Ref Watch

[BringBackSwales]

I'd be interested to know who undertook/paid for those studies.

Stuart atwell

 

[Charliegull]

So your solution to corruption is to scrap the potential safety net? Lets say, for arguments sake, the on field referee wanted to ensure that Spurs won that game. Pre VAR, he could say he just didn't see the infringements in question and that would be the end of it. Honest mistakes, move on. People forget in the 'good old days', we would have thread after thread on here about various officials having it in for City. Having only one person involved in the process is far more open to corruption. Also, pointless bribing assistant referees these days because offsides are now checked by VAR. In short, if you're worried about corruption in the game you should be right behind VAR.

So what's going wrong? First of all the opponents of VAR don't mention the vast majority of VAR interventions which correct on field mistakes, but lets leave that aside. Why is a professional referee looking at an incident which 99.9% of people can see is an obvious penalty and failing to intervene? The problem is with the protocol and with how VAR is being used, this is where the focus should be. I suspect the root of the problem is the constant whining about VAR intervening too much and ruining the flow of the game/undermining the authority of the referee from people who never wanted it in the first place. This has led to the reluctance of VAR to get involved unless it's a 'clear and obvious' error, which in turn has led to VAR operators stressing about whether the error is large enough to justify a review rather than just judging each incident on it's merits and asking the referee to use the available technology to re-evaluate something he may have missed. If I were the on field referee I'd much prefer to be given the opportunity to correct an error than to look like an absolute plank in front of the entire football community. We need to get back to that.

So you wake up in the morning news headline is police looking at possible match fixing, what game would you say it was?
Ifyou were a ref you say you would like to have to Opportunity to correct an error rather than look a plank by having VAR correct your mistake. Attwell and the rest of the officials now look like planks, dont you agree?

I have not said get rid of VAR, but i can take 1 or Possibly 2 human errors again

So your solution to corruption is to scrap the potential safety net? Lets say, for arguments sake, the on field referee wanted to ensure that Spurs won that game. Pre VAR, he could say he just didn't see the infringements in question and that would be the end of it. Honest mistakes, move on. People forget in the 'good old days', we would have thread after thread on here about various officials having it in for City. Having only one person involved in the process is far more open to corruption. Also, pointless bribing assistant referees these days because offsides are now checked by VAR. In short, if you're worried about corruption in the game you should be right behind VAR.

So what's going wrong? First of all the opponents of VAR don't mention the vast majority of VAR interventions which correct on field mistakes, but lets leave that aside. Why is a professional referee looking at an incident which 99.9% of people can see is an obvious penalty and failing to intervene? The problem is with the protocol and with how VAR is being used, this is where the focus should be. I suspect the root of the problem is the constant whining about VAR intervening too much and ruining the flow of the game/undermining the authority of the referee from people who never wanted it in the first place. This has led to the reluctance of VAR to get involved unless it's a 'clear and obvious' error, which in turn has led to VAR operators stressing about whether the error is large enough to justify a review rather than just judging each incident on it's merits and asking the referee to use the available technology to re-evaluate something he may have missed. If I were the on field referee I'd much prefer to be given the opportunity to correct an error than to look like an absolute plank in front of the entire football community. We need to get back to that.

You say that you would like to be able to Given the opportunity To correct an error then to look like an absolute plank in front of the entire football community, however we now have Attwell and the rest of the officials at the game plus those on VAR as well looking like planks. Do you agree?

If you wake up in the morning and see the news headlines see the news headlines that a game is being ivestigated, What game over the weekend springs to mind?

I did not say get rid of var Altogether but something needs to be done, You may be get one or possibly 2 mistakes per game But to me in that game on Saturday there was 6 incidents That need explaining.

The problem with VAR is that is that it's not used right Why are they Checking every goal? A quick look at a monitor is he onside, yes or no. Why check for a toe on a drawn line to see if its offside, That's not clear and obvious

VAR is now in what its second season and we still have problems like Saturday.

You need to convince me that VAR is good for the game, because yes if it is human error then so be it, but human error and VAR together still making incorrect calls dont wash with me.

 

[Dodge]

Also was on Pointless

Which is exactly how we left the swamp.

 

[halfcenturyup]

Out of interest , anyone watching the Wrexham v County game ? Only been 25 mins. One stonewall penalty not given, few offsides given that were very tight - home crowd absolutely furious with the officials.
It’s games like this that’s a reason why other lower leagues are calling for VAR - despite it being a shambles at times in the PL

Stonewall penalty not given, you say? Offsides given that were very tight? Thank God that never happens with VAR.

This argument that fans are furious at officials so they want VAR is disingenuous. Fans will be furious at officials whatever decisions are made, and how.

I would imagine we all want a VAR that works in the background and within the framework of the game. We don't have that at the moment.

 

[Ashleymcduff]

In rugby and cricket you hear what the on field and off field refs are saying to each other …

Doesn’t happen in football cos it’s bent

 

[TinFoilHat]

Out of interest , anyone watching the Wrexham v County game ? Only been 25 mins. One stonewall penalty not given, few offsides given that were very tight - home crowd absolutely furious with the officials.
It’s games like this that’s a reason why other lower leagues are calling for VAR - despite it being a shambles at times in the PL

It comes down to cost there. I think the league's want to clubs to pay for it being installed and not everyone is as financially sound as Wrexham.

Possibly Wrexham's 2nd and the penalty would have been reviews had been in.

 

[halfcenturyup]

In rugby and cricket you hear what the on field and off field refs are saying to each other …

Doesn’t happen in football cos it’s bent

Is the only conclusion you can come to, I am afraid. I really tried for years to give the benefit of the doubt - tough job, doing the best they can - but that all changed at OT. There is no explanation for what happened there other than corruption, and I don't necessarily mean financial corruption.

 

[BlueHammer85]

Stonewall penalty not given, you say? Offsides given that were very tight? Thank God that never happens with VAR.

This argument that fans are furious at officials so they want VAR is disingenuous. Fans will be furious at officials whatever decisions are made, and how.

I would imagine we all want a VAR that works in the background and within the framework of the game. We don't have that at the moment.

just a point without VAR there will still be farcical wrong decisions and outrage (more so than now)

But yes, a much better VAR application to help refs is something we all want in the main

 

[Pingu the Penguin]

My opinion is not disimilar to yours. When it comes to refereeing I don't think there is some kind of anti-city conspiracy... I think there's two fairly logical reasons some might perceive it that way. One, I think referees are often guilty of trying to 'even up' one-sided games and let the underdog off the hook, you see this a lot with the way yellow cards are distributed and how much time is added on. I think this is a bias most sports fans are guilty of, everybody likes an underdog. But we are never the underdog so we'll never benefit from that.

Then I think there is definitely a level of implicit and unconscious bias towards some 'legacy' teams, just as a result of the size of their fan base, it feels inevitable. There are a couple of referees in particular that I think are very suspect in this regard and the pattern of their decisions makes no sense to me.

With VAR, I agree, and I've said it on here before. People have short memories, if we were to remove it people would be clambering to get it back the moment somebody dives and wins a penalty or somebody is offside in the build up to a goal. Before VAR that happened several times a week. VAR does statistically get way more right than it gets wrong, but the wrong decisions dominate people's minds because of confirmation bias and how ridiculous some of them are.

It is not the tool that is the problem, it is the utterly woeful application of the tool by PGMOL and the generally poor quality of refereeing in this league. They probably couldn't have done a worse job. If it were up to me I would do three things to improve things:

1) They need to accelerate getting to fully automated offsides. The semi-automated World Cup ones were already way better and faster. It needs to get to a point where if somebody is offside it instantaneously buzzes the lino to raise his flag. Make it work based on AI rules training, it will be way better and more objective than any human official. This would remove the whole 'not knowing whether to celebrate' which people hate the most about VAR.

2) Give teams challenges like in other sports, give them two per game. They force the on-field referee to review the screen and honestly re-assess the incident (get rid of this utter nonsense of whenever they go to the screen = overturn the decision).

3) Introduce proper fucking timekeeping. An infant would have figured this bit out by now. I will keep ranting about this until it changes.

I don’t get the challenges thing. I hat if you run out of challenges and get a crap decision?

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

I don’t get the challenges thing. I hat if you run out of challenges and get a crap decision?

Well, like in other sports, you get the challenge returned to you if the decision is overturned. So the only way you can run out of challenges is if you’ve frittered them away on marginal or frivolous things. We might even see a spate of honesty breaking out in football like other sports with players having to honestly weigh up if they think things are worth a challenge instead of just surrounding the referee and moaning like fuck for every little thing.

It works great in other sports with technology, and the number of challenges is chosen so that on balance if you’re in a situation where you need one and don’t have one it can only really be your own fault.

You can’t have unlimited challenges or people will use them for everything and it’d slow everything down.

So it’s between this and letting referees decide what is worthy of a challenge, and we’ve seen referees in football are totally incapable of making such calls so it should be taken out of their hands.