Objected when it was first mooted predicted that it would spoil the game so, I must be “nobody”I think nobody could object to the idea of VAR. It just is how it is being implemented and the clarity of the decision making process. In Rugby Union the referee and the VAR referee are transparent in their reasoning about any decision that needs to be referred so that the paying public in the ground can hear the reasons as to why a decision is being made. Why does football deny the public that clarity? Why are they trying to hide the thought process in making a decision?
I would love to know because whilst we continue to have silence about the decision making process then VAR will continue to be flawed
How do you square all that with the original case for VAR - giving help to refs?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.
1: before the offside is given incidents before it have to be checked this is why decisions take so longMy 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.
Before VAR we had the man in the middle making a mistake now we have a whole team making the same mistakes We also have ridiculous toe nail offside decisions Get rid it’s spoilt the gamejust 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
Before VAR we had the man in the middle making a mistake now we have a whole team making the same mistakes We also have ridiculous toe nail offside decisions Get rid it’s spoilt the game
In a heartbeatI really would love to see this happen to see if fans are genuinely happier to go back to the man in the middle making blind decisions
These refs are all mates. Would you criticise a mate outside your cicle of friends when everyone else is having a go at them? That's the problem with VAR, they don't want to keep dropping a mate in it.
how far back do they go?1: before the offside is given incidents before it have to be checked this is why decisions take so long
2: Please no that would slow the game down even more
3: Absolutely
I think that would be every fans reaction as well, oh and Firmino as well, even if he was a sub.It was interesting that when the ref was made aware of the incident- his first instinct was to book Robinson!
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