Ref Watch

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.
If I wasn't just a lazy **** looking for easy likes, this is the sort of insightful post I'd try to write!
 
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.

Fully automated off side is never going to happen. A computer can’t ever decide if a referee considers a player in an offside position to be interfering with play or an opponent.
 
The process in cricket is calm, efficient and transparent. 9 times out of 10 everyone agrees with the final decision. VAR in comparison is a shambles.
I have to disagree with you as I, and the powers that be, do not consider VAR a shambles. It is working exactly how the powers that be want it to work and being anymore transparent will be resisted as that could be, er transparent.
 
Fully automated off side is never going to happen. A computer can’t ever decide if a referee considers a player in an offside position to be interfering with play or an opponent.

You might be right with the law as it’s written at the moment. But that’s because the law is so badly written that two people can look at the exact same situation and come to completely different conclusions. I can’t stress how problematic it is for a law of the game to be that way.

You would have to adapt it to make it more precise when technology is in play. They can use machine learning based on referee training data to determine the criteria for “what an offside looks like”. Don’t forget they can make an AI’s rule-base way more complex than would be reasonable for a human to administer in real-time but designed to make decisions far more consistent. Stuff that is easy for computers to determine but hard for people, like:
1) does the interfering player move closer to the ball after the pass breaks the defensive line
2) does the interfering players vector cross the path of the ball
3) given the path, speed and distance travelled by the ball, is it possible for a defensive block moving across the path of the ball to have been intentional, thus resetting the offside. This is one that’s caused all kinds of problems.

This is all stuff which seems super complex for a person to assess (though they expect linesmen to do it all anyway). A computer can do it consistently, and objectively in fractions of a second.

Of course, back here on Earth I realise that what I’m asking for will never happen because if they haven’t figured out how to use a clock to track time properly then there is simply no hope.

Computers are literally built to execute rules the same way every time. If somebody is saying “a computer could never be expected to apply that rule” that is a strong hint that the rule is really shit.
 

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top
  AdBlock Detected
Bluemoon relies on advertising to pay our hosting fees. Please support the site by disabling your ad blocking software to help keep the forum sustainable. Thanks.