Sorry if it sounded disrespectful, it wasn't meant to be. But it's so clear to me, and to everybody else I think, I can't believe it's a hill you want to write essays on, to mix metaphors.
Forget VAR for a moment.
DOGSO is a red card, a touch on the ball doesn't preclude a foul. Them's the rules and interpretations as written. Apparently.
Apparently, but apparently not as they didn't issue a red card as you think they should. And I'm trying to provide a possible reason why they didn't, that's different than their official explanation which is bent sounding about how the ball didn't bounce in the right way, a complete nonsense that everyone seems to object to. And rightly so.
I'm simply saying that it would have been harsh to send the keeper off there due to a lack of intent to commit a foul, thinking he was in the process of getting back into the box as he was swatting it. That's all I'm saying my man. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill to use an analogy.
My view is, forget about the red card, VAR should have the ability to quickly correct the more clearer aspect of it, the handball and resulting free kick, but for one reason or another, because they can't get out of their on way due to the bottlenecks involved, they were unable to, which is unsatisfactory.
If you are suggesting the rules and interpretations should be changed, that's fine. I just don't have the strength to do IFAB's and PGMOL's work for them.
But that is different to saying Henderson shouldn't have been sent off at the weekend or it shouldn't have been a penalty because the defender got a touch. Neither of those things were true with the rules and interpretations as they were at the weekend.
Fwiw, I think Silva was going down before contact. I would have overturned it because I hate that shit. But that's just me. Unless a "match commander" told me to balance it all up, of course. Either way, nothing to do with the touch.
No I'm not suggesting the rules or interpretations should be changed, it's VAR that's changed the rules and interpretations since it's inception which I'm hugely bothered by. From linos keeping their flags down for offsides, to the changes to the handball rule that has become so problematic. And then to cite the rules as in the result of it rather than the actually looking at how it came to be, i.e. the intent of the keeper is in my view missing the point.
It's like that 5th goal from FCB in that match against Real Madrid that was disallowed, to which you agreed was absurd. But it hit the hand, short of any understanding of "proximity" of the kick from the defender right into it at close range and the fact that he had no time to react, and that was well outside the box but led eventually to a goal. Or that Roma penalty that was disallowed. Would anyone sit here and say "but rules and interpretations" for those? VAR has constantly shown themselves to make decisions independent of the "rules and interpretations" so that is not an excuse as much as we would like it to be.
As far as the Silva situation, I appreciate your take, that you would have overturned it, for a different reason than I would, but this only reinforces how subjective and multi pronged a situation like that is. It just so happens that I have a very strong aversion to "dive paranoia" as it pertains to this sort of thing influencing penalty decisions. What drives me up a wall is how ever since VAR, it's as if their own subjective assessment of the aesthetics of how an attacking player ends up falling has become more important than the physical contact between the defender and the attacker, which in my view is completely mad. Maybe you can understand that.
You're on the other end of the spectrum, you and many others, in that you're looking for dives and not wanting to give penalties for those that you think are falling down. But ironically we have both come to the same decision via different means.
To say though that it has nothing to do with the touch is a bit much. Even the commentators said when they realized finally that he did get a touch they said in no uncertain terms that the slight touch "could have affected things". But in their infinite blindness, both the VARs and the commentators, they completely missed the touch, which regardless of what you think the decision should have been shows how they're somehow not seeing what occurred despite looking at slow motion replays for minutes on end!!
So which is it? Penalties are now given not by whether or not a defender gets to the ball first or not anymore, but whether it is thought that the attacker is pulling himself down prematurely in a way that look suspicious via slow motion? That's where we're at now? This is hugely problematic in my view, and completely missing the plot about where the focus should be. Slow motion is not useful in judging falling down aesthetics, but it is useful in seeing if the defender got to the ball as was the case there, something that very clearly could be missed by a referee in real-time, as was certainly the case there. But the latter doesn't matter anymore apparently, nowadays penalties are all about if it looks like a player is diving in slow motion? This is completely mad in my view.
I think you'd agree that verifying that the defender was indeed playing the ball is an important component. Another important component is if he actually got to the ball first. You say it isn't, which I reject, but if that's your hill, so be it. But none of these apparently are as important as judging if the player is prematurely bringing himself down before contact, which is in my view completely losing the plot as to what should be going into penalty decisions.
Somehow in that Roma match last week the ref disallowed a goal at the monitor because he seemingly concluded that the Roma player was bringing himself down and "running into the defender". This is purely "dive paranoia" as in that case the defender didn't even come close to getting the ball, and after the match Ranieri went ballistic, and for good reason! The defender clearly took out the attacker without getting to the ball, yet they review it and reverse the decision due to apparently the VARs aruging that the attacker was diving into the defender or something. A complete nonsense. The problem I have is that in my view, penalty decisions are no longer about what they should be about, about getting to the ball first, which was what we were taught mattered. Instead it's all become about trying to catch and identity diving through slow motion which is inherently misleading at its core.
To use a boxing analogy, it would be like scoring a round not by who landed the better punches, but by judging the aesthetics of the motion of the boxers throughout the round. The excessive focus on diving has become a huge problem in my view. I consider it mostly paranoia. There's almost never a case in which how a player is judged to be falling should supersede the contact itself. But that's where we are now, ever since VAR was brought in, for penalty decisions, diving has become the main focal point, moreso even than the actual contact it seems, which is unfortunate.
