Watford And Modern Football

Think someone mentioned it earlier, but the problem is VAR should just be for bloopers. Give every club 10 reviews per season and they can throw a challenge flag. Win the review keep the review. Would be carnage at start like it was in the cricket but would be much better.

 

I stopped watching the Spurs Chelsea game last night - the VAR was just too irritating. If it takes more than 10 seconds for the VAR to spot a foul, handball, offside etc, then the ref clearly hasn't made an obvious error. It should be so straightforward

 

Keith Mercer having his eyebrows stitched back to his face on the touch line, Rankin saving penalties, pitches with no grass in the penalty box from November to March. The hope for a decent result when the Bug Match covered the game for a Sunday lunchtime broadcast on LWT. Season ticket getting you free entry to regular Wednesday evening combination matches, watching from the luxury of the main stand where they had seats - The whole thing has been ruined now.

 

I once sat next to someone who stood up from his seat, put his arse right into his seated brother's face and loudly broke wind.

It's quite astonishing what some people think is acceptable public behavior.

 

Great idea with regards to the post game discussions!

Because of the money involved football now has to aim for perfection. I'm not saying it's right, I agree with you, but that's what top tier football is now. To help with that we need more than a single referee per game IMO

 

A night at the opera isn't what it used to be

 

I suppose the point is that VAR has not made the slightest bit of difference.
So the question is would the game be a better spectacle with or without VAR ?

 

Without.

 

It has made a difference. On paper PGMOL and FIFA etc will point to the fact decisions are being made more accurately than ever. It's gone from something like 92% to 98% I think I read. The whole thing is a bit like plane crashes though - there's no point telling the grieving relatives of those in a plane crash that flying is statistically an extremely safe way to travel.

 

One strange thing about it all is this misty eyed idea everyone just put up with bad decisions before VAR, without complaint and would do again, they didn’t, and they wouldn’t.

 

Tricky to measure though. Guess fine for offsides leaving aside whether the game really wants these toenail offsides. But the Curtis Jones red was correct at yellow before VAR did the freeze frame after his foot had rolled off the ball (in my opinion) . How are they counting these subjective ones - as an improvement in accuracy just because VAR gave it?

 

But I would argue that the 6% of "improved" decisions are those toe nail or kneecap offsides
and in any case these are goals that everyone accepted as a good goal pre var being ruled out.
In essence , they fixed a problem that wasn't broken

 

On the whole I think VAR is a good thing, esp for the objective offside decisions. It does reduce the big-club bias to some extent. They just need to speed up the review process considerably and only bring back play when overturning pens/red card decisions where it's clear and obvious.

The wrong decision chatter will continue, each incident getting more attention as there will be fewer/less incidents, and because in theory there should be none. That will never disappear but more decisions are correct, the process just needs to be slicker.

 

I assume there's some boffins in lab coats somewhere running a fine toothcomb over it and coming up with the stats. That or Pierluigi Collina has the stattos running scared.

 

The problem is pre var, not all offside decisions were ‘toenail’ ones though. Plenty were scandalously wrong. What’s worse, rulling a goal out because they were (correctly) a toenail offside, or ruling a goal out, but they were actually a foot or more onside?

 

I think the offsides are least of our worries, people are complaining now about toenail offsides, but I fail to see how people are more unhappy now about a player from their team being correctly called offside by a mm, Vs a player from their team being incorrectly called offside, when they were actually a foot or more onside. Var for offsides is by far the lesser of two evils, but people have short memories.

It’s the subjective stuff that is a mess, but that’s because we’ve created greater opportunity for error, not less, because you still have idiots making the rules and the decisions.

 

This is a good point . However VAR is being used to rule out perfectly good goals
and this data is then used as "proof" to say the system by and large works.
Moreover a toe nail is 1 inch a kneecap 2 or 3 inches but the lines drawn across the pitch to determine an offside , if marked out on the pitch, would be between 1 and 2 feet , so therefore they are using something that measures 12-24 inches to measure 1 inch. Secondly do they know for sure the exact moment a ball was kicked ?. I don't think they do and there is an element of guess work. So , again, this guesswork data is being used to prove something

 

The toenail issue could be eradicated anyway, they could’ve just adopted the automated offsides, don’t forensically show the world and his wife how close every offside was or wasn’t, with a thousand lines on the screen and everyone would quickly move on and not give it a second thought.

 

But that is still more accuracy than we had before with offsides. People are just shifting their outrage, but ultimately more offsides are called correctly with VAR than without. For every toenail offside with VAR that may or not be accurate, there were probably three pre VAR that were 10x less accurate.

As I mentioned above though, we just need the automated offsides and the elimination of the forensic line drawing for everyone to see and the outrage disappears overnight. We can then concentrate on the real VAR issues.

 

They're not perfectly good goals if they're offside though. The fact that people allowed for a degree of error before VAR doesn't mean they should build that in and continue allowing them. There's no margin of error in the rules - it's black and white. On the point about lines, they're just there for broadcasting purposes. The ones they use at Stockley Park are different.

Semi-automated offiside tech resolves this completely though, as @a19tgg says.

 

I'm a bit of a child when it comes to things like that and thought that was quite funny

 

I hope your brother felt the same way.

 

Are you saying you think there should be more VAR interventions?

 

Bad decisions were moaned about and that was it. There are just as many bad decisions now, if not more, but they are scrutinised to the hilt and the scrutiny goes on for weeks and months.

So much discussion around football now is about stuff other than the football.

 

They were definitely moaned about and scrutinised back then, but certainly not as much, however if we didn’t have VAR now, they’d definitely be moaned about and scrutinised far more than VAR is now.

As you’re alluding to, now we get greater scrutiny full stop, it isn’t a VAR/No VAR thing. More coverage, more games, more channels, more YouTube pundits, more tinpot armchair Twitter ‘analysts’, more bedroom podcasters.

You can bet your bottom dollar that if we didn’t have VAR now in the present day, and there was a big game between a top four team that had a goal ruled offside that was actually a foot onside, you’d get ‘pundits’ like Jamie Ohara screaming that the referees need help, that there is too much at stake in games, and that we need technology to help them.

As it is the same pundits are moaning about VAR, but there is just a whole lot more coverage on it than we had 10/15 years ago.

 

The offside thing should be quite simple. Either automate it like FIFA do, or alternatively the VAR has 5 secs to look at the freeze frame, and if they can't tell at a glance then they stick with the on-field decision. If you need to draw lines then it isn't a clear and obvious error either way and the referee or linesman's decision is final.

 

The lines should be drawn automatically by software and just come to a decision. No need for human intervention. This isn't the 1990s !