Women’s World Cup France 2019, 7 June - 7 July

Just on a very basic level the inability to celebrate a goal without spending ages wondering if its even going to stand is just profoundly shit for the sport. And I'm saying this as someone whose team have benefited from it this season.

If they're going to use technology work on one that can be applied instantly or not at all.

Someone should retweet this to piers:

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1776 because we’re going to the #FIFAWWC FINAL!!!!#OneNationOneTeam pic.twitter.com/kZh6qH3YKi

— U.S. Soccer WNT (@USWNT) July 2, 2019

Right, can someone please beat the USA now.

Thank you, no.

he should want to die for many fucking reasons, but I suppose no harm in adding "pretending to irish" to that long list.

even before VAR you had goals disallowed for offside, sometimes well after the celebrations had gotten underway. this doesn't seem tremendously different?

in baseball if the replay isn't clearly conclusive then the decision of the ump on the field stands, and that's an explicit part of the process. does it work that way with VAR?

(xp) Occasionally a ref would consult his linesman, but that takes all of 30 seconds.

i can see it (if not necessarily *like* it) in football because the goals are so rare/monumental

the replay reviews in the nba finals were horrific tho, as are many of the uses in baseball

VAR offside at least has a consistency to it but the England pen is a textbook example of where it doesn't work, you could watch those clips a million times and gain no certainty, just another layer of stupidly bad decision-making beyond the referee's

yeah that seems like a flaw. it needs to be clearly one way or the other, otherwise defer to the ref. most of the angles on that penalty looked like nothing, but the one from behind looked like the American ran straight into White's legs.

still got a ways to go before you hit American football levels, where you watch a spectacular touchdown, then you nervously scan the field for flags, then you wait out a 5 minute review process to make sure the ball carrier performed an appropriate "football move", then you celebrate, though not too much or its 15 yards

It feels like you could devise some Hawkeye-ish offside tech that would be near instantaneous - if the Byzantine interference guidelines were dropped - and then just forget about the purely interpretive fouls/intention/contact nonsense

Then use similar technology to solve the Irish border dilemma.

woah buddy I'm not running for the Tory leadership

there won't be any such thing as an offside trap when players can teleport themselves to different areas of the pitch in a millisec!

VAR in this tournament has been a fail. I like it in limited circumstances but what got me into soccer for the first time ten years ago was the flow of the game.

This interrupts it and there is a world of diff to me between noticing a player is a foot offside vs seeing their toe is a centimeter over

There will be an offside backstop to cover that

But last year at WC it wasn't bad. I read the revisions to the handball rule and I feel like it's not being interpreted properly, but that's because they went into effect on 6/1 and nobody had much time to let it marinate

IMO players should get a text message when they are offside

I mean maybe I'm reading too much into body language but watching the ref watch the replays it seemed she was like "wtf is this shit" as much any dumbass watching with me in the pub.

In NHL 19 you can turn on an offside indicator that let’s you know if you’ll be offside if you cross the blue line

There was one VAR intervention every six games in Germany last season iirc. It doesn’t have to be intrusive. The biggest problems are policy related - always letting play go on unless the striker is about three feet offside, the terrible handball rule, the apparent decision to ban virtually any contact in the penalty area.

It's kinda sad that MLS has a better (albeit still awful) VAR system

And yea, a foul in the box needs to be an outright mugging or something that isn't a video that shows maybe a shin tapped the outside of a leg lightly.

Kinda wonder if No Era Penal would indeed have not been a penal with this VAR.

But that would make me sad cos lol @ the hypocritical whining over that for more than a year

IMO players should get a text message when they are offside

― Fuck Trump, cops, and the CBP (Neanderthal), Tuesday, July 2, 2019 11:37 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Tweetstorm iirc

VAR could be so simple, and great, if it deals with measurable, objectively detectable things in play: offside or not, goal over the line or not.

Now thought, it creates a Droste-effect: the ref doesn't know if it's a pen or not, so we go to the VAR that - big surprise - is also inconclusive. Leave those decisions up to the ref, don't VAR it. There'll be mistakes, but hey, the sport has survived those up till now. Part of the game.

The logical conclusion of leaving everything to VAR is to abolish football.

^^^ spot on

its still a work-in-progress, im optimistic itll work efficiently and properly eventually

Seriously. My local team gets jizzed on with shit calls weekly and i show up

It doesn't need to become the NFL where you need a doctorate to determine if a catch was really a catch

Everybody more or less otm. The tech is way less a problem than awful reinterpretations of rules.

"VAR could be so simple, and great, if it deals with measurable, objectively detectable things in play: offside or not, goal over the line or not."

Goal over the line is measurable in a way offside is not. A player can look marginally on or off depending on the angle available. We are going to be looking at a mm here or there and shit is gonna blow.

it should only come into play when ref calls for it

the craic of relying upon it to finetooth every important event is so shockingly stupid its as if they want it to fail

xp an offside that close shouldnt go to var

Watching three idiots argue in favor of the bullshit Pen on Deadspin's comments, illustrating exactly what obscure camera angle you have to watch, and at what speed to watch it at, kind of illustrates the problem.

Wonder how influential sportsbooks are in this type of system

Goal over the line is measurable in a way offside is not. A player can look marginally on or off depending on the angle available. We are going to be looking at a mm here or there and shit is gonna blow.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, July 3, 2019 1:34 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You're wrong. Offside has to be the easiest detectable thing in football. Whether it be by a yard or inch or what have you. Ref should hear a whistle in her ear before the player being offside realizes it him/herself. Fast and clean.

If mm's bother you, there's no point in having the offside rule at all is there? Offside is offside. It's not complicated iirc

ok you guys, I wish you would allow me to continue fantasizing that I liked sports for once

The important thing is to keep hating Luis Suarez

the instantaneous offside calls LBI is advocating would require every player to be microchipped and the entire pitch carpeted with sensors

And then offending player shot

late to the party yall just gimme the goals

Do the soccer!

Tonight should be good as well. Based on performance across the tournament as a whole, i would go for Netherlands, based on performances in the knock-out stages, Sweden. Netherlands can definitely step up a gear.

My memory of VAR at the Men's World Cup was that it was heavily used during the group stages and less and less during the knockouts.

It's the uncertainty and waiting and faffing around that ruins everything - any evolution that kills or undermines the most basic unit of joy in a match feels insanely short sighted on behalf of the authorities. It's like it's been devised by people who have never watched football in a stadium.

devised for people who've never watched football in a stadium, by people who've never watched football in a stadium

but i'm not sure how that accounts for the even more fundamentally stupid handball change

unless somebody at FIFA got fed up of explaining to thick bastards what intentionality means

Alternatively, sport is about human frailty and human error as much as feats of skill or strength or achievement and I don't see why referees should be excluded from that, other than to make a million armchair twats happy.

like i said before, half the time all VAR does is defer to another fallible ref no better than the one on the pitch anyway

Lol @ offsides being the easiest thing. It is...except that one with the tiniest bit of leg in it, or was it? *Checks VAR for five mins*

If it doesn't stop the TV money coming in FIFA or whoever are not gonna care.

highly recommend the first ep of this podcast, re: VAR:

https://atrpodcast.com

Lol @ offsides being the easiest thing

Indeed, the entire history of Association Football suggests otherwise.