VAR isn’t going to solve anything

43 comments

1. Every single Spurs player bursting forward is actively making a play for the ball — ESPECIALLY their elite striker who earlier had an offside goal ruled out. So even if the law is badly written, whether Kane is actively making a play for the ball isnt really a matter of dispute. He is.

   Of all the players in the Spurs white line, who do we all think is Eriksen(?) is aiming for? Even in the unlikely event that he wasnt aiming for Kane, they all were actively making a play for a ball in flight. The minute we start trying to divine who of the white line is doing so, we are over-complicating something that should be pretty simple.

   VAR is a good thing, and while it isn’t going to solve everything, I totally disagree that it “isnt going to solve anything.” That seems a tad too sweeping a statement. It’s going to cut down on wrong decisions, but it isnt going to totally eliminate them. No reasonable person should expect it to.

   Decision making in the sport of cricket is much improved by DRS, Decision Review System. It is for the elimination of the howlers, not the tiny marginals that are still inconclusive after 20 replays. The smart thing they did (which I think they borrowed from tennis) is limit the number of reviews a captain is allowed. So if you burn up your 3 on frivolous reviews and your team suffers a howler, too bad. VAR in football should have that, to stop endless reviews and to save them for truly bad calls. Like the offside that wasn’t.

   Walton made another important point that shouldnt be ignored. VAR wouldnt have been used in the Auba penalty or the Torreira red card, because those are at the ref’s discretion. The offside was blatant, obvious and was not.

   1. I certainly agree that VAR reviews should have a limit on them to stop a perpetual review cycle from happening.

   2. VAR isn’t going to solve anything. It is actively making more wrong decisions in Serie A and will make more wrong decisions in EPL. It’s not going to make refereeing better. It will be the exact same.

2. Oh and the Xhaka tackle on Kane was bad, and he got lucky. It reminded me of one of my favourite Wengerisms….

   “It looked a dark yellow – and the referee went for a bright red.”

3. I think I read that the handball law has been changed for next season so that it no longer requires there to be intent. Good, but won’t fix the issue.

4. VAR was highly successful at the World Cup and will eliminate the majority of bad refereeing decisions. It works well in tennis, cricket, rugby and ice hockey l

5. Yeah, as Claudevian said, there shouldn’t be any question that Kane was actively playing for the ball and thus offside. It was almost a carbon copy of the one earlier in the game that he scored and then had called back. Kane is one of the best in the world at that sort of thing, and he is being paid to be challenging for that ball. Were I a Spurs supporter, I’d be disappointed if he were not trying for that ball.
   And yes, the Xhaka tackle deserved a yellow for sure, and was more like orange. And the Rose one was pretty significantly worse than the Torriera one.

   As said, a lot of this will still come down to judgement. VAR won’t be a magic silver bullet. But it will fix some things, sometimes some important things. So if it can be done relatively quickly, we should do it. We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

   1. You are allowed to be offside. You are even allowed to make runs and act like you’re going to make a play for the ball. Sorry to break it to you but the referee got that call right. Or he got it wrong.

      I don’t want perfect. I don’t want VAR.

6. Wasn’t the offside rule introduced way back when to increase goal scoring? I wonder if in the modern game that’s much more possession based, if that’s still true. I can’t see how weaker teams could “park the bus” if they couldn’t keep attacking players in front of them, there’d be less circulation of the ball on the periphery of the 16-yard box. Free kicks would certainly have different a totally different strategy. It’s an interesting thought experiment on what might happen if we took offsides out of the game.

   1. No, the opposite actually. The offside rule was introduced to stop teams parking a solitary player (or more) upfield and simply lumping the ball to them when they won it. Strikers would never leave the opposition box, and we’d have 7 goals every game. Eliminating offsides would be a terrible idea. And Theo Walcott would be the best striker in the world.

      1. Yeah, ‘goal hangers’ they called them.

7. The Kane penalty was valid. Look at the law. It says that if a player in an offside position is moving towards the ball with the intention of playing the ball and is fouled before playing or attempting to play the ball, or challenging an opponent for the ball, the foul is penalised as it has occurred before the offside offence. Now look at film of the incident again and only one outcome appears to be legitimate. Penalty. Why are so many referees, pundits etc unaware of the rules?

   1. Yep.

   2. But he was fouled ‘after attempting to play the ball’.

      1. So was offside.

      2. I had this same argument in the Guardian comments section. Kane was pretty clearly “attempting to play the ball” and one could certainly argue “challenging an opponent(Koscielny)” for the ball. These things happened before the Mustafi shove. The ball at that point was a fraction of a second from hitting his head. He wasn’t a decoy. He had headed a ball from the exact same play earlier.
         It’s a judgement call, sure, but I’d certainly argue that the rule language quoted above does mean that Kane should be considered offside.

   3. Wrong. The freeze frame at the moment of offside shows Mustafi some distance from Kane. I know it’s a matter of fractions of a second before he gets to him and bumps him, but the offside clearly occurs before the contact. What I think you mean to say is before the linesman is in a position to give it, but you’re dead wrong on which occurs before. Which is the problem with the law. It is badly written, but any interpretation of it that seeks to contend that Mustafi fouled Kane before the offside is to defy logic and the evidence of our own eyes. THat much shared red-circled part of the law is directly contradicted by the paragraph directly beneath it.

      1. Yes, as Walton points out, the offside happens before the foul. Kane was in a position where Mustafi felt he needed to foul him because he gained an unfair advantage from being offside.

8. I met Michael Palin! And another Gooner friend met Eric Idle. You should do a Monty Python Arsenal themed blog one day.
   “We are no longer the knights who say COYG…”
   Ramsey, FFS, STAY DOWN! “It’s only a flesh wound…”

9. Ever the cynic, eh Tim?

   Not that you don’t have a valid point, but you do rather ignore the situations in which VAR can be beneficial. For example, Adrien Clarke points out that during Aubameyang’s missed penalty, Jan Vertonghen had encroached the penalty area by about 5 yards at the time the ball was struck, and that put him in position to clear what would’ve been a game-winning goal off Auba’s toes from the re-centered rebound.

   Bigger than that example, and to your main point, I do think there is a role for VAR and it can make the game a better product even with the subjective interpretations of the rules because it will allow referees the benefit of slow motion replays that will show them exactly how something happened. Show any referee the Kane clip and I would be shocked if any of them subjectively interpreted that Kane was not trying to play that ball. Mike Dean, maybe. In fact, the Mike Deans of the world will no longer be able to hide behind the whole “bang bang play, too hard to see” when they make a bad call. It should decrease the variance of subjective interpretations because the facts will be more immediately available for use.

   1. I’ve been watching a lot of Serie A this season and I feel like it is a warning: fans in the stadium are going to be outraged at VAR, fans at home are going to be perplexed by VAR, and VAR is going to be used to give some incredibly weird decisions that most people disagree with.

      In short, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

      1. I thought it worked brilliantly in the World Cup. People were fussing about goal line technology too before it was brought in, now nobody questions the need for it.

         1. Goal line tech is a no-brainer. I never fussed about that. I begged for it to be introduced. The laws of the game are a mess. VAR is going to make the game less fun to watch. Which is surely the point of sport.

10. Clearly supporters will interpret the Kane incident in the way that favours their team. We all do that. But there is little or no interpretation here. Kane was running forward to get into a position to head the ball when Mustafi fouled him. The ball was in the air and Kane’s feet were on the ground. If he was attempting to play the ball he would have been airborne. Kane was moving forward with the intention of playing the ball. Applying that law Kane is not offside at the moment of contact. The law doesn’t feel right to me and that’s why some referees and the clowns on MOTD are making up their own versions. If you look at the video and apply that law there can only be one outcome.

    1. There isn’t any language there that defines attempting to play the ball as having to have your feet off the ground. Kane was intent on heading the ball into the goal, was fractions of a second from doing so, and had done so on a very similar play earlier in the game. I’m pretty sure both Kos and Mustafi think Kane is attempting to play the ball, and not some kind of decoy like the near post Spurs players making runs.

    2. “The ball was in the air and Kane’s feet were on the ground. If he was attempting to play the ball he would have been airborne”
       ______________________

       That’s an invented and completely arbitrary standard for what constitutes actively attempting a play for the ball. You just made that up.

       Put it this way… if one of the best and most productive strikers in the game isn’t attempting a play for the ball on a FK whipped into the opposition box, he should be put in whatever detention is for footballers.

    3. “If he was attempting to play the ball he would have been airborne.”

       lmao! that’s got to be one of the most ridiculous things i’ve ever read on here; must be a tottenham fan.

       1. sound the alarm! we’ve been infiltrated by a scum spy!

    4. come on man, he was running towards the ball, while being in an offside position, airborne or not doesn’t matter.

11. As far as I’m concerned, soccer refereeing has always sucked so I want to see any sort of change in the hopes that it will be better. You aren’t going to improve if you aren’t going to try.

12. From the previous blog:

    To claude:

    I am in favour of VAR. Not because it will fix everything. It will also be abused by a corrupt organisation. But it makes it easier to see it happen. It removes an excuse of not having the option of seeing it again, and it creates a log of video decisions that hopefully in the future can be used to create a clearer standard.

    The alternative is more of the same and that clearly isn’t working.

    ———————————————————————————-

    To Jw1

    I remember the infamous Kings-Lakers series. Man I really wanted that Kings team to ‘Beat LA’.

    I wasn’t surprised when those allegations came out. I’d lived through the cricket match fixing scandal, and I guess I expected this to happen in all sports. I think the NBA managed the fallout and kept some of the story under wraps. But I also think they have taken steps to make it more difficult for something like that to happen again. In any case, they are more open about their decision making. I hated the call that banned Draymond Green. Stepping over him was a deliberate provocation by James. But, despite disagreements like that, I’m generally not disillusioned by them.

    Football though, especially the PL, seems to reject the existence of any problem. Which just means that I trust them to…..heh…. fix things.

13. What VAR ought to be doing is creating a set of conventions to support the laws of the game.

    This argument about Kane is bogus because it ignores convention. Just like with the Spurs Liverpool game when Moss asked if there was input from TV on how to call it… He ruled, and the Pgmo later agreed, that Lovren made a backpass, when he was trying to intercept a through ball. This was a blatant rewrite of the rules because the Fifa laws of the game even had a diagram to depict that exact same thing and explaining why it is then offside and not a backpass (it’s treated equivalent to a GK’s save).

    So Tim is right. VAR is only going to be used to reinforce the tyranny of the refs. It is not going to be a tool which brings justice. I am still in favour of it though. Because it’s progress. It will make things worse. For a while. Until it makes it tougher to keep getting away with it, and things will get better.

14. I want VAR simply because we seem to be the least favoured of the big teams. I was genuinely surprised we got the Aubameyang pen. Not only because we were getting hard done by the officiating the whole game but also the timing of it.

    We hardly get those kind of calls. Hopefully refs will be under pressure to give us pens and stop opposition players kicking lumps into us as a viable strategy.

    And I’m pretty sure when a player is in an offside state and a defender plays the ball back then the striker isn’t offside (Aguero scored like this recently when a defender headed the ball back into his box). Its only if the ball ricochets off a defender and he wasn’t trying to play a pass that a striker is offside.

    1. That was a classic “Make up call” i.e. the case of two wrongs making a right in the mind of a referee. I’m 99% certain that someone told the referee that the goal he had given was offside.

       That said, Auba deserves credit for getting goal side of Sanchez and forcing the referee to make a difficult decision, and Mkhi even more credit for playing perfect passes to him all day.

       1. All of this. Spot on.

15. Egg: Clearly, in the beginning, the world was without form and there was created an egg. And the egg was one with the world, and, like obviously, without the egg, there’d, like, be no chickens…so the egg HAD to come first.

    Chicken: Hate to break it to you, mate, but, obviously in the beginning there was the one and true Mother Goddess Chicken who existed prior to, and birthed, the first egg.

    VAR official: After further review, the video does not present clear and indisputable proof to overturn my original call which I declined to make in the instant case because I saw no actual intent to birth an egg.

    1. This comment wins the thread IMO

16. “VAR will be used for mistaken identity.”

    If Trump is your referee, he might still get it wrong.

17. Of course we need the VAR! Think of the Thierry Henry handball against the Irish, think of Maradona’s hand of God, think of those goals that are scored while the scorer is meters off side or cancelled for offside while the score is comfortably on side, think of all that happened during a corner kick, the grabbing, the pushing, the shoving. That has to be kicked out. Think of all the games (tournaments, championships…) that were decided on obviously unfair goals (in football, goals are few and far between: we need to ensure of their validity). VAR will not be useful where the call depends on the interpretation of a referee who saw the action and made a judgment call. It will be useful in all those cases where the human eye does not catch the reality because it goes too fast (off side), because referees concentrate on a small part of the pitch and can’t see it all (corner kicks) or when they plainly miss something (Maradona, Henry). Let’s give it some time. As someone mentions it works very well in other sports where interpretation is also very present like rugby, field or ice hockey… It helps cancelling the influence of biased or corrupt referees. It objectifies the game, to an certain extent. Also, it is fun to watch at work.

18. vf; dr
    (very funny; did read) 😉
    That you asked ‘that’ question to John Cleese– counts as a brilliant tally.

19. I’m on record for ‘Vote Yes for Prop VAR’.
    +++
    Apologies that I keep bringing basketball into the discussion.
    Comparing the officiating to that of football, to me– are the two most similar by way of infractions which stop play.

    Some years ago (mid-90s) I’m in the Houston Rockets old arena, The Summit. Sitting halfway to high altitude watching George Karl’s Sonics apply a zone defense about 80% of the time– in an era when zone defenses were illegal (Illegal Defense, by rule) and punishable by a team technical foul– awarding one free-throw and (re)possession of the ball to the team infracted.

    By the same token that Tim states ’50 referees will have 50 differing opinions’. So it was in getting Illegal Defense called. The Sonics were a very good defensive team– made better by their borderline-legal tactic of switching to/from different players without actually leaving the area they occupied. Karl was happy– to give up the 1-2 or 3 FTs awarded in a game– in order to play this swarming style of defense almost full-time.

    Midway 3rdQ– and this has been happening most of the game. But since Seattle isn’t getting called for it– they are emboldened and push the envelope. On one possession where they are doing the same stuff– I yell very loudly from the rafters ‘THAT’S ILLEGAL’ — just as the ref blows his whistle and awards the Rox their 1st FT by way of that call.

    Must have had a dozen people turn, applaud and/or start asking me– ‘how I knew’, ‘what I saw’ — or to explain the rule to them. I had little to offer other than ‘You know it when you see it.’

    VAR? To me? Isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s the beginning. The start of creating a uniform style of judging infractions. Creating standards that are made public. Training referees from the beginning of their careers with video for examples. Start coring referee performances to promote/demote officials as akin relegation. Start now (or as soon as can be effected) so eventually officiating can become ‘more’ uniform.

    One foot in front of the other.

20. Start *scoring referees…

21. Agree with Claude – VAR can eliminate the really egregious errors. THe thigs that are inexcusable, just like the goal line camera. There will always be errors by officials. It’s not possible to eliminate all of their mistakes. There is a lot of judgment required by the rules. I think, however, it might really impact diving. As soon as one referee overturns the penalty he awarded into a yellow card for the diver, it’s a wake up call for the league. No more drag foot. No more air challenges or you will get booked. It’s pretty rare now for that type of yellow – it happens, but not often enough, IMO. It’s the part of the game that infuriates me, and I think VAR can help eliminate the more egregious ones.

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