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The Video Assistant Referee (VAR)


Stevo985

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There doesn't seem to be any accountability. Why do the VAR officials not have to justify their decisions in this sort of instance? We know who the ref was yesterday but genuine question, do we know who the VAR official was? Are we given that information. I can't find it but it might be published somewhere. Is it an actual referee? If it's not a referee, how are they the ultimate arbitrator of decisions above the referee on the pitch? If it was a referee, which one? Kevin Friend in a box somewhere **** us over? Also, if it's judges to be a 'clear and obvious' error then the referee on the pitch has failed to do his job and there should be repurcussions for that too. 

 

Such a crap implementation that half of.me hopes we go down so I can enjoy championship football without this shit. Really struggling to find the motivation to get a season ticket if we stay up, as without being able to fully let go and go mental when we score, what's the point? £500 and a lot of hassle getting to and from matches to just be disappointed and angry every time. I can't be the only one. 

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Atkinson was the VAR ref yesterday

Like I said the rugby yesterday gave a great comparison, the aussie try at the end which was a forward pass, the TV showed the 2 refs talking

"I saw this"

"no I don't, I see this so I'm not giving it" 

Followed by the captain being called over so it can be explained to him

That yesterday between the 2 refs would have been OK, there's no way the pitch ref didn't see Wes and the keeper jump together he just didn't think it was a foul whereas Atkinson did

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Yesterday's decision was objective at best, which is not the "clear and obvious" purpose behind it's introduction. It seems to me that VAR are looking for reasons for reason not to award a goal, it's a farce. 

The unwillingness to overrule the referee (in most situations) is also laughable. In my opinion this halfway house approach does not work, we either scrap it or go full bore with the ref and the VAR team discussing their thoughts together, similar to rugby. 

I'd rather scrap it. 

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10 minutes ago, sne said:

Not being able to enjoy football is apparently an integral part of the modern game.

I'm just too old fashioned to get it.

Fans in the stands are just a nuisance at this point as far as top brass football is concerned.

There seems to be a modern crop of fans who get off more on decisions being right, regardless of the impact. I still feel that VAR if implemented correctly is the right route however I'm just not confident that it can ever be implemented correctly. Also it's clear that it saps away from the excitement of games. So far it has delivered absolutely no benefit to football from any perspective.

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15 minutes ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

There seems to be a modern crop of fans who get off more on decisions being right, regardless of the impact. I still feel that VAR if implemented correctly is the right route however I'm just not confident that it can ever be implemented correctly. Also it's clear that it saps away from the excitement of games. So far it has delivered absolutely no benefit to football from any perspective.

Pretty much exactly what I’ve been saying for the past year or so.....and often being ridiculed for it.

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16 minutes ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

There seems to be a modern crop of fans who get off more on decisions being right, regardless of the impact. I still feel that VAR if implemented correctly is the right route however I'm just not confident that it can ever be implemented correctly. Also it's clear that it saps away from the excitement of games. So far it has delivered absolutely no benefit to football from any perspective.

This is very much my stance too.

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19 minutes ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

There seems to be a modern crop of fans who get off more on decisions being right, regardless of the impact. I still feel that VAR if implemented correctly is the right route however I'm just not confident that it can ever be implemented correctly. Also it's clear that it saps away from the excitement of games. So far it has delivered absolutely no benefit to football from any perspective.

And it will never be "right" anyway as the game and rules are up for interpretation and ambiguity.

Even the offsides are not clear enough however many lines they draw on the screen to show what they guessed to be correct.

Goal line technology works because only the ball is moving. The goal and goal line is static.

Football isn't static, too many moving parts.

Edited by sne
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Offsides should be judged by foot offside not body. as your body being offside has no real impact on play. Also for me the big problem is the ref cannot be over ruled and it was the refs who were the problem with iffy decisions in the first place, i.e our disallowed goal at Arsenal.

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2 hours ago, villa4europe said:

Atkinson was the VAR ref yesterday

Like I said the rugby yesterday gave a great comparison, the aussie try at the end which was a forward pass, the TV showed the 2 refs talking

"I saw this"

"no I don't, I see this so I'm not giving it" 

Followed by the captain being called over so it can be explained to him

That yesterday between the 2 refs would have been OK, there's no way the pitch ref didn't see Wes and the keeper jump together he just didn't think it was a foul whereas Atkinson did

Great example. It was actually incredible that the TMO thought that pass wasn’t forward. So much for TV replays !

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2 hours ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

There seems to be a modern crop of fans who get off more on decisions being right, regardless of the impact. I still feel that VAR if implemented correctly is the right route however I'm just not confident that it can ever be implemented correctly. Also it's clear that it saps away from the excitement of games. So far it has delivered absolutely no benefit to football from any perspective.

Worth a repost.

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I think by the end of the season after everybody's been hurt five to ten times, goals will be celebrated like the awarding of a penalty. Still a cheer, but not going mad as there's only an 80-90% chance of a goal being awarded. Then a secondary cheer at kick off, not dissimilar from a converted penalty. Gone are the times of hugging random strangers and ending up five rows down with bruises all over your legs. 

Edited by blunther
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I don't think they've implemented it badly to get rid of it, they're hamstrung on that as all the top level competitions have some form of it now and the Premier League would have to fall in step with it to some extent.

The reason they've **** the implementation is they've fudged it.

They needed to bring in some form of VAR, but they were aware of a few things that concerned them. Firstly there's a concern the image and reputation of the Premier League as a fast, dynamic, hard fought league would be harmed in their view if games stopped for lengthy periods to allow referees to look at screens and have rugby style debates. The worry is that the game would end up like rugby has become at it's worst - every decision with a hint of contention goes to the VAR, the game stops for an extended period, momentum goes, the atmosphere drops off, and the impact of the referee is massively exacerbated.

Secondly the role of the referee would, in their view, be in jeopardy. This would concern the ref association, of course, as the worry would be that the refs on the pitch would basically become glorified enforcement officers and the game was actually being reffed by the TV assistant. That would also worry on another level - the idea of the shady official hundreds of miles away actually manipulating the game, rather than the man in black that everyone can see. Referees would also themselves be concerned that the VAR is basically a criticism machine, someone looking over your shoulder waiting to tell you you've **** up.

So they came up with their own version of VAR that attempted to fudge a need to implement a system whilst also being as low impact as possible on the 'product'. Thus, we get the 'clear and obvious error' and 'high bar to intervene', the advisory nature of VAR, and perhaps most importantly, the distinct instruction to avoid using the pitchside screen at all costs. These ideas seem somewhat understandable when you view them in light of the concerns they had, and at a glance they seem pretty simple. But then they become a nightmare.

Clear and obvious errors seem like the thing everyone wants to have go away in the game. Those decisions where everyone in the stadium knows the refs dropped a clanger. The thing is, those incidents might happen to a club once or twice a season. What is meant by clear and obvious then becomes a matter of judgement. Is a scramble in the box where a defender, in the scramble, clips an attacker, a clear and obvious error if the ref doesn't award a pen? Is it a clear and obvious error when a ref has seen an incident where a heavy tackle has gone in and awarded a yellow, but on reflection the tackle is actually a leg breaker that deserved a red? Is a striker being imperceptibly offside the kind of thing technology needs to sort out?

So, we're left with what we've got. A system that has a wibbly wobbly definition of where it can actually be used on the matters people care about, that cannot overrule the referee and only advise him, that seeks to protect the referee more than do what it was brought in for, and rules on offsides to a level that pretty much breaks the rule, throwing it's intention away behind an absurdist bureaucratic interpretation of the rules that nobody wanted.

It's an awful system.

I've long argued against technology because, in my view, football just doesn't fit with it. Technology works for sports with hard and fast binary choices (i.e. in tennis is the ball in or out) or sports where the game has stoppages built into it (tennis, rugby, American football, sports where the game has defined phases). Football has very few binary choices - it's pretty much did the ball cross the line or not, though the Premier League likes to pretend that offside is also one (when imo offside actually has to exist with a degree of vagueness to work). And it doesn't have defined phases, the nature of the game is in constant flux between occasional stoppages. The game has an inherent level of judgement in it's rules, where context and action are needed to be weighed into a decision. And technology can't fit that degree of judgement in without explicitly impacting other elements of the game. Something has to be sacrificed to implement it, and the PL basically made a fudge of it all to try to weave its way through these issues, and ended up with something that actually made the situation worse.

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I think part of the problem is they seem to freeze frame incidents and make a judgement on a slow mo or frozen image which can miss vital pieces of the evidence so to speak. For example freeze frame Wesley's arm across the Brighton keepers face and it looks like a free kick. What it misses however is that their keeper effectively jumped & arrived after Wesley's arm (which he had used to fairly gain momentum for his leap with no foul being committed in the process) was already there & so the keeper basically jumped into his arm as he arrived too late. At best that is a subjective decision though in reality no foul & yet the freeze frame image discounts all the key points in the incident and makes it look like a foul.

I cannot find anyway of understanding why that would result in an overrule of the on field decision. Maybe the VAR ref just wanted to feel important or something.

It's a total mess.

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Watching Manure vs Scouse. I can’t stand Liverpool but feel they were hard done by VAR, certainly for the Manure goal. The inconsistency is worrying and needs sorting out as this will cost some teams titles or places in the Premier league..

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By today’s standards yeah sure, it was a foul but was it actually a foul or did origi purposely throw himself to the ground upon feeling a bit of contact? That for me is still diving, plus it’s Liverpool so I really don’t feel sympathy for them ha

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