CL knockouts

[Ray de Galles]

Yeah, good piece that, mostly. If the information is accurate and this new directive is a few weeks old and effectively enacted mid season/competition I find it even more astounding.

[G-Man]

The question should be: is the penalty decision, and the decision to review, within the current laws and conformant to current directives. The article makes no persuasive argument that it wasn't. The writer argues about the ergonomics of jumping, and the problem of adapting directives halfway through the season, but that doesn't clear up whether the decision confirms to the current laws and directives.

What is weird is that VAR was used in some matches and not in others. Had VAR been used at Old Trafford, the DiMaria goal would have been rule out for offside.

[ad hoc]

Well, that's what you think the question should be. I think the question should be: Do the current laws, and the way that referees are being asked to interpret them, make sense?

[seand]

Well, that's what you think the question should be. I think the question should be: Do the current laws, and the way that referees are being asked to interpret them, make sense?

Absolutely.... the joy of football is at stake here, the question is whether VAR is adding anything, not is VAR being enacted according to some arcane and arbitrary mid-season directive

[EIM]

A mate of mine who was at the game is mates with a current PL ref. The minute it went to VAR he got a text saying that it was a penalty. Not that it should have been, but that it would be given. It seems that even the refs are giving decisions they don't agree with.

I, as an expert on all things football, thought it was a penalty at the time, and it gets more and more a penalty on every viewing. In my expert opinion he was a lucky boy not to get sent off.

[EIM]

Though I think the idea of listening to a TV idiot or former professional over the people who are actually paid to officiate the games and keep up with the rules is laughable. VAR has come about as a result of the false importance put on the game by these people and by the clubs and players, moaning at every decision that went against them. Well here it is. And they're still fucking moaning. If they'd all just been proper fucking grown ups in the first place we wouldn't be having this conversation.

[Jah Womble]

In my expert opinion he was a lucky boy not to get sent off.

Behave.

[Snake Plissken]

Ben Gibson actually did get sent off for similar at the start of the season against Olympiakos. But that second half refereeing display got swept under the carpet a bit.

[ursus arctos]

[URL]https://twitter.com/richard_conway/status/1103965402047148033?s=21[/URL]

[Ray de Galles]

Interesting but there's no real new information there. Does anyone know exactly when the "make the body bigger" directive was given and how wide a set of officials? Was it actually only "mid-February" and only to "UEFA's top officials" as the 200% article claims? I would find it staggering if such a significant reinterpretation of the law was done piecemeal mid-season.

[Ray de Galles]

Absolutely.... the joy of football is at stake here, the question is whether VAR is adding anything, not is VAR being enacted according to some arcane and arbitrary mid-season directive

VAR added something in the Porto v Roma game, the completely justified winning penalty would have been missed without it.

[Nocturnal Submission]

There's some great stuff in today's WSC Weekly Howl but the link to Klaas-Jan Huntelaar's celebrations in the Bernabeu are probably the best:

https://twitter.com/emctear/status/1103281446146506752

[treibeis]

Virtually all of us grew up with a game in which it was considered madness for a defender to clasp his hands behind his back while on his feet in the area.

I definitely grew up with that. Our coach, who went on to disgrace himself at international level, encouraged us defenders to "make yourselves as big as you can", with outstretched arms and all the rest of it.

Don't happen no more, not never.

[Lang Spoon]

There's some great stuff in today's WSC Weekly Howl but the link Klaas-Jan Huntelaar's celebrations in the Bernabeu are probably the best:

https://twitter.com/emctear/status/1103281446146506752

That's just brilliant. Imagine not hating Madrid.

[G-Man]

Well, that's what you think the question should be. I think the question should be: Do the current laws, and the way that referees are being asked to interpret them, make sense?

Then those who claim that the penalty shouldn't have been given might have framed their grievance accordingly. Because it sounded like you and others were saying that the award of the penalty was indefensible within the famework of current rules and directives.

That the current rules and directives are an overcomplicated pig's breakfast needn't even be stated. When I learned the rules of football in the 1970s, the handball rules were quite coherent. Intent wasn't an issue; everything was handball unless the arm was on the body (i.e., it would have hit the body anyway) or ball went to hand. Clearly, that was inadequate, because defenders would just stuck their arms out and claim "ball to hand", so that necessarily needed a tweak. But tweak followed tweak, and now we're sitting with a mess.

Surely things could be dialled back, as was done with offside, when for a time we had the "daylight between players" rule which created more controversy than it solved (we still have the inactive offside rule, which can be highly problematic).

[Patrick Thistle]

Though I think the idea of listening to a TV idiot or former professional over the people who are actually paid to officiate the games and keep up with the rules is laughable. VAR has come about as a result of the false importance put on the game by these people and by the clubs and players, moaning at every decision that went against them. Well here it is. And they're still fucking moaning. If they'd all just been proper fucking grown ups in the first place we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Totes agree. All the pundits demanded video assistance. They got it. Now they think it sucks. Fuck off.

I can't see the argument it wasn't a penalty. He jumped, swung his hand out, the ball hit it. Unfortunate? Yes. Bloody unlucky, in fact. He'd have got away with it before VAR and the narrative would be how brave Man United should have had a penalty and we need VAR now!

Every pundit should just fuck off. This is a general rule.

[Jah Womble]

VAR has always been (and will continue to be) a divisive subject among people in the game - all this 'you wanted it, you got it, stop moaning'-stuff is a bit infantile, tbh. In concept, VAR is something that's welcome in the game (IMO) but the application of it in its current (hopefully embryonic) state is far from ideal.

(This isn't directly related to the incident that kicked off the debate here: I'll concede that that 'could' be viewed as an absolute application of the law - my issue remains, however, that if we're giving penalties for non-incidents like that in the first place, then the game is up sh*t creek.)

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

But that's not a non incident. He can see that the shot is coming, and kimpembe has desperately thrown himself through the air to get something on it, his arm is out and the something he gets on it is that arm. That's always been a penalty. What has changed is that the ref didn't initially see it. The thing that people are going to struggle with is that a Penalty is a huge deal, and can have a major impact on the match. In the past only really obvious ones have been given, but there have always been loads of unpunished penalty incidents, simply because they were too subtle to see, or the ref wasn't looking directly at it, or the view of the officials was obscured. This leads people to have expectations of what is a penalty that are based on what they are used to seeing been given, rather than the rules, so you get stuff like "There's not enough contact there" when it would be given as a free kick outside the box.

What you are likely to get in the short term is a substantial increase in the number of penalties, until defenders eventually realize what the can and can't do any more, and then it will all level out. This is going to screw things up for teams like juventus and atletico madrid, and for managers like Jose Mourinho, but essentially it's going to force defenders to focus more on their positioning, and timing to begin with, rather than recovering situations by fouling. It could wipe out a lot of old-school defenders in the way that the backpass rule did.

[ad hoc]

Then those who claim that the penalty shouldn't have been given might have framed their grievance accordingly. Because it sounded like you and others were saying that the award of the penalty was indefensible within the famework of current rules and directives.

Not sure where you saw that anywhere, it seems to me that everybody was clear that it was the rules and (especially the) directives which were the problem. A highly experienced and trained professional made the penalty decision with the benefit of multiple replays from different angles. Clearly he made the decision that he felt he had to make according to the directives. If VAR hadn't been involved, then whether he'd awarded a penalty or not then the argument could have been about a refereeing error. What VAR has brought home is the utter insanity of the rules that with the benefit of extensive technological support the ref made the "wrong" decision (note: not the technically incorrect decision, but the decision that makes no sense whatsoever in the real world)

[G-Man]

Stuff like,

"Good result, terrible penalty decision. Fucking madness."

created that impression.

And arguments like,

"There is no way that you can say that that handball was deliberate. It is feasible that it was, but it would have to have been a piece of rare skill to do what he did. If we move away from "deliberate" to what seems now to be currently accepted "if it strikes an arm which is projecting from the body in a way which is in some way unnatural" then I still can't see that you can give it since if you jump and spin your arms come out (go on, try it). So it's not in the rules, it's in the interpretation. And this particular interpretation seems to take away the spirit of the original rule."

seemed to refer more to how the referee was wrong to arrive at his decision than to the problems with current directives. I'm sure you'll agree that an assertion like "I still can't see that you can give it" is reasonably interpreted as disputing the decision of anexperienced and trained professional who made the penalty decision with the benefit of multiple replays from different angles.

[ad hoc]

The first one is ambiguous to say the least*. The second one isn't at all.

(*in much the same way that your initial angry reactions to the exact same interpretation being applied via VAR for the France penalty in the first half of the world cup final were presumably a bit ambiguous until you realised that it was the directed interpretations of the law that were actually the issue)

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

But AH, you're talking about it almost as if he was just standing there and and dalot lashed the ball against his arm and he couldn't get it out of the way. This lad was flying through the air like a superhero, or Nureyev in his pomp, desperately trying to block the ball, and he had his arm out. He's trying to get something on the ball, he's not fussy, and he got his arm on it. It seems fair enough that that is a penalty. The rules basically make a lot of sense. It's there to catch the John Terry Starfish/making yourself bigger/"accidentally" using your arms to protect your cage like a goalkeeper. The rules may well have come as a surprise to many of us, but kimpembe knew them, he didn't protest or complain, The others got pretty het up, but He knew that once it had gone to Var, he was fucked. And tuchel didn't really have much of a problem with the penalty. He's a big fan of VAR in general, so he's not going to start raving about it.

The Penalty in the World Cup final is surely pretty cut and dried? He basically slaps the ball.

[ad hoc]

What you (and I think only you) see as some kind of high end elaborate ninja move designed to knock the ball from its path with the elbow, I see as a man who has the standard number of limbs jumping and turning his back as he does

[seand]

As an experiment choose two random football teams in the same league, add the word action and do a Google images search. Look at the first dozen pictures and see how many times a defender has his arms outstretched at 45 degrees, shoulder height, i.e in what would be considered an 'unnatural position'.... looking at random pictures like this will reveal one of two things..... either (1) defenders (and indeed attackers) are spending pretty much the entire match going around with their arms in unnatural positions, 'making themselves big', ready at a moments notice to deliberately handle the ball or (2) players have arms at odd angles all the bloody time

[seand]

The Penalty in the World Cup final is surely pretty cut and dried? He basically slaps the ball.

Agreed that it's cut and dried.... ball to hand from a distance of considerably less than a metre. Ball to hand, no intent, absolutely nothing unnatural in the arm movement, nothing sneaky, no attempt to make himself big, heck there's not even any advantage to Perisic in handling. Anyone who's played football knows balls hit arms, we all need to get over it.