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    Originally posted by hobbes View Post
    But wherever you draw the line there will be an error bar that people will argue about. So you might as well make it 0.
    Or have the error bar wide enough that the flow of the game is never interrupted.

    Comment


      The law was brought in to stop goal hanging

      A lot of the impetus for the organization of sport in the 19th century was the muscular Christians trying to discourage masturbation in the young. Liverpool were created to be tenants in an empty stadium, Income tax was a temporary measure to pay for the Crimean war. Prince albert gave the royal families of Europe Haemophilia to bring around an era of never ending peace and stability for the empires of europe. The nineteenth century's reasons for doing things are interesting but not binding on us now. The rule may have arisen to prevent goal hanging, but that doesn't explain why there had to be three players between you and the goal when the ball was played for the first 62 years of football. Then it was two players for the next sixty five years, and for the last 30 years it's been level with the second last player. The one thing that has been common through all of those rule changes though is that there has always been a line, and if you were on one side of it you were onside, and if you were a tiny bit over it you were offside. whether you were caught or not was a different matter.This is why rule changes can't solve this. This problem remains constant. There's no possible construction of the rules that gets around this line. other than abolishing offside entirely, which to be honest would be a complete disaster. You would suddenly be looking at an entirely different and largely unrecognisable sport.

      See there are two things going on here, and one of them hasn't been explained properly by the people running the shit show. The first is that Linesmen no longer instantly put up their flag. If it's a tight call they are under instruction to let it go and let VAR sort it out if it results in a goal. This has the effect of allowing all potential goals to be scored so you are definitely seeing more goals than you otherwise would. and the second is that you then you go back and rule out all the ones that actually were offside. The alternative to this is to go back to the situation where the linesman has to make a snap decision, which means that before VAR a lot of potential offside goals get ruled out before they happen, and a number of onside goals get incorrectly ruled out. In both situations goals are ruled out, you just don't get to see the ones that are ruled out by the linesman under the old system hit the back of the net usually or you know it's not going to count. the new system makes all the potential goals explicit and real, and then takes some of them away. That's the thing that really catches people's eye. The alternative to Teemu Pukki having that goal ruled out (correctly if narrowly by Var) is a super keen eyed linesman seeing that he was offside, or a jumpy linesman accidentally correctly flagging him offside because he doesn't want mourinho to make him into a back page headline, or the linesman getting it wrong and winding up on the back page etc. They've made a mess of the introduction and the explanation of this, but you can't just criticize VAR-offside separate from what went before. They didn't go to the trouble of introducing this because things had been going well under the old system.

      See I'm not convinced by arguments that use phrases like i"nterrupting the natural flow of the game". which gets bandied around a lot. See when you're teaching music, and you get a new pupil, and you inevitably have to fix their bad habits, and various basic technical flaws, ultimately to enable them to play the way that they would like to, you will always run into the same phrase. The bizarre, hopelessly inefficient and potentially dangerous (Through RSI) thing that they have been doing for the last few months feels 'more natural.' That's when you put your instrument down, lean forward, look them in the eye, and say to them "You're telling me that there's a natural way to hold a plastic plectrum and to double pick a steel stringed instrument? I wonder what chromosome that is encoded on?" . You then tell the pupil that if they do what you tell them, in a surprisingly short period of time that will seem like the most natural thing in the world,, with the added bonus that they will making the sounds they want to make.. Adult learners are generally very good at this, and throw themselves into this process, but the sort of person who goes to the trouble of taking up an instrument as an adult is the sort of person who actively wants to hear this sort of thing. Teenagers. generally fall into the sullen resistance bordering on "You're not my dad", or "Nah I'm right again." and are a much tougher nut to crack. (in the first case you crack a joke and tell them that it feels good to gain mastery of something, and this is the easiest way, in the second case you just play for them and demonstrate that your way is clearly a lot better.) People tend to confuse what they're used to with what feels natural, it's a perfectly normal in that everyone and comfortable way to think, and I'm sure there's some sort of evolutionary advantage to it. It's an important part of feeling comfortable in your home. However it's not a great way to think about even relatively simple systems, and it's also one of the key mechanisms that makes people in general get more reactionary or small c conservative as they get older.

      See football isn't a naturally flowing game. I mean the ball moves around a lot, and can go quite far, quite fast. But the ball is dead for an average of 36 minutes (but a median of 41 (Every major league has a median of 55-56 minutes of active play in each game on except spain where it's consistently a bit lower. The Ball is dead more in the uk leading to them playing more injury time, to get up to the common median. and time given over to var is added on at the end. VAR hasn't changed these figures in the competitions that had it, though there are no figures for the premier league yet) ,lengthy periods of uninterrupted play, while less rare than they used to be are still a relatively modern thing. There are loads of long pauses in a game of football. People are just used to them and ignore them.and if you're watching on telly, they're already filled with replays. People will get used to VAR eventually. Because something to remember is that sooner or later people are going to stop talking about VAR. See until recently, what would happen is that at the end of every match, when they go back to the studio, they used to go through the goals and tell you what happened in case you were blind, and then the ex-player representing the losing club would then use their limited knowledge of the rules of the game, and the benefit of video slow motion to argue that the referee or the linesman had done their side in and got all the big decisions wrong. or some variation thereof. They can't do that anymore. You can't bawl out a linesman for making a mistake. The ref VAR relationship still is a shambles, but lots of those decisions have been taken out of the 'debates'. Instead they fill that space with people talking about VAR, and usually complaining about it looking at a correct marginal offside call, and acting as though the linesman might not just have flagged it without VAR. But at some point they're going to have to stop talking about VAR. there's only so many times danny murphy can say "the Game is gone" before it starts to lose its impact.

      The thing is what we are ultimately talking about here is the application of rules, so at some level accuracy has to be important.That might sound abstract, but in reality it's the difference between Man City fans watching replays of aguero Crossing the ball to sterling and realizing he was actually offside, and Spurs fans looking at the same replays and feeling that they had just been cheated out of a shot at european glory by a blind linesman and the inevitability of massive oil wealth.. One of these is much worse than the other, so the things to remember when watching your player being called back from his celebration because he was marginally offside is that it works both ways, and without Var he might well have been flagged offside anyway. This article explains a lot and has an interesting statistic down near the bottom. They went back and reviewed all of last season's games, and found that they got about one in 6 major game changing decisions wrong (82% accuracy) On the one hand I think that figure is miraculously high, but on the other hand one in six still seems like quite a lot.

      Comment


        Originally posted by scratchmonkey View Post
        The question for me is whether people who want VAR gone would be okay with situations like Gosling's goal against Chelsea a few weeks back, where it was flagged offside, then VAR showed that it wasn't even close, with a Chelsea player putting him on by a good two yards, then giving a goal that gave a team struggling at the bottom of the table a well-needed win against a "big club" fighting for a top four spot. Is it worth going back to having those sorts of egregious mistakes to have goals like Pukki's (which was barely off, if at all) or Mousset's (which was off to my eyes, if only just) from yesterday allowed?
        Yes.

        Comment


          Originally posted by EIM View Post
          As a side issue, you're getting goals given or disallowed in the Premier League that would be disallowed or given in every other league in the country. How is that reasonable? They're either the laws or they're not.
          That's always been true though to a greater or a lesser extent. the implementation of refereeing varies from country to country. English refs used to allow forwards barge goalkeepers into the net, You used to have to put an opponent into hospital for a week to get a red card in spain, Italian referees liked to start the game with a penalty to juventus. Different strokes for different folks. The Handball rule is implemented differently in different countries.so different things are penalties in different countries. Technically The Way that the premier league has implemented the offside is basically about as good as it gets. It's literally everything else that they have fucked up to high heaven. It's the old double disaster of a) they're a fucking football association, what do you expect. b) they're a body charged with regulating a public good in England. Again, what do you expect.

          Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
          I don't read EIM or anyone else as advocating a "less accurate" standard. On the contrary, I see the position as wanting to return to the rule's original motivation of penalising an unfair attempt to gain an advantage.
          Advocating might be a bit strong, but it is the inescapable logic of his position. If he's saying that he doesn't think that the additional accuracy brought by being able to review key moments on video, is worth the attendant hassle, or even desirable in the case of some tight offsides, he is inevitably arguing for a less accurate standard of refereeing than the one var seeks to bring around.. But that's an internally consistent position and a reasonable enough opinion to hold. It certainly seems to be common enough. I'm not sure about the appeal to the original intent of the law though. The original version of the law would technically allow you to play a high line of four players just inside your own half, just like now, except you couldn't be level, oh and you could also have an extra sweeper standing beside the goalkeeper and the offside line would still be on the halfway line. I am not convinced that it has ever been about goal hanging. If anything the iron line of offside that EIM seems so uncomfortable with was theoretically much more severe the further into the past you go..

          [
          Originally posted by TonTon View Post
          But there really isn't any point in arguing with people who think "it's more accurate" is a winning or a persuasive argument. Same as there's no point in VARlovers arguing with people who think "it's more accurate" is a bag of wank argument.
          I think this statement may be true in ways that the author didn't quite intend.
          Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 31-12-2019, 00:53.

          Comment


            It's a human game, played by humans with human error. We all moaned about refs and linos, but we also moaned about our fuckwitted right-back who played everyone onside, our ill-coordinated midfielders and the useless twat up front who couldn't trap the proverbial sandbag. And then we went home and forgot about it. Only (coincidentally I'm sure) around the advent of the Premier League, all things football became so important that ordinary supporters became less 'real' than the braying pricks on 606, you weren't a proper fan unless you tattooed your face with your colours and neglected your family to attend matches - oh, and referees started getting death threats. Which is why they've ended up needed the 'support' of technology. If saying this makes me a luddite I'm down with that. I write with a fountain pen, weigh with brass scales, prefer books on paper and human football to computer games.

            Secondly, if we're going to bring music in as analogy... When you teach percussion, you meet some people who want to play but have reached adulthood with no appreciation of rhythm. Maybe they want to join the samba band they saw at the demo or not make a dick of themselves at a drumming circle. Whatever. One of the problems these people have is that they can count the notes, sometimes even understand the different sorts, but not the spaces between. Adding up all the time a ball is dead and claiming it proves football doesn't flow without considering the distribution of the breaks is a bit like suggesting that any variation of 10 notes over 2 bars would pretty much be the same thing as they'll all have the same amount of sound and the same amount of quiet.

            If you're ever lucky enough to visit Bahia, you could explore your theory with one of the local samba maestros, but you might want to grease your cowbell first. Smiley thing.

            Comment


              VAR is only in the top flight currently but I'm wondering how much impact it's having lower down with the expectations of players and officials etc.

              I know from friends who play cricket that since Hawkeye came into test match cricket that batsmen no longer walk when they nick it to the keeper and this has had a very negative impact on the game especially at grassroots level.

              Comment


                Adding up all the time a ball is dead and claiming it proves football doesn't flow without considering the distribution of the breaks is a bit like suggesting that any variation of 10 notes over 2 bars would pretty much be the same thing as they'll all have the same amount of sound and the same amount of quiet.

                Hmm, the timing of fairly lengthy pauses in a football game is already a bit too random for a percussion analogy to work I reckon. Injury treatment breaks take quite a long time, and happen entirely randomly, and a lot more often than VAR breaks. People are just used to them. They understand what is going on, and they can see the physio out there spraying the magic spray or whatever, and then the player makes his way unsteadily to the touchline, before sprinting back on seconds later. Also pauses in the game for VAR reviews take place during periods of time when you would likely have had a fairly lengthy pause anyway. The gap in time between a ball hitting the back of the net, and kick off is actually quite lengthy. The gap between blowing your whistle for a penalty, and the kick being taken is not inconsiderable. This is when it happens.

                The point of adding up all the time that the ball is dead is to kind of make the point that People have no problem accepting pauses or breaks in football if they can see a good reason for it, which allows them to accept it as normal. I don't think the length of time is actually all that important. The problem is that for a short period of time, Events aren't happening on the pitch any more. Everyone has to pause for a bit while the locus of attention, power and decision making switches elsewhere, and as far as the crowd is aware, it's effectively like someone is shaking a magic eightball in a shed off a ring road, somewhere down south and pressing a button. I think that's the really jarring thing, and that's the thing that they should have tried to avoid. Offsides basically have to be done by a machine, but I get the strong impression that people wouldn't mind pauses for VAR checks half as much if they see the ref trotting over to take a look at the screen, because it's the ref, and he doing something and in this instance Var can be understood as "Something important happened, that the ref might not have been able to see from his angle, and now he's going over to check." Suddenly that's a lot less weird. The ref is still in charge, Var is helping him, not telling him. The locus of control is still on the pitch, and it is likely to result in a better decision because the ref gets another look at something that happened in a split second.

                There is an interesting side note about offsides though. I was quite surprised to discover that the average number of offsides in a premier league game last season was....... 4. I would have assumed there were at least twice as many. ten years ago it was 5. Which given how much more fashionable high defensive lines are, and how much more effort goes into catching people offside, I think it pretty impressive. The lesson I would draw from that is that football continually evolves in response to changes, such as increased athleticism, improved balance, better youth coaching, new tactical approaches, so in effect trying harder to catch opponents offside lead to a switch to a lot more short passing, and a fall in the overall number of offsides. I think there is considerable evidence that footballers have already absorbed this to a substantial degree. I quoted Dan Burn going on about how gutted he was to have a goal ruled out for brighton, but he finishes recounting his tale of woe by saying "but offside is offside." But he's a defender, That's kind of his job I suppose. Every pre-season, they all have to sit down while someone goes though all the rule changes and implementation changes that they're going to be dealing with, while most fans are generally unaware of these things until they crop up in a big game. Meanwhile any half prepared side has spent preseason building this into their game plan to try and gain an advantage from it. The players have already moved on.

                Comment


                  Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post
                  VAR is only in the top flight currently but I'm wondering how much impact it's having lower down with the expectations of players and officials etc.

                  I know from friends who play cricket that since Hawkeye came into test match cricket that batsmen no longer walk when they nick it to the keeper and this has had a very negative impact on the game especially at grassroots level.
                  Well a lot of the impact of VAR on top flight football is dependent on the certainty that you are being watched. So I don't know how that sort of thing is likely to transfer. You can still get away with what you were getting away with before VAR came in in a higher level league. What VAR seems to have revealed though is that a lot of people are quite surprised about how absolute the laws of football actually are. Offside is a strict binary, I'm kind of surprised that people weren't always kind of aware of this. If your toenail is offside, then you are offside. People just haven't been able to see it before, but linesmen acted on it anyway.and prayed they got it right. I think people will have been a bit surprised to discover that if you don't get the ball first, you're basically not allowed to touch a player who has the ball in your penalty area under pretty much any circumstances, other than a clean shoulder charge where you emerge with the ball. Sufficient contact isn't really in the laws as such.

                  Comment


                    Are shoulder charges as such mentioned in the laws?

                    Comment


                      Well in so far as it's the equivalent of making a clean tackle. But it's the one area where you can make contact with the player before the ball without it being a penalty.

                      Comment


                        Briefy tearing ourselves away from VAR, I found this rather interesting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/50822875

                        Comment


                          we fully acknowledge that expected goals is not a perfect model
                          Lol.

                          Comment


                            Somebody linked an article about how they do the offsides. Compared to what NASA do, it's very simple. There are a large number of cameras feeding into to a massive computer that generates a high resolution 3-d model, and that's what they run it off. So the answer is yes, they know pretty much exactly when the ball is kicked, and they know where everyone is.
                            I don't doubt they have a 3d model, the question is how precise it can be.

                            The cameras being used don't have the frame rate to determine exactly when the ball is kicked. Ajax had a goal disallowed against Chelsea because the frame used to determine that Quincy Promes' toe was a centimetre offside was when the ball had already had left Hakim Ziyech's foot by a good 30 cm.

                            ​​​​​​If you are trying to determine exactly when a ball leaves a players foot then you need to get down to the molecular level, and once you've determined that you need to determine where all the limbs of the other players where at that exact moment in time. This is forensic ballistics type stuff that can neither be determined using images from standard TV cameras, nor in the space of 30 seconds.

                            The VAR needs to be given the option to return "no decision" or "within the error". Obviously VAR are being instructed to always return a decision, because I have yet to see them fail to return a decision. The technology should be an aid, not a magic wand.

                            This guy did some basic maths alluding to what I am saying:

                            https://www.twitter.com/Dakeb_MCFC/status/1163856424230936577
                            Last edited by anton pulisov; 01-01-2020, 10:57.

                            Comment


                              The VAR thing was meant to be sold (as hawkeye is) on the basis that it was infallible, and fans would accept unquestioningly that its decision had to be correct. Now that the curtain has been drawn back and Oz the Great and Terrible has been revealed to be three blokes in a mobile home looking at the same grainy images as the rest of us it has failed in that primary purpose.

                              Comment


                                (To anton) But you’re argument is redundant. Given we all know it wil never be perfect to an atomic level, the question becomes “is it substantially more accurate?” Which it demonstrably is.
                                most of the arguments about disallowed goals have been “well he was only a tiny bit offside.”
                                I know you have trouble separating reality from fantasy when it comes to Ajax, we’re all guilty of that to some degree. We all have “they fucked us” stories. Liverpool would have won the league in 2014 if Stirling’s goal against Man City had stood. He was 2 or 3 yards onside and (I think) in his own half. Linesman flagged for offside erroneously. City drew the game and won the league by 2 points. Thing is, that was the best they could do then. The best they could do is now better. So Chelsea got the rub of the green this time.

                                Comment


                                  Who cares if it's more accurate if it's worse?

                                  Comment


                                    You could film at higher frame rates and higher definitions to reduce the margin of error, but you'd probably just end up with the footballing equivalent of the coastline paradox instead.

                                    It'd take even longer to make decisions, what with more detailed information to forensically comb through.

                                    Comment


                                      Originally posted by EIM View Post
                                      Who cares if it's more accurate if it's worse?
                                      Should Man Utd's last minute pen vs PSG have been given? (Non sequitur but interested in your view.)

                                      Comment


                                        Originally posted by Sporting View Post

                                        Should Man Utd's last minute pen vs PSG have been given? (Non sequitur but interested in your view.)
                                        Absolutely. An egregious handball that rivalled Suarez's v Ghana in the World Cup.

                                        Comment


                                          Originally posted by Sporting View Post

                                          Should Man Utd's last minute pen vs PSG have been given? (Non sequitur but interested in your view.)
                                          I watched that game with a load of French Canadians in a poolside bar in Cuba and had been telling the increasingly celebratory PSG fans that United always scored in the last minute, so when that was given I felt a frisson of "told you so" as they all howled in despair at the injustice.

                                          Comment


                                            accurate is measurable, worse is just like, your opinion man.

                                            Comment


                                              Happy New Year.

                                              New business: The collars on these Chelsea kits are truly terrible. I also imagine that many TVs are also struggling with the saturation of those orange socks. Blech.

                                              Comment


                                                Originally posted by Sporting View Post

                                                Should Man Utd's last minute pen vs PSG have been given? (Non sequitur but interested in your view.)
                                                Thomas Teuchel's take was having spent years calling for the introduction of VAR he wasn't going to give out about it when it went against him.

                                                Comment


                                                  Originally posted by hobbes View Post
                                                  (To anton) But you’re argument is redundant. Given we all know it wil never be perfect to an atomic level, the question becomes “is it substantially more accurate?” Which it demonstrably is.
                                                  most of the arguments about disallowed goals have been “well he was only a tiny bit offside.”
                                                  I know you have trouble separating reality from fantasy when it comes to Ajax, we’re all guilty of that to some degree. We all have “they fucked us” stories. Liverpool would have won the league in 2014 if Stirling’s goal against Man City had stood. He was 2 or 3 yards onside and (I think) in his own half. Linesman flagged for offside erroneously. City drew the game and won the league by 2 points. Thing is, that was the best they could do then. The best they could do is now better. So Chelsea got the rub of the green this time.
                                                  If anything, by saying that VAR is not infallible, I am acknowledging that there is an element of lottery/luck in football, a margin within which VAR is not capable of judging. The authorities need to acknowledge that as well.

                                                  I bring up the Ajax example because it is the main example that I know of of VAR getting it totally wrong by pretending that it can judge within margins that it can not. I tend to watch more Ajax matches than other teams, so I am more likely to notice it.
                                                  ​On the night it worked against Ajax. If a similar decision were to work out in Ajax's favour then it would be equally wrong. (My beef with Chelsea is that a cascade of decisions went their way, and the head of Chelsea has a documented history of bribing various legal authorities, and that football authorities have a documented history of taking bribes. But that is another discussion altogether.)

                                                  I am not against VAR in principle. As I say, it should be used as an aid, but not a magic wand. It has the potential to augment the human abilities of the referee and help overturn obvious mistakes and poor calls. I'm all for that. It would be a definite improvement to the game.
                                                  ​​​​But like a referee, VAR has its own limitations. However, the beauty about it being a piece of technology, and not a human, is that its limitations and uncertainty can be quantified, jus like how a thermometer or weighing scale can report a value ± a certain uncertainty.
                                                  ​​​​​There's no reason why the VAR judges can't just return "no further information, go with the decision on the field". We know that it is not technically possible with normal TV cameras to judge within the margins that they are trying to do, so why are they doing it? Do a scientific study of all the uncertainties and define the margins, and operate within the framework of those margins. Anything else is down to luck, and luck is a part of the beauty of the game.

                                                  ​​

                                                  Comment


                                                    Originally posted by matt j View Post
                                                    Happy New Year.

                                                    New business: The collars on these Chelsea kits are truly terrible. I also imagine that many TVs are also struggling with the saturation of those orange socks. Blech.
                                                    Why do we as humans use the improvement in technology to behave in ways that generate the old problems at a new, higher more intense level?

                                                    Comment

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