Recent content by Russell Jones

Thus far in the tournament, all the various ‘time saving’ law changes seem to have been implemented sensibly and achieved the desired outcome. I very much hope this continues to be the case. However, the real stress test will be the upcoming 31 ‘winner takes all’ matches, where the incentive...

In the context of this match and this substitution, I completely back the lack of action from the officials. But worth bearing in mind that, unlike the amendments to the throw in and corner kick restarts, the substitution change does not explicitly give officials much leeway in choosing when /...

The law puts the onus on the outgoing player to leave by the nearest point unless the referee says otherwise, not the other way round

77th minute substitution of the uninjured Mexico GK. Outgoing keeper takes 20 seconds to leave the FOP. Therefore, in law, incoming sub should stay off for 1 minute. But teams are not allowed to play without a goalkeeper …… hmmm 🤔 🤔 Obviously we wouldn’t expect the officials to get “busy” in...

Unless, as on our one this year, the medical team rock up 75 mins late and then there’s a further delay because of, you guessed it, a medical emergency!

Absolutely. It was a common theme in our 7-6-5 coaching visits last season that refs were being caught out of position at GK punts because of starting the count in a position that was too deep. Think next season it will be incumbent on refs to get to their desired restart positions promptly...

There are five in stadium officials at each game, the ‘extra’ one being the Reserve AR, which makes complete sense given how long it’s probably been since any of the 4th officials actually ran the line! Many of the officials fulfilling these roles are only at the tournament as backups and are...

Generally speaking, I believe that UEFA do not aim to implement the spirit or the letter of the current law as it is written. Instead, they often penalise entirely natural positions of the arm simply because an advantage has been gained. Conversely, over the past two seasons, PGMO have moved to...

Overall, the real pity is that it wasn’t given as a YC on field. There would then have been few complaints with that and very little argument that the YC should be VAR reviewed as a clear and obvious error.

What I really like about the current framing of the handball law (and yes, I know I’m in a minority!) is that you can basically distil it down to one simple and eminently fair question. Has the potential offender actually done anything wrong? If not, we play on, even if the accidental handball...

Almost certainly not. Devoting time and energy to observations which cannot result in a nomination isn’t an effective use of resources unfortunately

IMO, there’s also a reality that the standard of elite ARs in England is such that none of the Premiership or Championship ARs would look technically out of place in top level international settings (with the one caveat around the Championship not having VAR). The competition they face, the...

Surely that’s number 3 behind chatting s**t and drinking too much?! 🤨😄

But we only punish the ‘more serious offence’ if they are simultaneous. In this case, the obvious attempt to trip clearly happened first. If Almiron had stayed on his feet and a goal had swiftly resulted, I’d have been totally unsurprised to see the referee holding an advantage signal to claim...

I’d go further. Given that the law talks about trips or attempts to trip, I’d see the original decision as correct, regardless of the extremely minimal contact. IMO, absolutely no way VAR should have intervened there.