The Ref Stop

A couple of lines drawn by a 7 year old.

The Ref Stop
My attitude towards technology in football is the same as it has been for several years now, and is in line with what FIFA/the IFAB used to say about it - that it should only be used if it's minimally intrusive, virtually 100% accurate and gives an incontrovertible decision within seconds so as not to disrupt the flow of the game.

GLT meets those criteria, VAR as far as I'm concerned, clearly doesn't. I'm fairly sure I've said this before but for me it's a case of the old Latin aphorism, 'Aegrescit medendo' - usually rendered as, 'The cure is worse than the disease.'
 
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McTavish said:
And when we are talking about millimetres it also depends on whether you take the decision point as when the the player making the pass first makes contact with the ball or when the contact ends. The contact usually last only about a hundreth of a second but a player can have moved a centimtre in that time...I know this sounds stupidly pedantic but that is the madness that trying to use VAR to get this sort of decision 100% correct produces. It's just not black and white.
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The latest IFAB circular has clarified this that the first point of contact must be used for VAR purposes. Nonetheless, most standard cameras use 25 or 30 frames per second which means it is possible there is no single frame that actually shows contact with the ball or at least its very possible that the first point of contact with the ball is not caught on any frame. That would be a big factor when we are talking millimetres.
 
Reading the posts here made me think what is the difference between GLT that made it successful and VAR which to me is a failure. For me its the money spent on the tech behind it. They spend $250K per stadium to put technology that is specifically designed to get the GLT decision right. They spent no additional on ground $ for VAR (VAR room expenses don't count for me). They are using existing technology designed for entertainment for officiating a game. That to me is the source of the problem. If you want to make VAR work you must spend on technology to support the theory behind it. Otherwise you would create as many problems as you would solve.
 
one said:
Reading the posts here made me think what is the difference between GLT that made it successful and VAR which to me is a failure. For me its the money spent on the tech behind it. They spend $250K per stadium to put technology that is specifically designed to get the GLT decision right. They spent no additional on ground $ for VAR (VAR room expenses don't count for me). They are using existing technology designed for entertainment for officiating a game. That to me is the source of the problem. If you want to make VAR work you must spend on technology to support the theory behind it. Otherwise you would create as many problems as you would solve.
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This actually hits the nail on the head and articulates a point I didn't realise I agreed with until now. It very much feels like the FA/FIFA etc. are going to clubs and saying 'oh by the way would you mind lending a bit of space to the VAR' and going to the broadcasters and saying 'oh by the way would you mind lending us your broadcast feeds'. There's no initiative being taken.
 
Not quite. VAR is actually in a specialist hub away from the ground with a dedicated feed. What we see on TV is educated guesswork on the behalf of the broadcasters
 
The offside law was obviously not designed to work with VAR. If they are going to go down to the mm, then in my opinion they need to change the law. So Mata can be offside because of one inch of his knee, but the defender's arm doesn't count? In the future, things like the stride length, a forward lean when sprinting, or a toe would cause a player to be offside. Maybe they should change it like Athletics to the torso or body or something, or VAR can only call offside if there is clear daylight.

I'm not sure the VAR technology is even accurate enough to work in such small MM decisions. Maybe they shouldn't zoom in. I don't think they even use lines in the MLS. I think I read on Bigsoccer Ref forum that they think in MLS that decision isn't called because they don't use lines so looking at the pictures without lines or a zoom in you wouldn't be able to tell if Mata's kneecap is offside.
 
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santa sangria said:
This is "level" as we know it.
Ridiculous, even without the lines.
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Totally agree - if its not then the new 'level' needs to be written in the laws as 'The position of the attackers body parts must mirror exactly those of the 2nd last defender' - absolutely ridiculous. For those saying no one can blame the AR here - guess what - Huddersfield player did start berating him after decision made and Friend had to send him away.
 
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Its just chasing an impossible dream - the perfect game of football with no 'wrong' decisions - and its going to ruin the game by doing so.

And if I hear 1 more person says it works in Rugby - then I shall just refer them to a few weeks ago where TMO apologised for a wrong decision in 6 Nations recently.

Human and Video refs are going to get things wrong - at least the human version doesn't take all day about it, ruining the game by doing so!

Latest VAR rant over .........until the next time!;)
 
JamesL said:
Because we are going down to milimetres now and matas knee is milimetres offside.
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@NorthLondonRef hinted at this, but there is no way the lines drawn are accurate to milometers, they are only guides. They never calibrate those lines like they would for GLT.

Even if the lines were 100% accurate, Young's foot is still a few milometers away from touching the ball in that frame and if you move forward a few milliseconds to the time young actually touches the ball then Mata will be a few milometers onside.
 
one said:
Even if the lines were 100% accurate, Young's foot is still a few milometers away from touching the ball in that frame and if you move forward a few milliseconds to the time young actually touches the ball then Mata will be a few milometers onside
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Exactly - and this is yet another reason why I think that using the VAR is not the panacea that some thought it would be.
 
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Are these clever maths and geometry guys going to be at every match! And if they're going to take a week to do their stuff then I can see them not being very popular clever maths etc guys!

Why can't people just accept that the game is for humans, played by humans and refereed by humans, and humans make mistakes occasionally?
I know I make fewer mistakes than the players on my pitch, but that doesn't stop them coming out with tripe like the player did last week when he shook my hand and then told me "I was s**t today but you were worse!" The trouble is, we look for different things in a game.
We want the decisions to be right when they're in our favour, but not when they're against us.

Eventually I'm sure that they will come up with a way of getting literally every decision right almost instantly. I sincerely don't want to watch that, and I'm sure most other people would feel the same if they thought about it. It will make the game sterile and no fun to watch as a spectator. Teams will buy the championship, and no way could a team like Leicester ever win the Premier League. There will be no way that luck could ever influence a season the way it can at the moment.

I'm sure a surprise team got to the FA cup final a few seasons ago because of an error in the semi-final that meant the winning goal would be ruled out had VAR been used. (I seem to recall it was Portsmouth who beat Man United and there was a foul in the lead-up to the penalty that was not seen, although I could be wrong) That error was the highlight of their season because they had already been relegated.

In a VAR-ruled football world we might as well forget about all rounds of the FA cup / Champion's League / World Cup etc up to the semi-finals. We know who the teams will be before a ball is kicked so just draw their names out to decide who's in the home dressing rooms!

Sorry, really not a fan!
 
I don't buy that argument at all. If that was the case, why bother with skill or ability, why not just decide the league based on picking one of 20 balls out of a pot? Football is a game reliant on players playing within a set of laws, and being punished appropriately when those laws are broken. What you call "luck", I call "mistakes", and I don't understand why we should be expected to just accept mistakes and wrong decisions, because correct application of the laws is somehow "boring"? A game can be exciting to watch without a single foul - or if every foul is called correctly.

Mistakes by referees don't make for an interesting sport, good play does.
 
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GraemeS said:
Mistakes by referees don't make for an interesting sport, good play does.
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That's true, but it somewhat misses the point, in my opinion. Mistakes are an inevitable part of human existence and it doesn't matter what you do, you're never going to be able eliminate them completely. In trying to eliminate all mistakes (or even in trying to eliminate only 'clear and obvious' ones) you're sometimes just going to introduce other errors - as has already been shown in every country where VAR has been in use long enough. Then there's the level of disruption to the game that VAR causes. That's been one of the main complaints everywhere that it's been in use - that it destroys the flow of the game and kills or seriously damages much of the passion and excitement of a previously free-flowing sport.

In the end, based on the fact that VAR only deals with some mistakes and not all of them, is not 100% accurate and can actually introduce secondary mistakes through its own process, I think
the question for me is whether the overall amount of improvement that is available through VAR, outweighs the deleterious effects. For me, from what I've seen so far, the answer is no.
 
Peter Grove said:
That's true, but it somewhat misses the point, in my opinion. Mistakes are an inevitable part of human existence and it doesn't matter what you do, you're never going to be able eliminate them completely. In trying to eliminate all mistakes (or even in trying to eliminate only 'clear and obvious' ones) you're sometimes just going to introduce other errors - as has already been shown in every country where VAR has been in use long enough. Then there's the level of disruption to the game that VAR causes. That's been one of the main complaints everywhere that it's been in use - that it destroys the flow of the game and kills or seriously damages much of the passion and excitement of a previously free-flowing sport.

In the end, based on the fact that VAR only deals with some mistakes and not all of them, is not 100% accurate and can actually introduce secondary mistakes through its own process, I think
the question for me is whether the overall amount of improvement that is available through VAR, outweighs the deleterious effects. For me, from what I've seen so far, the answer is no.
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But what you're describing is VAR done badly. And of course I'm not in favour of bad VAR - and I would definitely count the current implementation as "bad VAR". But I don't think that's a justification for writing off the entire concept of VAR, or simply slumping back and accepting that key moments in games can be decided by referee mistakes and that's how it will always be.

I think that refereeing can be made better through technology, and that if done well, that will absolutely be a good thing for the sport. One failed experiment doesn't automatically mean that all future attempts will fail and we're wasting our time trying.
 
GraemeS said:
I don't buy that argument at all. If that was the case, why bother with skill or ability, why not just decide the league based on picking one of 20 balls out of a pot? Football is a game reliant on players playing within a set of laws, and being punished appropriately when those laws are broken. What you call "luck", I call "mistakes", and I don't understand why we should be expected to just accept mistakes and wrong decisions, because correct application of the laws is somehow "boring"? A game can be exciting to watch without a single foul - or if every foul is called correctly.

Mistakes by referees don't make for an interesting sport, good play does.
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Broadly agree Graeme, but there has to be a 'tipping' point, otherwise VAR IS going to take away the excitement. I've just learnt of a penalty given recently in Australia 4 minutes after the challenge - play continued all that time and no one appealed - that surely can't be considered a good use of technology or good for the game?
 
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