there’s still hope, England!
… not anymore.
That was a shit penalty call anyway. I think having taken away the off-side goal weighed in her decision.
I’m supporting England, as much as I would love to say otherwise we can’t have any complaints so far. I didn’t see any angles to justify the penalty, the offside was marginal but correct and the red card was more than deserved.
Still time though!
I love her. Fast and tricky. She doesn’t get a lot of attention, but she will in the future.
“Collapsed” isn’t the right word, but England really lost its way there at the end.
I think the penalty save just took it all out of them and they couldn’t recover.
Great game. I love England, but am glad to see the USA win. If the USA had been knocked out, I would have been cheering for England.
People have been down on Alex Morgan for not producing, but she’s drawing tons of fouls and she always has a few defenders on her, leaving other players wide open. Press was completely uncovered for her goal today and Rapinoe was left all alone a few times as well.
I think Morgan is doing just fine. I wish the refs would protect her some more – it doesn’t look like she’s diving to me, I think she’s just getting mugged out there.
That was pretty poor. I was cringing most of the way through just waiting for the next error or hopeful punt. The Americans were much the better team but overall not a great game.
The offside was close but correct, the penalty award was also correct. If you take a player’s leg when you run across the back of them it is a nailed on foul. The penalty itself was terrible, weak and poorly directed.
It was, but it was so close that it could only be seen to be correct with freeze-frame computer analysis. The England player wasn’t even half a step beyond the last defender.
The offside rule is a good one: by preventing attackers from goal-hanging, it allows the defence to come forward and makes for a richer, better, more interesting game of football. That’s its purpose. By virtue of being in place, it also creates an interesting mini-contest of tactics and skill, as attacking sides try to time both pass and run to get through the defence, and the defence co-ordinate to either spring the offside trap or simply keep the ball in front of them. All well and good.
But it’s a rule designed to be enforced with the human eye. In a case like this oneI think it’s fair to ask what actual unfair advantage accrued to England by the striker having some part of her body perhaps as many as 5cm ahead of the last part of the last defender’s body. No-one watching in real time could have definitively called that offside. The timing was a matter of milliseconds and it made no difference to the likelihood of scoring from the pass.
Just as in cricket, where if video/computer review shows that the umpire’s call was only marginally wrong then it is allowed to stand, I think it’s probably better to use VAR to correct clear errors rather than to overrule very marginal naked-eye calls on the basis of computer-assisted freeze-frame analysis.
(NB, this isn’t motivated by partisanship - I’m a Scot and while I don’t cheer against England I can cope with their losing a match with equinamity. It just seems that technology has out-evolved the rules here. In particular, it raises the spectre of future games where no goal can be celebrated until we’re certain the VAR team are happy with it, which just makes for a less fun experience.)
Edit: Nevermind - this was a question, that on reflection was dumb once I replayed through what happened when they reviewed the VAR.
Ned-Zwe in 10 mins.
Last edition of this match ended in 2-0 so I’m feeling confident.
Hup Holland!
That was too close for comfort.
Still a win 
Yay Holland! It’s good to see them do well.
I disagree absolutely. A rule is a rule. The rule should be enforced as accurately as it possibly can be. Anything else leads to perverse incentives for players to try to be offside where the ref can’t get a clear view, or other kinds of nonsense. Professional sports are important enough, with enough on the line, that it’s vastly better to have a bright line definition, and then use whatever techniques are available to measure that bright line as accurately as possible. Imagine that the definition of a goal was “the ball, to the ref’s judgement, is in the goal”. Madness would ensue. Instead, there’s as precise a rule as possible, and we measure it as accurately as we possibly can, and always strive for more accuracy.
Or to look at it another way, as long as the offside rule exists at all, there will be close calls, where it’s arguable whether it was offside or not. Isn’t it better to have a method of judging those which is as close to fair and objective at all times as is possible, rather than relying on human frailty? How bad would you feel if there were two identical offside situations in a game, one for your team and one against, and instant replay showed that both were offside-by-a-kneecap, and one the ref had a good view of and called, and one they missed, and that determined the game?
What happens when we achieve more accuracy in enforcing the rule than players can achieve in trying to follow it? I don’t think it’s possible for a player to judge to a VAR-level nicety the timing of an attacking run - the human brain just doesn’t operate at that split-microsecond timing. Holding people to a high standard is fine. Holding them to an impossible standard is just perverse - the only possible effect will be to make players hesitant and slow.
As for the perverse incentives you mention, they’ve existed in football from the invention of the offside rule to 2017 or so and… it’s been okay? People object to *clearly *bad calls by the ref but I don’t think there’s been any kind of suggestion that the game has been ruined by inability to consistently judge offside-by-a-kneecap infringements.
Ditto for the definition of a goal being the ref’s judgement - again, that’s how it’s worked for a 100 years or so, hasn’t it? With nothing more sophisticated than a line painted between the posts, and linesmen in position to help the ref, it’s been fine.
I think this is the crux of it. It’s a human game, played and referred by humans in real time. I don’t mind a system for catching absolute refereeing howlers, but stopping play to rewind, freeze-frame and adjudicate on a question of millimetres is taking it in to a new realm.
It doesn’t determine the game though. There are 90 minutes of play, and you’re allowed to score in the other 89’55’’ that didn’t involve the ultra-close edge-case call. If you couldn’t, it’s not the ref’s fault she doesn’t have superhuman vision. I’d be annoyed we lost, of course, but you can’t pin it all on that.
The trouble with this is you cannot be certain you’re achieving the correct result on close questions. In the case of Law XI (Offside), the moment the position is judged as offside or not (offside position) is the moment the ball is played by a teammate. But that exact moment of contact between (usually) foot and ball for a kick is not something that can be determined precisely from film footage (unless you’re using the sort of filming equipment that they use for showing super-slo-mo of golf shots). So if a player is moving forward and appears to be just a few inches (even a foot) offside at the point you think the ball was kicked, being off by even a few tenths of a second could mean that the player was actually onside.
This is where video review runs into trouble in almost all sports. It purports to provide a level of accuracy that is apparent only. In actual fact, it often misleads the viewer. But because the viewer thinks they’ve seen an error, failure to “correct” the error leads to condemnation. Condemnation in such cases is what the video review is trying to avoid. So, in actuality, implementing video review can have the amazing effect of making the results less accurate in some cases.
Video review is most effective when it is limited to cases of egregious error. The NFL originally tried to apply video review with a standard that limited it in this way. The trouble is that, even if the reviewing official doesn’t think there is obvious error, the situation is likely to be reviewed ad infinitum, ad nauseum by the television commentators. This leads to the appearance of error, causing condemnation, etc. Unless the sports league has the fortitude to ride the wave of outrage, it is inevitable that the standard of obvious error will not stay in place. 
9 mins in it looks fairly balanced.
So you guys are SOL 
Hup Holland!
It would be a good day for Holland indeed what with the heroic effort in the tour to hang on to the yellow jersey for another day.
Best player on the pitch: van Veenendaal