To me, the question is one of advantage in a constantly moving situation where multiple variables have to be seen simultaneously. And I just don’t see how ticky tack calls made by stopping the game and going to replay actually solves that. It’s really not just soccer where that annoys me; I said it already about baseball, it’s true for a lot of calls in football, and so on. At some point you have to let humans make judgement calls and let them stand without technology enforcing every single thing on the slimmest of margins.
Yeah, I don’t really have a problem with VAR micro-analysing offside. Wherever you define the offside line to be, it is possible for a player to be a millimetre over it and, well, a millimetre or a yard, it’s still offside.
What I do have a problem with is them calling the ref over for every dubious contact between a ball and an arm. Slow motion makes those things look worse. VAR is supposed to correct indisuptable errors. Handball is too subjective. Thankfully the ref in the Tunisia game actually had some balls and rejected VAR for once.
Reading the NYT, I want to know what an “expletive enhanced chorus of ‘They’ll be no drinking in Qatar’ to the tune of 'She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain’” sounds like.
Blasphemy! JP is American soccer announcing royalty, for the men and women game (and has been the beloved voice of the Philadelphia Union the last decade). I love JP’s voice. Hopefully Apple hires him for the new MLS Season Pass.
He can have a bit of a flat voice, but he isn’t as dull as most British announcers at least!
Yeah, that’s possible, and wouldn’t do the game no good. It’s definitely what would happen if offside was totally abandoned (which some people who don’t know much about football often propose).
The solution to the ridiculous amounts of time added on is to have the watch stopped for certain incidents. Like VAR checks, injury stoppage (when physio come on). Plus the referee should have the power to stop the watch if one team is time wasting. An indirect free kick a yellow and the watch stopped. Teams might cut it out.
It’s surely only a matter of time before they display a clock during the match which the referee or another official controls and use that for official timekeeping.
If they are going to add loads of time for little stoppages there needs to be more transparency. Thing is, it’s best for the referee to control it from the middle which complicates it a bit.
Here’s the thing … I like things the way they are re: timekeeping. It’s a tradition of the sport. I’m also really starting to hate VAR. It takes tradition away. The referee is running the game. He calls the fouls. He keeps the time. He runs the goddamned game. It should all be on him, good or bad. People make mistakes, that’s part of the game. Just like in baseball - if the ump thinks he’s out, he’s out, fuck VAR.
One of the objections to a stoppable clock is that it opens the door to commercial breaks during play, as desired by many broadcasters. It did occur to me that a conspiracy theorist could imagine that FIFA are being clever in engineering a demand for it with this directive for more stoppage time.
I might be in the minority, but I’ve loved having stoppage time actually be extended to where it should be. Yes it could be more transparent, but I can’t even guess how many times I’ve watched an opposing team roll around in stoppage time and run out the clock.