And now we know how Croatia fans felt during the men’s World Cup final 2018. If I was rooting for the underdog Spain I would definitely be miffed right now. It was a penalty, but a soft one to call. That’s why I laugh when people say things like even though Australia was hard done by the refs they should of overcame it. At the highest level it’s all about small margins. If the refs start helping one team, the other team is done. It’s kinda sad USA won with no goals from open play. Truth is refs are pressured to help the big name / big money teams. Liverpool’s pk in the first couple minutes of the champions league Final vs Spurs. The Perisic handball pk at the men’s final last year. At least it wasn’t a clear dive like the play preceding Griezmann’s first free kick goal in the men’s wc final. There’s still something to argue about. At high speed any little bump will cause you to fall. At high speed it’s impossible to move your hands out of the way to prevent a handball. It’s up to the refs if they want to ruin the game by calling soft fouls / handballs. Don’t blame the player. Blame the ref. But dont blame the ref, blame the rules which are so general as to bring on this amount of arguments. All sports enjoy the crappy rules, the controversies give people something to talk about and attract people to the sport. It’s called FIFA FairPlay even though all their rules and their implementation undermine anyone’s sense of fairness lol. I can’t wait for the forum banter when France USA play. It’s sure to be a s*** show. Hopefully it’s not a lame foul / pk fest where the ref determines the winner.
Teams peak at different points, so the only way to handle it is to look at a designated point in time (2003, 2006, whenever). Otherwise you run the risk of comparing Japan to their peak time in one year (c2010), China c99 finals, etc. Those teams were not near their best at the same time. One easy way to look at it: there are 19 teams other than US/Ger in the top 25 today and 16-17 years ago. 3 of the 19 have declined an average of abt 100 elo pts. Russia, China, and Norway. 6 have had no appreciable change. 10 have improved a lot. To the tune of 220 pts relative to GER/USA. The improvers, in both number of sides and magnitude of improvement, vastly outweigh the decliners. The field has improved. A lot. Another easy way: the number 15 side c 2003 was 370 elo pts worse than GER/USA. The number 15 side today is only 220 pts worse. You can virtually pick any rank in that 10-20 QF outsider range at any point in time from several years ago and find a similar difference. The former is similar to France v. Finland or Northern Ireland on the men's side today. Roughly a 1 in 10 fluke chance in a one off knockout match. Because soccer. The latter is similar to France vs. Mexico or Sweden. Roughly a 1 in 4 chance. The only way to argue that the gap hasn't closed is to argue that elo only tracks past performance and that it doesn't have predictive ability. But anyone arguing that doesn't understand how it is constructed and that it has been demonstrated (again and again and again) to have a high degree of predictive ability. Germany and the US have consistently won because they have been the best, but the ease with which they have progressed has been eliminated. I don't know why this is contentious.
Spain was committing all kinds of fouls, many of which did not get called. I'm not sure the US was prepared for such a physical game, but Spain must have known that repeated fouling, as effective as it might have been in disrupting the US players, was a risky strategy. The Spanish-language announcers also agreed it was a PK
Hopefully VAR will help with with this. To the extent that refs favor the more favored team, I think it's rarely about intentional bias, and moreso about preconceptions of team quality impacting how a ref views something as it happens. Once there's enough data, it might be interesting to study whether VAR lowered the number of penalties given to higher-ranked teams (by making the refs less dependent on their initial and potentially slanted perceptions). In this case I think the penalty was correctly given, and the replay did its job. If there's contact from that kind of challenge, it's a foul, and video seemed to show some contact.
Spoiler: USA 2-1 Spain...2 pk and 1 blunder...All 3 are soft goals...lol...VAR is once again the MVP.
We could have more players respecting the rules. There aren't that many fouls, and the parameters are pretty clear.
In a world where J.P. Dellacamera is the lead play-by-play man, I'm not sure why this is supposed to matter.
Well, it only took Guinho a couple of posts to hint that Lavelle took a dive, not a couple of pages. But after looking at the GIF for 3 mintues and seeing the play maybe 20 times, I have to agree. Lavelle, gets her leg clipped. If that happens you'd expect her next step to be smaller, because her right leg can't travel as far. And yet her right leg takes a monstrously large step. That's either a massive over correction, the likes of which I don't expect out of a trained athlete, or else bad acting. I'm thinking the latter.
I don't think it was necessarily a dive - anyone getting even trifling contact is likely to go down coming across with that speed. But the point was that the contact was practically the definition of trifling. The officiating in this tournament overall, whether it's the refs themselves or the combination of refs and VAR, is embarrassing.
Lavelle got kicked. One angle showed the defender's foot bending back from impact. It was a late challenge becuz at the moment of impact, the ball was no where near that foot. It wasn't a dive or acting. Her big stride was the body reacting to regain balance from the friction of impact that hindered the body momentum. The big stride itself threw her off balance. Now, if you played this game, you would know a hit like that on another player (who got the ball and you didn't) will render you sorry defensive self at the mercy of the ref. I know it, it did it. A lot. They always called it.
We wanted VAR for the precision. We got VAR. Now we like VAR is inhuman... any person could see that it’s not humanly impossible for the person to move out of the way. Intent is impossible to judge... that’s why lawyers make the big bucks lol Should just go with Alexis Lalas’ suggestion and make any foul any handball a penalty regardless of intent. So there’s less arguments. Just another way to break those boring bunker games.
Those are criteria for cards not for fouls. I understand most people are used to seeing much more lenient, much less strict officiating in the penalty area. The referee, Kulscar, showed quite early - for instance calling Heath for a push in the corner when she lost possession - that she was going to call things pretty tight. Of course she's human and she can't see everything but she showed she didn't tolerate a lot of negative tactics and careless defense. Watching live on TV, I couldn't tell but it looked reasonable given Kulscar's demonstrated foul recognition and the replays convince me she was right - there's definitely contact. Most people misuse the replays and particularly slo-mo. You slow things down enough and generally you can talk yourself into thinking the contact was trivial... because you're watching in slo-mo and you lose any sense of force. You also start looking for things like how much (in this case) Lavelle's leg moves - again, slow it down frame by frame and it'll look like nothing. And not that her leg has to move a lot for it to hurt - you get cleats raked across your leg, do you expect to every Newtonian force of the cleats in slo-mo? Do you think you're watching a cartoon? The abuse of slo-mo is ruining sports but most people are simply unaware of it.
Btw, I'm normally against switching keepers in the middle of things, but we need Harris in there, starting next game.
Can we also give the coaches two challenge flags. The fact that VAR is only implemented when the refs want to use it creates a lack of transparency when they also don’t have to explain their calls later. Why are some plays / fouls reviewed and others not. It just leads to more conspiracy theories lol and makes it so refs can unfairly influence the game. Plays/ fouls other than ones that create a natural stop in game should also be reviewable.
I’m saying there was marginal incidental contact that wasn’t strong enough to be careless and Lavelle made a playacting meal of it, yes. And it’s precisely the movement and multiple steps before going to down that makes it a not very convincing dive. She could easily have kept her feet
The point is that the contact was trivial which cane be seen by the fact that Lavelle continues her run for a step or two before dramatically flinging herself to the ground
I think slo-mo established without question there was contact. I think the referee, Kulscar, is right to use it to make sure she wasn't deceived by her view of the play. As for force of contact and whether it was trivial or not, that's generally best left to real-time judgement unless, of course, your view was obstructed or distracted. Slowing something down, slo-mo, generally has the effect of lessening the perception of impact. Slow it down enough and most of the time it always seems like just a gentle nudge.
More nonsense brought on by our addiction to slo-mo. You really think when someone's tripped, their feet fly up and they land like a belly flop? There are guys who of course actually dive like that and you're the one who buys it apparently.
You've been watching too many guys who really do dive. They stop their legs working like they're dead or shot out from under them. This is absurd.