04/30/22 Houston Dynamo vs Austin FC PNC Stadium (1:30PM ET) REF: Ted Unkel AR1: Cameron Blanchard AR2: Corey Rockwell 4TH: Luis Arroyo VAR: Sorin Stoica AVAR: Fabio Tovar Toronto FC vs FC Cincinnati BMO Field (3PM ET) REF: Pierre-Luc Lauziere AR1: Oscar Mitchell-Carvalho AR2: Lyes Arfa 4TH: Silviu Petrescu VAR: Ramy Touchan AVAR: Gianni Facchini Real Salt Lake vs LA Galaxy Rio Tinto Stadium (3:30PM ET) REF: Drew Fischer AR1: Kathryn Nesbitt AR2: Frank Anderson 4TH: Joshua Encarnacion VAR: Younes Marrakchi AVAR: TJ Zablocki CF Montréal vs Atlanta United Stade Saputo (4PM ET) REF: Alex Chilowicz AR1: Ian Anderson AR2: Kyle Atkins 4TH: Marcos DeOliveira II VAR: Carol Anne Chenard AVAR: Robert Schaap Columbus Crew vs D.C. United Lower.com Field (7:30PM ET) REF: Timothy Ford AR1: Nick Uranga AR2: Andrew Bigelow 4TH: Ismir Pekmic VAR: Chico Grajeda AVAR: Mike Kampmeinert New England Revolution vs Inter Miami CF Gillette Stadium (7:30PM ET) REF: Ismail Elfath AR1: Corey Parker AR2: Micheal Barwegen 4TH: Matt Thompson VAR: Jorge Gonzalez AVAR: Tom Supple Orlando City vs Charlotte FC Exploria Stadium (7:30PM ET) REF: Fotis Bazakos AR1: CJ Morgante AR2: Kevin Klinger 4TH: Natalie Simon VAR: Alejandro Mariscal AVAR: Jose Da Silva Chicago Fire vs New York Red Bulls Soldier Field (8PM ET) REF: Jon Freemon *1st game this season AR1: Jason White AR2: Meghan Mullen 4TH: Chris Ruska VAR: Victor Rivas AVAR: Peter Manikowski Sporting Kansas City vs FC Dallas Children’s Mercy Park (8:30PM ET) REF: Nima Saghafi AR1: Adam Wienckowski AR2: Diego Blas 4TH: Lukasz Szpala VAR: Jose Carlos Rivero AVAR: Jonathan Johnson Colorado Rapids vs Portland Timbers Dick’s Sporting Goods Park (9PM ET) REF: Armando Villarreal AR1: Chris Wattam AR2: Adam Garner 4TH: Thomas Snyder VAR: Edvin Jurisevic AVAR: Craig Lowry 05/01/22 New York City FC vs San Jose Earthquakes Yankee Stadium (1PM ET) REF: Guido Gonzales Jr AR1: Matthew Nelson AR2: Brooke Mayo 4TH: Elijio Arreguin VAR: Jair Marrufo AVAR: Claudiu Badea Nashville vs Philadelphia Union GEODIS Park (4PM ET) on ESPN REF: Chris Penso AR1: Jeremy Hanson AR2: Mike Rottersman 4TH: Tori Penso VAR: Kevin Terry Jr AVAR: Eric Weisbrod Los Angeles FC vs Minnesota United Banc of California Stadium (10PM ET) on FS1 REF: Allen Chapman AR1: Cory Richardson AR2: Chris Elliott 4TH: Ricardo Fierro VAR: Edvin Jurisevic AVAR: Craig Lowry
VAR with a big call to take an LA Galaxy equalizer off the board in stoppage time in Utah: https://www.mlssoccer.com/video/doe...y-s-stoppage-time-equalizer-at-real-salt-lake I can't quite decide what happened here. Maybe it's that he passive guy came back onside and then pushed - however slightly - the RSL defender? This not being passive any longer? The push alone doesn't seem egregious enough to merit the call, but maybe it did.
Really interesting second half in Chicago for John Freemon following a weather delay. First in roughly the 55th minute, he looked like reaching for a yellow card for NY’s Fletcher which would have been his second, but opted for just a warning instead and Fletcher was subbed out immediately. Then the last fifteen minutes had a lot of incident. First, a second yellow to Chicago’s Duran for SPA; in previous years this would have seemed harsh but this year it’s a more understandable decision. Still, I’m not sure about it. Immediately after, NY’s Klimala commuted a foul in his own half that was possibly SPA. It feels like SPA to me but the camera angle wasn’t wide enough for me to really know. Then Freemon suffers some rather bad luck just moments later when Chicago’s Czichos committed a foul that was much more clear SPA than the others, earning his second yellow and reducing Chicago to nine men. Then the VAR Rivas recommended a penalty for NY, and the check took a very long time due to apparent technical difficulties (more bad luck!), and Freemon came out with a penalty eventually. Interested to hear everyone’s opinions here on these five calls (well, the Czichos one is very obvious, but certainly the other four have some room for discussion).
What was the call on the field here? Wasn’t watching the game but based on this video it looks like they caught it on the field, so why the OFR?
1520631484943454208 is not a valid tweet id There was also a red card (second yellow) and a VAR overturn of a goal for offside keeper interference. Busy night.
The push doesn't matter. He was in an offside position when the ball was played. He then challenged an opponent for the ball. It doesn't matter if he contacts the opponent at all. He challenged for the ball after coming from an offside position. Violation - good call. It pisses me off that MLS inserts doubt on a referee making a correct textbook call.
Another VAR intervention without a changed decision, this time late in Nashville. I agree with Penso, the arm is wide but it’s in a natural position for the given action. No handball was the correct call for me, wrong to send it down to review IMO.
Honest question. How can a referee issue a yellow for time wasting before time has been wasted? In the SKC/FCD game. At 93:02 the balls goes out of bounds for a goal kick. It rebounds back into play and keeper goes towards it. Almost immediately Nima Saghafi is blowing his whistle at 93:05 and issuing a yellow to FCD goal keeper at around 92:08 for time wasting. Why isn’t time wasting called early in the game to set the standard? Why isn’t it called consistently?
He actually warned the keeper on a previous goal kick about wasting time. The goal kick he cautioned the keeper on, the keeper chose to not get the ball right next to the goal on the stand and instead trotted over to get a ball on the field near the sideline. He must have told the keeper to keep things moving and not chase after balls since there is one readily available to him.
Why should that matter though? Aren’t GK allowed 10 seconds to get the ball back in play? How does Saghafi know how much time it would have taken to get the other ball back in play? That is getting rather Orwellian to caution a player for what you think they might do. Saghafi determined this in 3 seconds before he blew the whistle. 3 Seconds! Time Melia took upwards of 40 seconds to get a ball back in play earlier in the game sitting on a 1-0 lead (one instance was game time 29:44-30:22). No one bats an eye. Does the end of the game matter more in terms of time wasting? I thought a foul was a foul whether it’s the 1st minute or the last.
The player in the offside position has interfered with the opponent and any one of these three appear to apply: challenging an opponent for the ball or clearly attempting to play a ball which is close when this action impacts on an opponent or making an obvious action which clearly impacts on the ability of an opponent to play the ball
There is no legitimate reason for him to ignore the ball that is on the stand right next to the goal and go on a 40 yard excursion to get a different ball. Everyone is more sensitive to time wasting at the end of the game, referees included.
The only thing I'm surprised about with the LAG goal getting called back in Salt Lake is that it was awarded in the first place. Offside position is abundantly clear. Contact with an opponent exists or, if that can't be discerned in real time, they are so close to each other that "challenging" is inherent unless the referee team deems the ball is too far away to be played. It also seems, from the video above, like the LA players were protesting to Nesbitt before a VAR review was called, so the implication appears to be she was giving Fischer information that would lead to a "no goal" call but... that call actually wasn't made? I guess I'm just confused why this was called "goal" and it was put on the VAR to annul instead of being called "no goal" the whole way through. Did Fischer want the trip to the monitor here to make it seem like a more thorough decision? He's done something like that before. Or did he have doubts over the "challenging" aspect of the call even though Nesbitt had the OSP correct?
Here's my guess on how it happened. From the AR perspective, it was too hard to tell if there was an actual challenge for the ball, as it was impossible from that angle to tell if the ball was coming close enough to those too to be a challenge (or for the contact to have interfered with the ability of the attacker to try to get to the ball). So that was up to the R to determine interference with an opponent. And that may not have been the players our R was focused on--not enough to wave off the goal, perhaps because he wasn't sure an perhaps because he preferred the optics of it being waved off after VAR to a latish on-field wave off. (While this is an easy call in an academic setting and should certainly be caught live by professionals, I suspect at lower levels it is more often called "correctly" because the AR loses sight of the interference requirement and flags when the ball is coming in towards the general direction of an OSP attacker than because the AR/R correctly recognize the nature of the active involvement.)
Having watched the whole thing, I'm also just realizing that the Galaxy were celebrating near Nesbitt rather than coming over for the purpose of protesting. It seems that players/substitutes then started to overhear the conversation she was having with Fischer, when some of the doubts were being expressed and hashed out. Having a bit more information right now, I think she and Fischer just defaulted to goal amidst all the confusion but I have a high degree of certainty that Nesbitt knew the correct call the whole time.
As far as "2CT week" goes, most seemed solid/mandatory except maybe Elfath's second (justifiable, but I also don't think anyone would have said a word if it wasn't given) and then Freemon's first, which is discussed above and probably falls in a similar category. On the penalty decisions that have been raised, I'm interested to hear what PRO says about Freemon's at the end of the match. It's a different type of challenge, but I think it's similar to the one discussed with Marrufo last week in the sense that a no-foul call can be justified despite the contact (because you start asking all sorts of questions about who was there first, who fell when, etc.). It seems like the type of call that should be or have been left in place no matter what the initial decision is/was. But maybe PRO feels differently. On Penso's, I'm totally fine with him keeping his decision. It's that rare handball decision that, in the current environment, I think can go either way. Like Freemon's, I think "call stands" works either way. The arm is out some but it doesn't seem like he makes himself "unnaturally bigger" until after the contact, so the positioning felt pretty close to natural at the time the handball contact occurred. Again, we'll see what PRO says.