I've always believed that if you have a poorly regulated body with zero accountability and transparency, managing a massively valuable market, the result will be incompetence, grey markets, self dealing and general nonsense. I don't believe they actually go round rigging the competition but on the other hand, there is virtually nothing to stop corruption either - I think it is at least as bad as calcio suggested.
Does anyone actually believe Lee Mason's excuse? It doesn't really strike me as very credible that he could forget to do the thing he is there to do
What was the Assistant VAR doing? Does the VAR have a boss that could have seen what we all saw - no lines being drawn? Could the producers have asked where the lines were?
The only "human error" that I'd believe is that no one flagged Norgaard's position as a possible issue. "I forgot to draw the lines" is obvious bullshit.
I don't understand why they don't run VAR through one central office like how they do it for the NBA? What would be difficult about that? At least you'd think they'd be more consistent then, and less reliant on bald frauds getting scared on the pitch
"hi, are you new?" meme* Because that's exactly what they don't want to happen And they won't change until they put into a position where they cannot refuse any longer, where it begins to look extra suspicious that they won't implement it.
Incompetence almost always strikes me as credible. Especially where, as is the case with Mason and the FA, there's an extensive record of incompetence and no record of competence.
Today's Arsecast has a great intro that tees this topic up nicely. worth a listen for those who haven't/or normally do. The core issue seems to be that VAR is trying to manage expediency over accuracy in these instances. I appreciate expediency, but if you're already stopping play, doesn't it make sense to be sure you get the call "right" rather than just performing a "check"? What stands out to me is that the HR is just standing there on the pitch waiting for the VAR ref to tell him the decision. Why can't the HR run to the side of the pitch, or even have an iPad with the video feed brought to him so they are talking through the decision in real time. As @Jitty Slitter has mentioned many times, doing what Rugby does and mic'ing up the HR and the VAR ref seems to be another layer of improvement that makes sense here. The key issue seems to be that there isn't any oversight or anything resembling "checks and balances" for important calls like this. For both this match and BHA's, you'd think that the HR would ask whoever is running VAR to show where the line is drawn to catch this sort of problem.
That’s a likely story from the refs, but what evidence is there that they give a fish’s tit about expediency? They take three minutes to determine obvious calls.
I'm not convinced that explains it all For instance in the pizzagate game, it was obvious that all the calls went Man Us way. I don't think the ref was corrupt - i just think he didn't want to give big decisions against SAF IMO that explains a lot of what we see rather than competence
Was watching some Argentine league yesterday and VAR took FOREVER - 8 minutes of stoppage time minimum to the 4 halves I watched. Not good or bad, but it's happening there.
We need ESR back ASAP. How far is he and Jesus from availability? Jesus is obviously key but ESR is also something different to the players we have when we need a player to make a sudden impact.
i think they have bottled a lot of big decisions down the years Remember how SAF didn't give up a penalty at OT for ages then suddenly when he retired there were 3 in one game? All the decisions were correct IMO, but it never would have been given against him https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/26502631
Sounds a bit like either corruption or intimidation to me... Either way, the English FA are weak as piss for nothing coming down harder on it.
What gets missed is there is a lot of space between "corrupt ref" and "unbiased ref" i.e "favourable ref" who we think might not make those big calls against us This is what Calcio was all about - Juve could influence what refs they were assigned. When I paid attention to this stuff, it was remarkable how a small cadre of 2-3 refs who were terrible for Arsenal (e.g Mike Dean) controlled a major % of our games. How were those appointments determined?