He did it. I said this completely jokingly, and it ended up completely coming to fruition with the Embolo diving 2CT. Pinhiero with the extreme courage to make that call. Notwithstanding the incorrect initial yellow card... wow.
I mean, we aren't giving Pinheiro credit for the 2CT red card. It came from VAR after Pinheiro completely blew the original caution in the first place.
If I recall correctly from the discussion on the Ream/Almiron "swapped" yellow card, this was an unexpected and novel interpretation of the mistaken identity application of VAR even for you experts, yes? If so, then Collina and company came up with it and disseminated it as a standard to be used in this tournament. The 2CT red card tonight comes from this novel interpretation. Maybe they got too creative for the good of the game? It would seem like such a significant rule would need to be explicit in creation and application, rather than adapted after the fact. It seems like even more power than even the president of the referee committee should have. He was certainly in a position to introduce and champion just such a rule for consideration at any point. (Apologies if I've misunderstood the roll out of the policy and this was a known thing when mistaken identity was enacted as a VAR issue.)
If I remember right from the posting about it, I think the suggestion was that Collina was the one who proposed the mistaken identity change to VAR powers to IFAB and this was explicitly something he wanted to be part of it, so from his standpoint he asked for a law change and got exactly what he wanted, and the rest of us were caught out by the technical writing not exactly matching the intent. That said it’s been a bit since I read the discussion and it’s really possible that I am mixing up things from a different discussion, but that’s what’s stuck in my head about it. So hopefully someone with a better memory or understanding of the situation than me can clarify I think someone unearthed a post around the time of the law changes that (maybe it was socal lurker?) speculated this being a possibility in the wording of the Laws, but I think most of the active posters at the time took it like you have and assumed that it was probably not intended for that
It's a Ted Kaczinski type situation in that when you spend your entire life always being the "smartest person in the room" - even in rooms of people that usually fit that description, it messes with your mind. My own mother was one of those people. Being that inordinantly intelligent distorts your ability to interact with other people. When you are literally always several steps ahead of other people, instantly master any subject put in front of you, and can think through possible objections or counters before you speak - you reach a point where you exist in a bubble of one. And if you have nobody that you trust to correct you when you are ever so rarely off base, it quickly gets out of control. Ted K became the anti-technology unabomber. My mother became paranoid about her personal safety. It's obvious that Kasparov is starting to see patterns where none exist. I'm a very intelligent person in my own right, but I ain't got that much brain power. I've spent most of my life in various communities of other highly "gifted and talented" individuals. Enough to have met less than a handful of these folks like Kasparov. And at the end of the day, they all eventually go off the rails when they don't have a support system of lessors that they trust to correct them. What's the saying? "A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client" - When you reach a point where you only accept only your own counsel, it's probably too late.
I mean, the rule is brand new, so literally any interpretation of it would be novel. As far as “unexpected”, it depends who you ask I guess. I recall that a lot of people on this board were surprised by it. But my own experience was that simulation was the exact use case most people expected the rule to be used for. I even thought there was some official documentation of that, but I can’t easily find it now so I might’ve been imagining that part.
🤔 pic.twitter.com/HPvLDGXPWb— Lucas Navarrete (@LucasNavarreteM) July 12, 2026 Guess they don’t call ‘em VARgentina for nothing
It took a lot of effort in the game thread to get him to admit to the blown call because he was so excited about Pinheiro having the courage to make the right call after going to the monitor.
It’s looking at how often VAR intervenes in a team’s favor vs. against them. At a most basic level, it shows that Argentina is the only quarterfinalist to have every single VAR intervention go their way (which, of course, continued in the quarterfinals)
Top Dutch football referee Rob Dieperink has died, aged 38, weeks after he was dropped from the World Cup over a sexual assault arrest in the United Kingdom. https://www.dailymail.com/sport/football/article-15973727/rob-dieperink-world-cup-referee-death.html
It’s amazing. The aversion to using the very light blue up against navy is bizarre. Everyone figured out worked like 15 years ago. Is these making these decisions new?
I think if FIFA isn’t forcing the monotone, they allow the home team to have its preferred kit to an extent? I might be wrong. But if it’s not all blue v all white as a forced measure, I do think France gets a choice. The question then becomes why FIFA didn’t force it, which they obviously did in the other semifinal. But that’s probably because you’d have a straight inversion and England has already worn all white a few times.
There is no request here. It's a kit clash. White and light blue with stripes is a clash. England is "home." So, Argentina has to change and wear their change strip. Everything these teams have played one team has had to change. In '98 and '86 it was Argentina. In '02 it was England.
My read is that they made the request, or they told the press they made the request, knowing they were going to be told to wear it.
And while 100 games seems like a lot, it's what I, as a trained mathematician, would call a small sample size. This is what people mean when they talk about "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Sure, there are trends, and the trends can be concerning, but they can also be noise. When you hear scientists talking about reaching 5-sigma confidence when declaring a "discovery" like the Higgs Boson or Gravitational Waves... this chart isn't anywhere near that. I'm not saying the chart doesn't indicate something, but I don't have confidence in the sample size to be convinced that's it's anything other than a curiosity, and quite probably non-replicable.