I thought Clatts got in trouble before for going to a match by himself? Maybe I’m not remembering the details correctly.
Nah he got in trouble because he went his own way home (or to an Ed Sheeran concert to be specific) after the match.
VAR, but same point applies. That said, this really just comes down to geography, as @code1390 points out. We're talking about an area roughly as large as a mid-sized US state. There's no flying to matches and the drives are never that long. So I don't think anyone sees a benefit in forcing referees into a hotel the night before (whereas in MLS, it's close to a requirement--there are some exceptions/parameters that allow for arrival early the same day). This sort of freak traffic could catch someone who has a 1-2 hour commute and allots 3 full hours, but a similar sort of accident could affect someone driving 10-15 minutes from a hotel if, say, they allot 30-45 minutes for that commute. Short of a police escort like you see with major international competitions, there's always going to be some sort of chance that something like this can happen.
After the the talk about traffic delays, I thought he did a pretty good job filling in. He seemed a bit hesitant in the first 25 minutes, but fell into a nice groove. Once LC tied it up in the second I thought he handled the elevated play very nicely. Besides an advantage call he didn't make (maybe because he wanted to give the YC/ or because player that was fouled stayed down) LC was dribbling into the PA when he blew the whistle. I say good fill in Sir!!
Never mind my flare to the left, I am going to HOPE that these will even themselves out over a full season and MAYBE City will be able to pull out 2 perfectly good goals out of their own net. But, 2 in 2 weeks is not a good average for my squad. Even though we took the first match easily, that shoulder blade OS call against Sterling was pathetic, I am NOT going to be as excited watching games if we are using that as a basis of whether a player was OS. What are you going to do about the Laporte incident. But it has not been fun using VAR so far for me...
The EPL is smart and practical that it doesn't require referees to be in a hotel the night before a game. I just want to point out that the best league and most high profile league in the world doesn't require their referees to be in a hotel the night before the game yet MLS does even if they live close by. MLS' policy is that ALL center referees have to be in the hotel by 11:59 PM the day before the game no matter where you are coming from. Even if you live in Massachusetts and you are doing a game at NYFC or at New York Red Bull you have to be in the hotel the night before the game even if the game kicks off at 7:00 PM local time. My overall point is that there zero flexibility for the referees when it comes to arrival time. There is more flexibility for ARs and 4ths and VARs.
To be fair, if the EPL spanned a continent, it very likely might make that a requirement. I sympathize regarding the lack of flexibility because there are some cases in MLS where it's stupid. But, generally, I get the purpose of the rule. If you don't require referees to fly in the night before, many will try to do it that morning and then delays or cancellations with air travel become very problematic. Again, there should be some flexibility with the rigidity of the arrival rule (and with post-match departure rules, which can be more of an inconvenience for officials because they can require some to stay an extra night when they really shouldn't have to do so). But the intent behind the rule is good. And MLS to EPL really is apples to oranges here.
IFAB and FIFA have gotten this so wrong again. This is just the beginning. It will get worse as the season goes along. You'll get an incident where it strikes a player from the attacking team much earlier in the buildup and further away from goal and it will be disallowed. It's ironic that FIFA/IFAB don't follow one of the most important passages in the entire Laws of the Game. The Laws cannot deal with every possible situation, so where there is no direct provision in the Laws, The IFAB expects the referee to make a decision within the ‘spirit’ of the game – this often involves asking the question, “what would football want/expect?” You don't need to write laws to deal with every possible situation and that's exactly what they have done here with this accidental handling. They removed the option of "what football wants/expects" to one of the most important moments of a game. A goal being scored. Even though these laws and law changes pertain to all levels of the games, we all know that that all of these law changes are about really getting uniformity and consistency at the highest levels. There was no need to have the line about accidental handling as referees were already pretty much following that instruction at the highest levels (which is all that really matters to the general public). The "spirit" of the laws ball bouncing off an attackers arm into the goal or ball coming up on an attacker and hitting his arm and him shooting into the net. Referees have been penalizing that sort of infraction for years at the professional level. Every now and then someone would go rogue and not call that or not call it at the grassroots level and that's just a trade-off that people need to live with. I can't wait for a goal to be disallowed when a ball slightly grazes a referee's shirt or foot due to an errant pass at the half-way line and a goal comes off the change of possession and VAR intervenes. VAR is forensically analyzing frame by frame any goal or penalty that is awarded in search of an infraction to disallow it, but having an impossible bar for a goal or penalty not given. VAR along with these law changes is just killing the spirit and enjoyment of the game and yet some of these pundits and defendants of VAR can't seem to see that. VAR was supposed to change the discussion away from referees and towards the actual match and yet, two weeks into the EPL season, that's all anyone is talking about. We have yet to even have a red card given via VAR. Wait until we see that.
I've heard rumors that the PGMOL only expects "several" OFRs for the entire season. Given we have some weeks in MLS (and a Liga, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A, etc.) where there are several OFRs, the discrepancy could be jarring. If the rumors are true, you might be waiting a long time. The PGMOL and FA seem intent on making VAR intervention as minimal as possible. If they go the route they seem to be heading, you're only going to see VAR deal with offside and handball. I'm not sure that position can credibly hold, but the longer we go without a penalty or red card intervention, the harder it will be to break the proverbial seal.
I understand and get the requirement, but you are dealing with a relatively small labor force (referees only) in MLS and you make assignments a month in advance. My overall complaint is lack of flexibility when it comes to its policy. Could they not just specify in their policy, "if you live x distance or time from certain city you can ask for approval or arrive the day of the game?" But having a blanket policy of having to arrive the day before the game even if you live close by seems harsh and counterproductive.
Except that there was. A number of FAs (including England) have not been applying what FIFA has been pushing as the interpretations for the handball offence over the last few years. By codifying these interpretations in IFAB-esque text, they're forcing those FAs to adhere to the rest of the world's interpretations, working towards inconsistency. Unfortunately, what we get is... well... IFAB-esque wording.
I'd love to see the data on "what type" of offside calls are most frequently missed. Surely FIFA or one of the VAR domestic leagues have named and classified types of offside plays and can instruct their officials to delay their flags when they recognize one of the more error-prone situations. Is that possibly what's happening here?
The instruction (at the FIFA level and in domestic and other VAR competitions aside from the EPL, apparently) is to delay the flag when an OGSO is occurring or a potential GSO is occurring close to goal (near the penalty area or within it) and the AR believes there is a chance their affirmative decision could be wrong. It has nothing to with the "type" of offside, as I think you're suggesting (meaning a long aerial ball versus an attacker coming back versus a short diagonal run, etc.). It has everything to do with whether or not the attacking team has a decent chance of scoring and if the AR believes there is any chance a flag could be incorrect. Remember VAR isn't designed to correct all offside decisions--it's designed to ensure goals are correctly awarded.
Yes I'm aware of that. I'm saying there should absolutely be research done on the types of offside play that occur so we can better identify mistakes and perhaps that would lead to better instruction. Obviously every offside play is slightly different and unique but I'm sure that with a large enough data set we could spot statistically significant trends.
I think that's way over-complicating things. ARs are already making the decision on whether it is offside or not. The current VAR instructions then ask them to assess the goal-scoring situation/opportunity while determining if they have enough doubt to accept that they are possibly incorrect (but not enough doubt to change the decision). Adding another layer, where the AR also quickly classifies the type of decision and does a mental cross-reference to further assess the likelihood of them being wrong or not makes my brain explode just thinking about it. Plus, every AR is different--not just every offside scenario. So while overall data might show patterns on mistakes, it may not correlate to the type of mistakes an individual AR is most prone to make.
78’ in Norwich v Chelsea, aerial ball leads to a challenge between keeper and attacker. Collision. Keeper drops ball. Chelsea attacker scores. Martin Atkinson... does nothing. Literally no signal. I think he thought it might have been offside. It wasn’t. He didn’t call a foul. Didn’t award the goal. Just walked in and talked to players. Pointed to ear for a check. Eventually awarded the defensive free kick for a foul. Belatedly made the review signal. And... off we went. Holy crap that was bad. Like, literally nothing was done right. The referee must always make a decision. He didn’t. Subjective decisions require and OFR. There wasn’t one. A VAR should only be reversing an outcome if it’s clearly wrong. Granted, Atkinson never appeared to formally sanction a goal but without VAR intervention that would have been the outcome. For a VAR to say a goal is so clearly wrong there that a foul must be called. defies the instructions. Oh and the signaling was just 100% wrong. England hasn’t trained its guys well and/or they don’t want to implement it correctly. I think it’s a combination of both. This won’t get too much play because of the matchup. But if someone like this happens in a battle for the league or a UCL spot? It’s going to be ugly.
Yeah. I watched it and thought the same thing. He let (or appeared to let) VAR make the call for him. And along the way appeared to invent a new category for VAR intervention: did the GK have possession of the ball?
Oh, also, earlier, apparently this isn't going to be a VAR penalty in England. Good luck keeping this standard... https://streamable.com/i4nnz England seems to want to uphold what some viewed as the original intent of VAR. Essentially to only intervene in those instances where 95% of the world says "holy crap, how did they miss that in real-time?!" But the train already left the station. Thus far, the standards are so out of whack with what you're seeing in other domestic leagues and at the international level that it's just an entirely different system. When you add in the fact that the referees don't appear to know how to operate/implement it all correctly, you can only come to the conclusion that the FA made a big tactical mistake by waiting a year or more when compared to other domestic European leagues. England could have helped shape VAR--probably for the better. Now they just look like they don't understand a system that others are already becoming accustomed to.
So Oliver last week didn’t do an OFR on he handling. Now Atkinson doesn’t on the foul. Are they even doing OFRs?
I think it's two different questions. Or maybe the same question, but two different standards. The argument on attacking handling to rule out a goal is that the new Law makes it objective. It either happened or it didn't. Any touch of the hand/arm is an offence when it leads to a goal. So, since it's an objective standard, an OFR isn't necessary. The argument makes logical sense. But the VAR protocols were written and refined before most recent law change, so who knows if that's the way IFAB wants it. On this particular type of incident, it's a new frontier for all leagues so it will be interesting to see if any uniform type of standard is developed. As for OFRs generally, it's been suggested that PGMOL wants "several" OFRs all year. So there is an acceptance they will occur. The question is whether or not the desire for very few OFRs is due to a much higher threshold for VAR intervention OR an instruction that referees only need to take VARs in very limited situations (like a missed penalty or SFP red card). Only time will help us tell the answer to this one. But, given the poor mechanics and bizarre implementation we're seeing from a top referee like Atkinson, things could just be erratic for awhile and we may never get a true answer this season.
40th minute a arguably missed DOGSO in MANU CP. There was another defender a couple of yards back but probably wouldn’t have been in a position to stop he attack