UEFA Women's Euro 2022 - General Discussion

As an Italian, I am obliged to correct your spelling to Capello.

 

Great game! Very tense! Very happy England won which I was backing!

 

Attendance total was well over twice the previous record:- 574,875 versus 240,055 in 2017. Plus 7 of the 10 highest ever attendances at a Women's European Championship:

https://www.uefa.com/womenseuro/new...342af5f57b8-1000--attendance-records-smashed/

 

There are surely many more as for example Helmut Schön(Saar/Germany), Berti Vogts(Germany/Kuwait/Scotland/Nigeria/Azerbaijan), Otto Pfister(Rwanda/Upper Volta/Senegal/Ivory Coast/Zaire/Ghana/Bangladesh/Saudi Arabia/Togo/Cameroon/Trinidad &Tobago/Afghanistan) or Martina Voss-Tecklenburg(Switzerland/Germany).

And what about Bora Milutinovic(Mexico/Costa Rica/ USA/Nigeria/China/Honduras/Jamaica/Iraq) or Vera Pauw (Scotland/Netherlands/Russia/South Africa/Ireland)?

Edit: Not to forget Rudi Gutendorf (Bermuda/Chile/Bolivia/Trinidad&Tobago/Grenada/Antigua&Barbuda/Botswana/Australia/Nepal/Tonga/Tanzania/Ghana/Fiji/Mauritius/Zimbabwe/Rwanda)

 

Sticking to woso, Even Pellerud for Norway and Canada. Many years in both jobs.

 

I am happy to see that more and more ppl started to recognize women's football could also be very enjoyable to watch.

 

I used to be all for VAR--but now I'd be happy if they got rid of it and just let the on-field refs make the calls. One realizes that video replay and review does not eliminate poor and inconsistent judgement by the VAR officials. The human element is still there--and of course this a sport where there is a ton of subjectivity to begin with when it comes to PK calls/handballs, etc. You can't aggressively intervene to micro-check for not-very egregious fouls---"did that defender's foot scuff the attacking players boot in the box?---not seen or called by the ref or anyone else. "Penalty kick!" And then not intervene or even have a review of what certainly looked like a handball call on the goal line in the final. That is maddening and really ruins the credibility of the whole system. If you're going to spend 5 minutes reviewing and reviewing some seemingly minor contact in the box, you'd better be prepared to do it consistently.

 

VAR did "intervene". You just don't like their determination of that "handball". Anyway, I see you posted pretty much the same thing on the Referee forum so maybe you should decide which forum you want to carry on with this instead of replicating posts?

Meanwhile... I see the US is scheduled to play England at Wembley this fall.

 

Was perfectly visible for me, thanks!

 

As should have become clear from many of my other posts I too do not like what VAR has become.
I initially liked the idea of VAR and I do like "goal line technology" the final judgement for any "innovation" should be the question: Does it make the game "better" or "more "entertaining" or "more fair?" The answer to that is different for each of the parts of the question:
1. It slows the game down so much and delays the decisions so much that many matches become little more than a series of mini-games with many breaks while the decision is decided by VAR. Soccer is supposed to be a pretty free flowing event but VAR makes that impossible so VAR does not make the game "better."
2. The breakups of play caused by referees refusing responsibility and deferring calls to VAR makes watching soccer often as painful as watching baseball.
3. In soccer "fair" is not enhanced by delay. The argument the VAR makes sure the calls are correct is rather absurd. The only way to ensure that VAR truly makes the game fairer would be to give VAR jurisdiction over all calls including "ball into touch," "placement of free kicks" and all the other calls referees make.

In other words VAR is too limited to be "fair" and if made fair the game becomes something entirely different from soccer.

VAR was a good idea but, as currently implemented, it has failed to show that its advantages even come close to outweighing its disadvantages.

But now that we have it FIFA and all other governing bodies will expand its use and tweak it trying to reduce the flaws. It is already too widely used for FIFA to admit they screwed up.

Maybe in 20-30 years or even less we will hear about a riot between parents at a U10 match when VAR makes a call that some don't like. (The kids at U10 will not fight over calls but their parents will.)

I do wonder if VAR would be better if they were able to actually make calls like is done now with offside. Or if VAR can only change an on field call if they do it within 15 seconds.
I do not think tweaking VAR will fix its basic flaws but I also think that making changes to improve it is MUCH more likely than dropping VAR completely.

 

I think it is easy to forget that the reason we have VAR is because TV developed replay technology. Fans went bananas when replay showed wrong calls on critical plays, teams felt cheated, etc., etc. VAR is an attempt to help out with that situation. So the question is, which is better, VAR which still leaves something to be desired or no VAR with instant replay demonstrating missed critical calls.

 

Over the last few days I have watched a few Canadian Premier league matches and they do not have VAR or at least I have not seen any VAR delayed calls or reviews. The soccer was vastly inferior to just about anything I have seen in Europe and even inferior to the MLS and, mostly, the USL. However the matches were more entertaining than most matches using VAR.

Is there any league that at this time has decent soccer and no VAR? I doubt it but I am really having a hard time watching VAR impacted matches and would like to have an alternative.

The Premier League is starting this weekend and I hope they have improved their VAR to make the matches easier to watch but my expectations are not high.

 

I have never been much of a fan of instant replays. In soccer the replays interrupt the flow of the game when watching and add nothing.

I would vote for no VAR and banning TV from using replays during the match. But that ain't going to happen. Improvements in the technology and "better" training might make VAR tolerable but I doubt that will actually happen either. I think we are basically stuck with VAR for the future and soccer is the worse for that.

 

UEFA's official top 11 of the tournament is out.

Of course, just picking out an 11 players' team from a whole tournament is always a quite futile exercise: there are obvious lock-ins, as Keira Walsh or Alexandra Popp, but quite all of the choices are somehow questionable and there will always be absolutely stellar players who had an excellent tournament and are anyway forcibly kept out from a so tight selection.

Also, of course, the finalist teams tend to monopolize most of the spots, despite there being very deserving players from teams that were eliminated in the semifinals, or even earlier, possibily after a very tight game that was basically a coin toss.

Earps has most probably been preferred to Van Domselaar for this very reason (although everyone would likely agree that, as sensational as Van Domselaar was, Earps was anyway very good and equally deserving, so it's not like choosing her over the Dutch GK is outraging or something).

 

Good points, all. A tournament Best XI is not worth paying attention to---it's just talk-about-it fluff. Having said that, the keeper who had the best tourney was Van Domselaar--but, yea, the semifinalists/finalists will always get the most spots.

 

I agree that Asllani should definitely make the top 11.

 

Where is the Williamson save against Germany?

 

That was the biggest collection of amazing tournament saves I've ever seen.

 

So both Russo and Popp have two goals in the top 10 of the tournament: and it's well-deserved by both!

Some goals missing from the top 10 that in my eyes would have maybe deserved recognition over one of the less sensational ones that made it:
- Georgia Stanway in the quarter-final vs Spain;
- Nicole Billa's header at group stage vs Norway;
- Delphine Cascarino at group stage vs Italy;
- your choice of exciting collective effort by Portugal: they scored some goals from quite funny actions!

There were quite some spectacular saves at this tournament; of course there were some dreadful GK's blunders also, but in general I'd say that the level of goalkeeping was higher than in the recent past. I used to claim that the GK position was one of the weakest one in women's football, especially after Hope Solo's retirement, and I still feel like something better can be done to properly prepare the GKs in women's footballs, but it seems to me that the results of this tournament are quite comforting by this point of view and that we're headed in the right direction.

The selection showed many good efforts, it's difficult to choose just one. For instance, I liked a lot Merle Frohms' one vs Spain or Mary Earps reflex-tip over the crossbar vs Sweden from a Blackstenius' shot. But if I had to choose just one, I'd probably go with 2nd Daphne Van Domselaar's save of a Renard's header: she even had to dodge one of her DF on the goal-line to deflect that, and she did it in style anyway!
Not related, but I like the name Daphne a lot!

Honorable mention for Pauline Peyraud-Magnin's save of a Popp's perfectly placed FK.

Also, when following the game live, I hadn't noticed that there was actually an Earps' deflection on Magull's shot that hit the crossbar in the final! That's some key-save, by Jove!