Totally agree but it would be nigh-impossible to implement. How do you determine what is and isn't a 'goalscoring opportunity'? Is it left to the referee to adjudicate on a subjective level? Do we assess more generously when Kane has the ball in the box but never give a penalty when Sissoko does as he's never going to score? But it is farcical to think that an attacker could have his back to goal moving away from goal, surrounded by defenders on all sides with zero options open to pass to, one clumsy idiot sticks a leg out and suddenly a scenario with a 9% likelihood of ending in a goal becomes a 99% certainty. We were given such a penalty in the 2-0 against Arsenal last season iirc. Kane (or maybe it was Son?) Wasn't going anywhere, they had at least half a dozen players back, Koscielny sticks out a leg. Game over.
There is a reason it is called the "penalty area", and not called the "goal keepers area". That reason being, if you commit a foul of any kind in it you get a penalty against you, that penalty being a direct free kick against the keeper. Don't blame the ref or the rules (they have always been there) blame the players that give the penalty away.
No, there's at least two of us! All the pundits were talking about his arm being behind him. It wasn;t. It was in front. And it moved (not much, but perceptibly) towards the ball!
There's a rather obvious solution. The VAR has a time limit to decide. It should only be for the most obvious decisions anyway - and we've all seen a hell of a lot of those that could easily and quickly be reversed. So give them 30 seconds, maybe a minute (it can take that long anyway by the time certain teams have surrounded the ref) and if it isn't clear to the VAR then the original decision (or the ref on the ground's decision) stands. How hard is that?
The rules are long overdue a change in many areas. The outcome of the current rule is to encourage diving in the box, make refs reluctant to give real fouls and occasionally for a goal to be got for almost nothing.
That should be the way to go. Its still in its infancy stage so eventually it will be a handy tool for the officials to go to.
Would be interesting to get the rugby stats on TMO usage in top-flight games (per game averages) : - TMO referrals - time taken to make a decision after TMO referral That would give you some idea how the flow of a football game could potentially change.
He's a good player and he took it well, although the Bournemouth defence being all over the place certainly helped.
