Offical match day thread

Thank ****!

 

wait.. what?!

 

This ref is a ****ing ****!

 

Emery Out.

 

Bad result.

blew a two goal lead as well.

what do we make of xhaka’s reaction to the fans today?

 

VAR is bullshit! After watching the Chambers incident over and over I can in no way see how he committed a foul!

 

Telling your own fans to **** off three times should mean he never plays for us ever again. However with Emery in charge that probably cements his place in the starting XI at centre forward.

 

The Sokratis goal should have stood, it was a diabolical decision to disallow it. BUT we should never have bottled a 2 goal lead to begin with. Sokratis' 2nd goal should not have been that significant based on our position in the match.

And let's not use that to distract from how bad Emery's in game management and tactics were. Had we won today, it would have been another get out of jail card.

Looking at the fixtures we have coming up, I think he could be gone during the international break.

It was imperative to win today and we blew it.

 

Post internationals, to come out of Sheff Utd (a), Vitoria (h) and Palac (h) with just one win and a goal difference of 0 is just ****ing ****e. How can it be possibe to be even worse than Wenger?

 

I think Xhaka has just as much right to voice his opinion as the fans. I’m not angered by his reaction BUT...

what a stupid and unprofessional move - especially for a captain.

 

He can voice whatever he wants. But to be angry at people who think you are ****? He must REALISE he's **** surely? No?!

 

Not that I mind you dropping points at all, but what on earth was the 3rd goal disallowed for? Apparently Chambers commits a foul in the build up but I've watched the replay 4 or 5 times now and it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.

 

Because VAR is ****

 

Funnily enough, this was the first weekend all season where we've seen multiple wrong decisions correctly overturned by VAR instead of the men in the box reinforcing their mate's incompetence. Happened in the Chelsea match for the Hudson-Odoi booking and again today for the Palace penalty. But yeah, that second intervention to rule out your third was ridiculous. Not as bad as Son being half an atom offside against Leicester, mind.

 

If anything, I thought Chambers was fouled. He's trying to get the ball and is bundled over, so he sticks his leg out to poke the ball back into the 6 yard box and Sokratis smashes it home. Either should have been a pen or a goal. It was a terrible decision and cost us the game.

It also cost us last week against Sheff Utd when Sokratis had his shirt pulled going up for a header in the box and VAR should have awarded a pen.

Listened to an interview with Dermot Gallagher after the game yesterday and he said that the VAR Committee met after last weekend and decided to increase the amount of reviews due to criticism for not awarding Watford a pen against Spurs and not giving a red card to Tielemens against Bournemouth.

So in effect they are trying to use two wrongs to make a right and making a complete mess in the process. VAR is ruining the game for fans and players. It should be limited to offsides only as everything else is subjective, even when you hand it to VAR it's still subjective. So you might as well just leave it to the on field officials.

 

As I said, I would limited VAR to offside, but I would allow some leeway. So for example you could set the hawkeye to measure any part of the body that is 10 inches offside for example. That way you wouldn't get stupid decisions where half a fingernail is offside.

 

This seems to be the consensus over on our board too. The issue is the whole 'clear and obvious error' guidance which refers to incidents that the on-field officials have missed entirely but would have penalised/changed a decision had they noticed them. I.e. there are far more objective scenarios than just offside.

The problem with that guidance is of course the fact that defining what constitutes a 'clear and obvious error' is totally subjective and appears to be at the mercy of the whims of whoever is in charge of the computer at the time.

The current system is undoubtedly a mess: the clearest indication of this is the sheer inconsistency of it all. Sometimes you'll see brilliant decisions made by VAR (both of ours against City in the CL for example) and sometimes you'll see awful ones. So in other words: VAR is just a very expensive, time consuming, atmosphere destroying version of what PL officials tend to do anyway. Another problem is how certain rules are being redefined in a way that it is almost humanly impossible to enforce them without technological input, so what should be subjective incidents are inching closer to being unavoidably objective, yet the ultimate decision will still be subjective as watching a replay 6 times in slow motion can only make your guess more educated. It can never give you omniscience. The new handball rule is getting close to this point. Happens too fast for the ref to see if the arm was in an 'unnatural position' - so needs objective help - yet at the same time 'unnatural position' is still subjective no matter how many times you watch the replay, and can only be known for certain if you have an algorithm monitor the same player's technique and physicality in the same scenario a million different times to establish a pattern. As someone pointed out after Rose was penalised for handball (and got booked for it too) in the 1st leg Vs City; a short, quick, stockily built human is obviously going to move their body differently to a slight, tall human. So who defines 'natural'? God?

I also object to the way that you now see players surround the ref, pressuring them to consult VAR - and then the ref caves in and does so. Who exactly is deciding when it is or isn't deployed? The whole process needs to be far more transparent and far less subjective, which is why for all subjective decisions (i.e. anything aside from offside), I'd like to see football borrow from tennis and give each team 2 or 3 'challenges' per game which they can request through the 4th official at any time. Poch amongst other managers sit with an ipad watching replays as they come in anyway, so the challenges would be made pretty quickly after an incident, especially given how the players involved in the incident know better than anyone what actually happened.

Limiting the number of challenges will also limit the interruptions and ensure that teams are really, really careful before issuing one - probably only intervening when 90%+ sure that there has been a mistake. Or in other words: as close as you can get to the magical 'clear and obvious error'.

 

Son wasn’t offside ffs -
how does var distinguish between the actual point of impact of foot to ball or the actual point of when the ball moves away from the foot, and then compare to where a player is on the pitch and in relation to others.
basically it can’t and neither can the human eye, so offside rule should be refined and defined as “both feet clearly in an offside place” so that
a toe
a foot
a hand or arm or any other body part
cant be offside

as to our disallowed goal well VAR stands for Veto Arsenal Results

 

That's what I was arguing for earlier. You can use Hawkeye technology for offside, but at least give the attacking player some leeway, so something like 10 inches of the player has to be ahead of the last defender.

Other than that VAR should just be binned off, because it's just another layer of subjectivity and doesn't actually correct the mistakes it sets out to.

 

After the Son incident they interviewed the guy who built the technology for the damn thing and he said that from one frame to the next a player can move by up to 10cm, and it is basically humanly impossible to know which frame out of 2 or sometimes even 3 the actual contact with the ball took place. Unless the players wear sensors in their boots feeding real-time information back to the computers to clarify when contact happened, the only sensible option is as Piskie suggested - there has to be a leeway of a number of inches or it isn't offside...which is precisely what you'd get from any semi-competent linesman anyway, which again leads me to beg the question: Why VAR?