Charles de Ketelaere with a cheeky nutmeg on Donnarumma: https://streamja.com/nXVqz Someone's going to sign him soon.
Looks like Hugo made a couple of key saves in France’s Nations League win. He’s a had a real resurgence in my opinion, for a couple of years I was really down on him, he’d made a number of huge blunders and was looking a shadow of the keeper he once was but since around the beginning of 2020 he’s seemingly gotten back to near his best. Still can’t kick for **** though. Reguilon and Gil remained on the bench for Spain in the game. Lo Celso grabbed two assists for Argentina and Cuti kept a clean sheet.
It seems incredibly harsh. On the other hand I'm all for rules that can only be interpreted in one way. It hits the defender, the attacker is played onside. You don't have to assign any subjective meaning to what the defender was intending, or what advantage was gained or not. Do you see where I'm going? I'm saying that the more black and white rules we have like this, the harder it is for refs to favour certain teams (intentionally or otherwise). So in one game and to one team it's unfair, but to the majority of teams when they come up against the favoured few, it's actually fairer than letting the refs have a subjective view.
Great, now I have to watch international football in case some bugger on Reddit posts Ghostbusters: Afterlife spoilers this evening...
I agree with your point. A comprehensive effort to improve the rules would prioritize rules that are easy to enforce, as long as they aren't gameable. In this case, Spain seem unfairly penalized. But the rule can be called correctly ten times out of ten, so it can't be used to favor big teams, unlike the handball rules or penalties. I favored disallowing any goal in which the ball touched an attacker's arm for the same reason. It's easy to get the call right, and it's ungameable. (Handball infractions for defenders, on the other hand, are very gameable).
Gio not-quite-supercut Let's see how long before that Geordie twat starts posting the same three gifs in this thread...
In VAR times, for defender handball other than deliberate movement of the arm to make contact with the ball, IMHO you should consider only the path of the ball. If the defenders' arm was not there, would the ball have passed by the defender (towards the goal line, another attacker etc) , or hit the defenders' body. If it would pass by, then it is a penalty. All other aspects (arm position/movement, speed of the ball etc) should only be used to determine whether the defender warrants a card.
I'll add something else to this: they also need to better define what an arm is better, because if the ball hits a defender's upper arm that clearly isn't the same as hitting their hand or forearm since for the the latter to make contact it requires either a conscious effort or the laws of momentum to get it in that position, while if it hits the upper arm the question then becomes more a case of whether it was ball to arm or not And then there's how certain dickheads can't tell the difference between an armpit and an elbow...
So that's why FIFA wouldn't allow Cameroon to wear those sleeveless shirts at a World Cup: it allowed them to play basketball with impunity ...no, wait, that was Thierry Henry, wasn't it?
