Alan Hansen is seriously ill in hospital. Great defender - it’s criminal he only won 26 caps for Scotland. Hope he makes a recovery from whatever the illness is.
As if it’s not bad enough with GPs, the vets have given our dog a phone appointment. WTF. “How are feeling today?” “Rough”. This is madness.
On the radio this morning they were talking to a guy from Adidas about the new ball for the Euros which includes a chip. This works with the other technologies to make VAR more accurate etc. They spent quite a while explaining that one of the features is that now they will know exactly when the ball is kicked. My point is that they are therefore saying that before this ball they didn't know exactly when the ball was kicked. Stating the obvious but VAR must therefore currently be a garbage in garbage out system. In other words if the system is not based on an exact measure of when the ball is kicked then all this playing with mm on line drawing is pointless. They have always promoted VAR offside as an exact science but it never has been, so how valid have those really close decisions (that have taken ages to make) been? We've suffered from a few of those.
They've never said VAR was exact. Frames are 20 ms apart so that's the most precise it can be. Humans are hard pushed to judge within 100 ms. So the VAR has technology which is at least five times more accurate than the assistant referee. Why is that somehow bad?
Also it is impossible to know exactly when the ball is kicked because kicking a ball is not instantaneous. Seems to be in contact with the boot for at least 10 ms. The people who wrote the offside rule probably didn't know this or didn't care because they knew it was dwarfed by the errors a human would make trying to judge it. The problem is that in 100 ms the last defender and the attacker can move 2m relative to each other. So some offside decisions are bound to be 2m wrong. To me there are only two options to deal with that....abolish offside completely or use technology to get it as right as possible.
Matija Sarkic. Only 26. Played a blinder in Montenegro's 2-0 loss to Belgium on June 5th. MOTM. Fell ill at an apartment while on international duty and passed away. Must be devastating for his family.
If 777Partners take over at Everton that would make 11 American owners in the Premier League. How long before the American sports model is introduced. No promotion and relegation, Madrids super league given the go ahead?
Great choice for Everton: accept the American bid in spite of the track record of American owners being ****e, or accept the Saudi bid in spite of the track record of the Saudis being a sportswashing-obsessed hate cult?
Almost no sport other than football has promotion and relegation as standard. I much prefer the football model but it can only really apply to sports which are very popular.
