Only if you believe that the technology is 100% accurate. Look at where the ball is below: Looking at the player positions/body shape - is that the same still? Hard to tell for sure but looks very similar. He simply wasn't offside, or at least, nobody can say with absolute certainty that he was off. Same with loads of the armpit offsides this season.
Another possible solution to all the marginal offside debates: Firstly, linesman makes their call in real-time Secondly, referee goes to pitch-side monitor. IF he can clearly see error, then overrule, but if not then stick with onfield decision. This would mean that marginal ones don't get changed from the decision (if it looks fairly level, then decision not overturned as it's not clear and obvious). I know the argument against is that there will be decision that can be shown to be wrong (however marginally). But I would argue we are in danger of players and fans no longer celebrating goals for fear of VAR retracting them, and with that will go the enjoyment of watching football live. Case in point, Wolves' 'goal' against Liverpool, the player that scored and celebrated so exuberantly will unlikely celebrate so excitedly next time he actually does score, and as such some of the joy of the moment is lost.
The (probably completely spurious) counter-argument to this is the undisguised pleasure that we Saints fans get when a 'goal' against us is overruled by VAR. It is a very good way of winding up the opposing fans. "VAR, he's one of our own"
It's a sad state of affairs when seeing a goal for the opposition chalked off is more enjoyable than the one your team has scored.
I don't think we need the ref to look at the screen for offsides tbh. It should be for clear errors which will be noticeable on the first replay. It's not to try and make better/perfect decisions.
You can tell its not the same frame by the leg positions of other players. The speed of the ball actually makes it easier to tell which frame the ball was kicked in. As you pointed out, pukki had barely moved between those frames so VAR would have been very accurate in this one. That one is very marginal though.
My point was more that you can't really say for sure either way when it's that close, it's guess work. I'd be extremely surprised if there wasn't a frame showing him 'on' from that incident. That's only one of the issues with offsides though, and the bigger one imo is that we shouldn't even be looking at these ridiculously close offsides. It's not what it was brought in for.
Yeah but your evidence actually contridicted that point and showed it being more accurate. by showing only marginal difference between frames. The handball rule was brought in to stop people playing rugby with it, not for balls being hit to the hand, but bringing in rules changes the game. The offside rule now is all about pushing it to the limit and not over, which is a common theme in sport. Its about deciding what margin to give yourself and how far you need to push it. Close offsides are totally in the spirit of that.
I think VAR is much more accurate than an official or linesman trying to watch a bunch of things at once, while running down the pitch, in real time, with just one look at it. But the thing is, I don't really care that much. If I player was offside by one toe length, it's effectively 50/50 to me. If it's blown offside, the defense got a little lucky. If it's onside, the attack got a little lucky. Either way, it's luck. It doesn't really matter which way it goes... someone's getting lucky and the other side is getting unlucky. I never felt the need for those plays to be reviewed, but I don't care if they are reviewed and overturned because of six inches. It makes no difference. But I want them to be reviewed just so it takes out the human factor. The cameras and machines if inaccurate, are still less likely to be biased than human official. And, if we just review anything that's even remotely close then we also eliminate human bias in deciding what to review in the first place. Because the calls that matter and where VAR is really important are the ones where on replay it's really obvious and the official just missed the call. It's worth the extra hassle of reviewing close calls just to make sure we overturn the awful ones. I don't really care if the players get less excited and don't celebrate goals as much. I find it kind of absurd to even worry about that. Are we watching a soccer match or a dance competition? The only thing I care about is how officials interpret advantage and how allowing play to run impacts the flow of decision making. There were too many goals in the Women's World Cup where a player was obviously offside, but the officials would not blow the whistle to preserve the review. But then that left defenders having to defend an offside player, and so they would go after and touch balls they normally wouldn't resulting in own goals or playing the opposition on side by touching the ball. If you're going to use VAR than a player in an offside position is offside regardless of advantage. Which really, is the way it always should have been anyway. If you're not getting an advantage, then why are you standing there?
Yesterday with the Long offside was the first time I've seen them show the full VAR check from start to finish, and the part where they chose the frame. Firstly ill say that the framerate clearly wasnt super high, probably x2 or x3 speed, I'm just guessing there though. The frame was manually chosen and what they did is start several frames after the ball was kicked then go back one by one until the ball changed direction making that the frame before the ball was kicked. It was very obvious which frame this was because of the speed of the ball. Then they used that frame to check for offside. As this frame was before the ball was kicked, and Long was clearly the player moving faster, it means Long would only have been further offside when the ball was actually kicked. So effectively any advantage from the margin of error from the frame-rate was given to the attacker. I don't know if that's how they always do it or just happened to be the case with this one incident. The resolution was clearly good enough so any error here would have come from calibrating the 3d plane to the pitch to make those vertical lines correct, which we have no way of judging the accuracy of without seeing the results of those pre season tests. edit: Also, if this is how they always do it, then we are actually always seeing the closest point to the player being onside, which may be why we are seeing so many tight calls on VAR, when in reality they are more clear cut. The actual tight calls would always be given as onside if i'm right with my thinking.
It is exactly the point in bold which is the problem. The reason the Lino didn’t flag Long was because it was fairly obvious that Söyüncü’s shoulder was playing him on. The VAR check didn’t seem to take that into account.
They seem to have decided that the torso finishes in a straight line up from the armpit, and that a shoulder is part of the arm. They've been consistent with that. I cant remember any offsides by a shoulder.
It’s all nonsense anyway. I suppose you could argue that without VAR the 2 goals that Leicester had flagged offside were clearly off, while the one at the end should have stood. But then we would have had the pen, which JWP would have put away, and we would have won 3-2 instead of 2-1. That’ll do me, thanks.
Yeah, personally in sport, i prefer to have earned the result than have it through an officiating error though. Tbh Long deserved to have been caught for offside considering how he was constantly walking back from offside positions and not staying onside. Even the commentators on my stream picked up on it at one point when Leicester had been attacking for a while, we had won the ball back and passed back to Alex, and Long was still walking back from offside so we couldn't play it up to him. I guess he saves his energy for pressing but he can't complain after being correctly caught offside.
Don't recall it bothering you for the Watford match As for your original, good and interesting post. I agree that it seemed to show more of the process and that he most likely was off. I also agree that the framerate doesn't look near the required standard.
