That decision also encourages cheating. Deulofeu went down ages after contact was made when he realised he wasn't reaching the ball. Certainly not clear and obvious.
Like the wolves penalty, and Mane last week to a lesser extent. See the leg, make the contact. VAR will make players cheat more intelligently.
Yup, this is what i was arguing about just a couple of pages ago before they lowered it. Master offsides and the actual clear and obvious stuff like no contact dives, then lower the threshold slowly.
I thought it was going to eliminate diving/cheating Haven't seen it yet btw, but will watch motd in a bit.
Its hard to be angry when its so funny! Rather than one person making mistakes, now we have a delay, and a group of people making mistakes!
Hmm. Not sure I buy that. Surely there's a huge amount of in between with not giving Watford's penalty at Spurs and say, the James one at Norwich last week? I don't think one automatically leads to the other.
Oh I agree that is a gap between where we are now, and where we were before. Indeed, I said on this thread the other day that they could look at trying to close that gap. But my general point stands. If the threshold is anything less than maximum, then it opens the door for questionable VAR decisions. Of course, how far that door is opened will be dictated by just how low the threshold is, but ultimately the door is open. It is one thing having questionable on-field refereeing decisions - football has always had them, and VAR was never designed to remove all of them - but it's another thing throwing in questionable VAR decisions too. People knew where the stood with VAR up until three weekends ago. Now it's just totally up in the air, and something of an embarrassment. It's not what I want at all. (And I do feel with the PL on this. Because I'm convinced that it's criticism from the media, and possibly fans and clubs too, about the high threshold which has led to them caving in and lowering it.)
The thing is is that they didn't need to lower the threshold to give some of the pens that weren't given as they were blatant enough, as the PL themselves admitted earlier in the season. I think the issue is that no matter how you set the threshold, you're still going to get inconsistencies that will vary from game to game and official to official. It's still a lottery whether they decide to give a pen or not, and there's no way it's going to remove the opportunity for bias or eliminate simulation.
But what inconsistencies were we getting with VAR before last weekend? For example, prior to two weeks ago, VAR hadn't given a single penalty - and as I recall, I don't remember it overturning any penalties either. Knowing that unless it is a total and utter howler (for the subjective decisions) a decision wouldn't be overturned on VAR was entirely consistent in my view. Take the two penalty incidents in our home game to Bmouth: I was certain that our penalty wouldn't be overturned, or Bmouth's non-penalty wouldn't be overturned, because of clear VAR was being implemented. Now absolutely I will agree that there will still be on-field inconsistencies. One referee would have given something live, which another would not have. But that will be the case with or without VAR. As I've alluded to, I don't want VAR to re-referee a game; I don't want VAR to try and correct all errors. Indeed, to comment directly on your words, I've never said I want VAR to eliminate bias or simulation. I do want VAR to get rid of the Dacoure's handball goals. I do want VAR to rightly give the Auba goal vs Utd the other week, where he was miles onside but flagged off.
The issue before though is they weren't overturning things even that met their high criteria. I know you disagree but I personally think there's an inconsistency with judging offsides to the nearest mm (when there's a margin of error anyway), but not giving blatant penalties as the error made by the official, and impact on team, is far greater. You may have never said about eliminate bias or simulation but plenty of people did. Stopping grappling at corners was another which hasn't happened. Without going over old ground too much though my original point this morning was that they didn't need to massively drop the threshold. They just needed the var official to show a bit of bottle and overrule the ref when it's a clear penalty rather than the free for all its likely going to become. Otherwise, if we want to stick to how it was, then I don't see why we don't just scrap the reviews for penalties full stop and stick with offsides/handballs for now.
Time limit sooner rather than later please. The double check on the Spuds non penalty and the time it took on the Everton penalty check was farcical.
Didn't see the game but got the impression that after one of the penalty appeals the game was actually stopped to VAR it. Is that right?
