I agree that that's the rule, but do you think that that rule makes the game a better product?
FIFA Women's World Cup 2019 - France
- Thread starter Keith Putnam
- Start date
I think the game would be better if handballs resulted in indirect free kicks unless they were judged to be deliberate = yellow/direct/penalty in box
Correct. The problem is a slavish adherence to rules that were meant to be enforced with discretion. Only way out of the problem is to rewrite the rule to afford discretion (e.g. only retake if being off the line directly contributed to missed penalty and not if influenced by actions of penalty taker). Other way is to eliminate VAR for that call.
I understand that on June 1, the laws of the game were amended to add this call. Previously, VAR could not be used to check a keeper’s position on a penalty, and it still can’t be used to check anything else on a penalty.
I'd love to see more indirect free kicks in the box... those scrambles are insanely fun to watch!
Well, here's where we get into the slipperiness inherent in calling the governing framework of the game "laws" instead of "rules". The revised handball guidelines use the weasel word usually when referring to hand/arm position making the body bigger:
It is usually an offence if a player:
One could argue that "usually" allows leeway to not call the types of handball I'm talking about (handball with no agency on the part of the defender), even (or perhaps especially) under the laser eye of VAR.*touches the ball with their hand /arm when:
*the hand/arm has made their body unnaturally bigger
I am a fan of VAR to an extent, but I believe some of the recent rule changes to be too extensive and give too much power to VAR. I think it should only be used for determining if a goal is/isn't offside, whether a tackle in the box resulted in a penalty, and red card violations and/or wrong determination of who should get a red card.
Hand balls in the box, in my opinion, shouldn't be reviewed by VAR. If it is an obvious hand ball it will be seen by one of the refs.
I hate that it can only be used to review if a goalie was off the line early but can't be used to penalize the players inside the box before the PK is taken.
I'm hoping they take another look at what VAR can and can't cover, because with the WWC it feels too powerful on changing the game and the flow. A few more rule changes may be necessary as well.
I do entirely agree with this, by the way. I often think of football as the Theater of Justice, and I have a whole unwritten thesis in my head about how referring to the framework of the game as "laws" rather than "rules" is very deliberately intended to reflect society's relationship to Law (imprecise, custom-based, applied differently to different classes of people, parallel to notions of honor, etc.) and specifically the relationship to Law enjoyed by the British upper-class public school kids who created the game.
If a hand is swinging as the player is running, as that’s a natural movement, then let it go. If the arm is outstretched straight and perpendicular to the body while the player is marking space, there is zero “usually” involved with that discussion.
I agree. It feels like an adequate advantage to restore for the advantage that was taken away by the handball. Could even invoke DOGSO type discretion vs using deliberate / accidental to determine whether it's an indirect free kick or a penalty / yellow / red etc.
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I'd like to hear more of your thinking on this. The clothing brand I'm working on leans heavily on the Laws of the Game.
My concern is people have a tendency to respond to system failure by giving more power and resources to the people running the system instead of ever acknowledging the system is broken and let's try a completely different approach. I can give examples outside of sports but it gets political and I'd rather avoid that. So let's use the NFL.
As I mentioned, it is nearly universally agreed that replay has completely screwed up the enforcement of what is a catch in the NFL. There is also widespread agreement, though not quite as universal, that the use of "incontrovertible visual evidence" (the NFL version of "clear and obvious error") means that a substantial number of replay calls, whether the field call is reversed or upheld, is essentially arbitrary and a coin flip.
Despite this, and despite no progress ever being made on either problem, the scope of replay review in the NFL has been expanded multiple times since it was first introduced, and the number of plays reviewed every game has only gone up, because -- for whatever reason -- the most powerful influencing factor in people considering replay are the instances where it works exactly as intended. There are no statistics to support or counter this, but I am reasonably certain that such plays -- the correction of an actual generally agreed-upon mistake -- constitute a rather small minority of all plays reviewed ( I would guess maybe 10-20%) , and that the coin-flip calls -- which collectively accomplish nothing except to take up time -- are almost certainly a majority (my guess 60-80% with the rest in the "correct but we never meant replay to be used for this nitpicky BS" variety). Again, I can't prove that, and might be wrong, but even if I am 100% correct and could prove it, it will never matter, because I believe people choose to endure an ever increasing number of useless and even counter-productive intrusions into game flow in order to fix a relatively small number of plays. And every failure is met with more and more use of replay. Whenever you suggest that maybe replay use should be curtailed to someone who just complained that replay is arbitrary, the response is usually along the lines of "so we should improve it, not get rid of it." Yet 30 years in there is no evidence of it ever having been improved and its usage keeps getting expanded.
In the most recent NFL playoffs the refs missed an obvious and blatant pass interference call. Pass interference has never been subject to review because everyone knows that 98% of all PI calls are subjective. But because lots of people looked at that one clear mistake and thought "something must be done" we will now have video review of PI calls, 99% of which will do nothing to improve the game. And for the next 10 years the same fools who screamed that we have to have replay for pass interference will complain that replay review of PI calls is a pointless coin flip.
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Thanks for the considerate and considerable response.
I really have no engagement with NFL so it's hard for me to determine whether your account of replay review is accurate but it's certainly plausible. For the same reasons it's difficult for me to tell if the circumstances that make replay review seemingly detrimental for the game in NFL apply or don't apply to soccer. One thing that seems material is that reviewable events in soccer seem to happen less frequently and seem to have a much larger effect on the flow of the match.
To summarize my concerns more generally, I've seen two problems come up in every sport that adds video review.
1. One or more hard and fast rule(s) used to be applied loosely, if only because officials couldn't see tiny violations. Now they see them and are making calls accordingly. This leads to a series of rule changes that try to mimic the old system of a clear simple rule loosely applied but they never succeed. Because nobody wanted this to happen and these are never the types of calls people bring up when they say "this is why we need video review" I consider this entire phenomenon to be negative. The new FIFA rule change letting keepers have only one foot on the line instead of 2 is an example. VR makes it too easy to notice de minimis keeper violations that used to occur all the time but were never called and everyone was fine with that. So they recently relaxed the rule to require only one foot be on the line, but already in the first major tournament after the rule change that was meant to address the problem, everyone is still unhappy with the results. I predict there will be more rule changes and the problem won't go away.
2. Most reviewed calls do not lead to a general public consensus among fans or participants that the call is correct after review. I sense you think this is less of an issue than I do because, I infer, you think it is still worthwhile because possibly more calls are objectively correct even if the public does not agree. Maybe I'm wrong. My position, of which I am certain, is I don't care if some Platonic ideal of correct calls is enhanced. The games are played for the participants and the viewers. If a new system does not lead to them thinking that most reviewed calls are correct, then it is not fulfilling its purpose. The cause of this is the unavoidable standard of review which allows both officials and players/fans to justify any decision they want given their priors. Rather than enhancing a consensus that calls are correct it is a confirmation bias factory.
Adding goalkeeper positioning on a penalty to the list of things subject to VAR was solving a problem that didn't exist, and creating a new one in the process.
Time to use VAR on throw-ins because I swear 50% of long throws have a lifted rear foot.
And next, use VAR to make sure the ref is in the correct place to call the play. If they aren’t, then the ball goes back to the last spot the ref was in position, doesn’t matter what’s transpired since.
Last, use VAR to charge players with unsportsmanlike conduct for hiking their shorts too high on their thigh (looking at you Villalba)
RE: #2 - I agree that the real metric they should be optimizing for is something along the lines of "how much do people enjoy / engage with the game". And that doesn't necessitate general public consensus either. One reason I'm cautiously optimistic about VAR is that when games, particularly important ones, are decided by calls that seem farcical, it diminishes my enjoyment of the game. You'd be wrong that I think it's worthwhile because more calls are objectively correct, but I'm also not necessarily certain there is _less_ consensus nowadays. I do think that as a novelty, VAR is a readily available scapegoat.
Like you say, the use of VAR is being extended to review decisions that were never highly disputed anyway. Since we're already talking about other sports, what about tennis, with its limited # of player challenges (which don't get diminished if the challenge is correct)? That way only (literally) disputed calls get reviewed. Unsurprisingly, I'm not the only person to have thought of this:
https://www.goal.com/en-om/news/var...ijk-tennis-a-league/kp7kynrs19h212drvjai6zkkg
https://www.tennis365.com/tennis-fe...-tennis-celebrates-12-years-challenge-system/
Ironically, here's a (pay-walled) article that asks whether tennis would be better off with a more VAR-like system:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...n-is-proof-that-tennis-needs-it-too-tps7r6gbs
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What I think is so odd is that VAR seemed very successful in the 2018 WC, pretty good in the UCL, and suddenly it's fallen off a cliff in the WWC and Copa America.
Regarding penalties, maybe it would be interesting for VAR to only be empowered to *overturn* wrongly given penalties, and not to *award* penalties missed by the ref in real time. This would certainly cut down on the number of lame handball penalties.
Also, the ref organizations need to walk back this whole thing of refusing to raise the offside flag until the play dies on its own. The only time they should be keeping their flags down and letting VAR backstop their decision is when it's tight. I've had more than enough of the crap where an attacker is clearly offside way back near midfield and the flag doesn't go up until they've charged down the field and taken a shot. It's dumb, dissatisfying, and as players have been saying it will lead to injuries which would otherwise have been prevented if the play had been flagged dead twenty yards upfield.
Regarding penalties, maybe it would be interesting for VAR to only be empowered to *overturn* wrongly given penalties, and not to *award* penalties missed by the ref in real time. This would certainly cut down on the number of lame handball penalties.
Also, the ref organizations need to walk back this whole thing of refusing to raise the offside flag until the play dies on its own. The only time they should be keeping their flags down and letting VAR backstop their decision is when it's tight. I've had more than enough of the crap where an attacker is clearly offside way back near midfield and the flag doesn't go up until they've charged down the field and taken a shot. It's dumb, dissatisfying, and as players have been saying it will lead to injuries which would otherwise have been prevented if the play had been flagged dead twenty yards upfield.
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I'm not too familiar with the tennis system. I can read those articles but still cannot really comment on how it works in practice. But in other sports (again I'll go mostly by the NFL) it seems that giving players or teams a specific number of challenges does a good job of limiting the instances of review (how could it not) but a poor job of selecting the best occasions of review. Even though they have a strong incentive only to use challenges for situations that are both important and likely to succeed, it does not seem that most contestants do a good job of it. And because a lot of obviously bad calls never were reviewed the league expanded the way calls that get reviewed. The NFL went from (1) each team gets 2 challenges per game, to (2) still 2 per game but if you get both right you get another, and more and more as long as you keep winning them, to (3) every touchdown and turnover is automatically reviewed, plus officials can decide to review anything late in the game plus the status quo of (2) remained. So now there is almost no limit that is effectively imposed. Also, when you do set limits you end up with the practice of using unspent challenges late in the contest for ridiculously unlikely situations because why not? Oddly, even though I would get rid of video review in all sports, I don't like these types of measures. I guess I figure if we are going to have an inefficient system that IMO does more harm than good, we might as well make sure we get the good out of it, which requires not putting in these artificial limits. I prefer the system where officials decide what gets reviewed.
