***Official*** English Football Season 2019-20

[dontcloseyoureyes]

RE: VAR, I've actually really enjoyed how it's been used tbh. Big fan.

 

[Uppercut]

It is far from the only issue and as you say there are many reasons that cricket is better suited to it than football (it is a series of self contained events etc) but it is a fair point that the celebration thing is objectively the same, it just does not feel the same way to me. I guess the way I treat the sports is just so different, I would say that a goal is more momentous than a wicket but getting Smith out is obviously as big a moment as any goal. Maybe I am just not used to it in Football but then I can't really remember it ever bothering me all that much in cricket. Basically I can't explain why, it just feels different.

Yeah I find it hard to explain too. But it’s not just us, a football crowd celebrates goals with far more passion than a cricket crowd does wickets.

I enjoy cricket and football for completely different reasons. Moving at a slow pace is a strength of cricket but football at its best is relentless and absorbing and a bit chaotic.

 

[OverratedSanity]

I as a neutral find it highly amusing to watch a crowd deflate after a goal is disallowed.

 

[Lillian Thomson]

The disallowed VAR goals are amazing for the crowd of the other team. The second greatest elation apart from your team scoring a goal always used to be the opposition missing a penalty. Not anymore.

 

[sledger]

Yeah, adds to the theatre of it all I think.

 

[vcs]

I think Uppercut said that football isn't important enough for the extra few percent accuracy of decision making (while detracting from the experience of match goers) to be worth it, and I tend to agree. Mind you, I might have said the same when DRS was brought in for cricket. Maybe fans will get used to it in time. Still think that particular decision was ridiculously pedantic and harsh on City because he was being tugged by that defender and it wasn't even clear on first viewing whose arm it hit.

 

[Cabinet96]

Tbh while I agree that fans need to grow up and get over decisions, the football isn't important enough argument doesn't really stand when so much money and so many people's livelihoods live and die on the basis of these margins. People made their minds up about that matter a long time ago.

 

[flibbertyjibber]

I love all the cry arsing going on. These clubs have never had to put up with the diabolical refs in the lower leagues and some of the decisions they make.

 

[Uppercut]

Tbh while I agree that fans need to grow up and get over decisions, the football isn't important enough argument doesn't really stand when so much money and so many people's livelihoods live and die on the basis of these margins. People made their minds up about that matter a long time ago.

You are right that this is the game everyone’s chosen. I would say that VAR is one symptom of the game being taken too seriously, and money is another.

But does all the money make it more important? I think it makes it less important, in the same way that a high stakes poker game between trillionaires matters less than whether a single mother loses her minimum wage job. Whose livelihood was threatened if Liverpool didn’t get a penalty for Sissoko’s handball?

 

[Cabinet96]

You are right that this is the game everyone’s chosen. I would say that VAR is one symptom of the game being taken too seriously, and money is another.

But does all the money make it more important? I think it makes it less important, in the same way that a high stakes poker game between trillionaires matters less than whether a single mother loses her minimum wage job. Whose livelihood was threatened if Liverpool didn’t get a penalty for Sissoko’s handball?

Yeah you're right in that respect. I guess you can argue it's probably much more important when it comes to relegations and the like than CL finals.

 

[andmark]

Chelsea vs Leicester should be a good test for the people with theories about the top six being broken into this season. Deceptively interesting match potentially.

 

[Uppercut]

Looked on to me. Chelsea’s shape without the ball makes baby Jesus cry.

 

[Niall]

Only watched the second half and Leicester should have won that. Maddinson clearly got talent, but I actually thought he was a little wasteful today.

Famous last words,,,but be shocked if Chelsea get near the top 4.

 

[Furball]

My biggest gripe with VAR is that the laws, particularly the offside law, just aren't written with it in mind.

There 100% needs to be a football version of umpire's call for VAR though. Disallowing goals because a player is millimetres offside (Man City's on the opening weekend for example) is a nonsense because the frame rate of the replays is not high enough to make decisions definitively. For that particular decision, the actual moment the pass was made happened between two frames, during which point Sterling ran 13cm. When the margin of error is potentially that wide, you cannot be making calls as definitively as they are just now.

 

[sledger]

My biggest gripe with VAR is that the laws, particularly the offside law, just aren't written with it in mind.

There 100% needs to be a football version of umpire's call for VAR though. Disallowing goals because a player is millimetres offside (Man City's on the opening weekend for example) is a nonsense because the frame rate of the replays is not high enough to make decisions definitively. For that particular decision, the actual moment the pass was made happened between two frames, during which point Sterling ran 13cm. When the margin of error is potentially that wide, you cannot be making calls as definitively as they are just now.

Why not? In the absence of VAR the ref would still have to make a decision on it, and that call (whatever it would be) would be just as "definitive" as any assisted by VAR.

This argument would only really work if there was some fairly conclusive evidence which showed that the technology used to assist with decision-making had a significantly worse success rate than leaving it to human error.

 

[sledger]

Cricket being more segmented or compartmentalised than football is not something I entirely agree with either. It gives the appearance of being a series of isolated incidents, strung together, one after the other, but I think this is somewhat superficial way of looking at it, thus making the distinction for re: why VAR is more appropriate for use in one that the other fairly unconvincing for me.

Cricket matches, like football matches, are essentially just dynamical systems with underlying patterns, feedback loops, and fractals, and a small change in one of their constituent elements can trigger huge changes in their future state. There is a massive sensitive dependence on initial, seemingly benign factors and conditions, which is why cabinet is absolutely right to point out how matches are decided on margins. The more marginal calls decided correctly the better so far as I am concerned.

 

[Pothas]

You are right that this is the game everyone’s chosen. I would say that VAR is one symptom of the game being taken too seriously, and money is another.

But does all the money make it more important? I think it makes it less important, in the same way that a high stakes poker game between trillionaires matters less than whether a single mother loses her minimum wage job. Whose livelihood was threatened if Liverpool didn’t get a penalty for Sissoko’s handball?

I love the Champions League but I often find myself thinking how much it really matters, the same teams and players are going to be there next year. I suppose Spurs might be an exception and Ajax obviously were. It is one of the reasons why World Cups still win out for me, the football might be worse but you have to wait 4 years to try and win again.

 

[sledger]

I love the Champions League but I often find myself thinking how much it really matters, the same teams and players are going to be there next year. I suppose Spurs might be an exception and Ajax obviously were. It is one of the reasons why World Cups still win out for me, the football might be worse but you have to wait 4 years to try and win again.

I think it just comes down to how much it means to you as a fan really. I can recall moments from seemingly trivial moments of Arsenal matches from about 15 years ago which I remember thinking were just clearly wrong (e.g. offsides or whatever), and thinking that you never really know how much it might have ultimately influenced the result of the match or even season. There was one Henry goal against Chelsea, in the early Mourinho days, that was very dubiously disallowed and really sticks in the memory.

I think it all comes down to the integrity of the experience somehow. When you really pour your heart and soul into something, and follow it with great passion, as I did back in those days, I think the idea that you can be robbed of what you want to see so badly by something that is ultimately very iffy, seemingly arbitrary, or just blatantly wrong, is incredibly difficult to bear. It really makes you think "If the system in which everything operates is itself incredibly suspect, then why bother at all about what happens inside it?".

I guess the common comeback to all of that is that sport has always been like that (or that it is "part of the charm", which I really despise). But the antidote to that these days is that it really doesn't have to be any longer.

 

[sledger]

I mean, these days I really care a fraction of what I once did. But I think I would struggle to enjoy any sort of adversarial contest, sporting or otherwise, these days where I felt the rules were at a considerable risk of being applied massively inconsistently.

 

[Pothas]

Was not really talking about VAR then and obviously I would feel totally differently about things if supported a team in the Champions League. I have yet to have my team involved in VAR so don't know if I will feel differently if it ever does happen. Generally though I feel similarly about refereeing decisions as I do about all the other bits of luck that make up a football result.