Weekend football - 20/21 April 2024

[UlversToon]

Absolutely brilliant!!

[UlversToon]

VAR?

[seaside nipper]

Ffs toenail

[UlversToon]

Gutted for them.

[seaside nipper]

Come on let’s have the fairy tale win on penalties.

[bodacious benny]

The law needs changing, when they’re tight calls there’s no advantage. If some part of your body is “onside” then let the f***ing goals stand.

[seaside nipper]

Totally predictable and cruel.
That’s that then , shame

[UlversToon]

Feel for them, shame.

[bodacious benny]

lol Hojlund expecting the team to be running towards him in celebration only to see eriksen walking forward and that’s it

[seaside nipper]

Man Utd fans out of Wembley already
Pathetic lot

[bodacious benny]

Man Utd fans out of Wembley already
Pathetic lot

A few empty seats in the Chelsea end yesterday, laughable.

[Colly]

Consider its options.

Well with luck, forest can do the job of a stalking horse allowing others to join in and say that enough is enough.

It's all very well having an extra set of eyes, but when there is unconscious big-club bias with just a referee, there is now double big-club bias with the VAR getting in on it too. Forest have probably been hard done by on the whole, although they got a point v burnley that they clearly should not have, and that 3-point swing in their favour now looks huge.

Wolves, burnley this season, Brighton last have all suffered disproportionately. Of course when the single bad decision went against the Scousers we never heard the last of it.

Where's the big club bias in Everton v Forest?

My question would be if "enough is enough" what change do people actually want? Football is a completely imperfect sport with subjective decisions constantly over the course of every game, there is no way this imagined consistency can ever exist regardless of how many extra lines IFAB add to the Laws of the Game (handball being the obvious example where more prescription has led to even more whinging). The problem is that the phrase "you've seen them given" has been completely removed from the football lexicon, now if two superficially similar incidents are decided differently it's uproar and letters to PGMOL. The sooner the sport accepts that it isn't tennis the better, and if it takes scrapping VAR (bar maybe objective offsides) so be it. Adding extra layers of refereeing does nothing but complicate it.

To note I've not seen the Forest incidents yet.

[bodacious benny]

The issue is they are doing what they said they wouldn’t do at the outset of VAR, they’re re-refereeing games.

You can understand how an official on field can make a “bad decision”, but for some this season it’s absolutely astonishing the decisions that supposed refereeing experts have arrived at after replaying incidents dozens of times. GW1 this season, the wolves goal that was disallowed for example. I’d absolutely bin VAR.

[Chappy]

Looks like Everton will be stinking out the PL for another season.

It's about time they f***ed off like. Rode their luck for years and are total s****!

Was laughing at the West Ham score then realised we're playing em on Wednesday!

And f***ing gutted for Coventry!!!

[Colly]

Which goal? The Wolves one I remember from that game was the penalty not given, in which case they definitely didn't rereferee it via the "high bar" for intervention.

It's the other issue with VAR, there's definitely an element of refs being nervous to make a clanger and "leaving it" to VAR, which then finds it's not enough of an error to overturn. Those post match panels of ex pros are often 3-2 on decisions (after multiple viewings under no live pressure), but we still can't accept that in some cases there isn't a "correct" decision, and in many cases fans would be far more accepting of the on field refs decision when he isn't scared of doing so.

[bodacious benny]

Which goal? The Wolves one I remember from that game was the penalty not given, in which case they definitely didn't rereferee it via the "high bar" for intervention.

It's the other issue with VAR, there's definitely an element of refs being nervous to make a clanger and "leaving it" to VAR, which then finds it's not enough of an error to overturn. Those post match panels of ex pros are often 3-2 on decisions (after multiple viewings under no live pressure), but we still can't accept that in some cases there isn't a "correct" decision, and in many cases fans would be far more accepting of the on field refs decision when he isn't scared of doing so.

I’d say missing a penalty should have fallen under the high bar. The keeper’ completely cleaned out the wolves player, it was a stone wall penalty all day.

And they’ve gone against their own “high bar” on numerous occasions this season to re-referee the game based on innocuous blocks etc. There is absolutely no consistency week to week, it’s laughable.

Fully agree that there will always be subjective calls in football, but some decisions have been outright abysmal.

[Colly]

But you're saying they're rerefereeing, if there's no VAR there the outcome is the same, no penalty. So what's the solution, another layer of VAR (that won't improve things) or an acceptance that referees will make mistakes?

[bodacious benny]

But you're saying they're rerefereeing, if there's no VAR there the outcome is the same, no penalty. So what's the solution, another layer of VAR (that won't improve things) or an acceptance that referees will make mistakes?

Ok probably a bad example, but pick any example where the ref has allowed a goal only for VaR to overturn the goal based on something subjective or bollocks.

Personally I’d take the “accept that referees make mistakes” rather than having some bloke sat in a room hundreds of miles away watching umpteen replays in super slow motion to disallow goals, while fans sit waiting for 2/3/4 minutes for a decision.

[Colly]

Case in point is our goal v Arsenal, 3 separate checks over 4 minutes, goal still stands, Arteta goes mental, independent panel later agree it was fine. Arteta got away with it with his hilarious "no hablo Ingles" routine, Forest won't.

[Don Sholeone]

A big problem with VAR is how they completely went the opposite of what they said it would be. If they had just stuck to the clear and obvious mantra they hammered on about then a lot of the issues wouldn't have happened.

We went from trying to stop absolute howlers to measuring offsides by pixels and redefining the whole handball rule every single season, over analysing every single 50/50 penalty call. It's become madness.

Nobody ever asked for absolute perfection but then they tried to make it so, now you have so much inconsistency because they have made such a mess of the rules by trying to be unnecessarily meticulous over every single aspect of officiating.

They've just backed themselves into a corner with it now as there will always be an element of human error regardless but now they have put everything under the microscope you are seeing more and more errors that previously wouldn't have been given a second thought pre-VAR.