by Hoop Blah »
22 Aug 2019 08:43
Sanguine I know I'm repeating myself here, but that's a problem with your perception of what VAR should do, or is designed to do. It gives referees an opportunity to make a 'better' subjective decision - that you happen to think the City incident was a penalty is irrelevant. The referee didn't, subjectively, think that it was, and the VAR officials didn't think that that was a 'clear and obvious' error, subjectively, when they reviewed it. The emphasis remains on disproving the referee's original decision. VAR won't, and isn't designed to, remove all subjectivity from decision-making, or produce only decisions that we can all agree with. It should produce more decisions that we can all agree are correct, by adjusting the obvious errors.
The imbalance exists because they have to check every goal for every possible infringement and will over rule some.
As you say, they don't do that unless a goal is scored, so there is an imbalance. And rightly so really, because otherwise the game really would be ruined.
In terms of the City penalty claim, apparently it wasn't given because the ref felt the contact wasn't enough to bring him down and, because he fell forward (to my mind the way his momentum and the pressure from the defender would push him), he concluded that it wasn't a foul. The VAR checked his thinking with him and said yeah, fair enough. I think that's a clear and obvious error because I don't agree with it, and neither have most people I've heard talk about it.
It is a subjective decision. This takes us back to the initial conversations around this where you said it would only be clear and obvious errors, but clear and obvious to who? They maintaining the refs position which is great, but if VAR is there to bring in more consistency and accuracy to decisions, then they'll need to come up with a better definition IMO.