Everton vs Liverpool

I can't help but think someone random will win the league and a fairly big club may go down. The barely non-existent pre-season (United had about 1 week) seems to be causing some crazy games and I can see teams struggling to name 11 first-team players by the end of the season as with no pre-season and so many games to fit in players are going to be dropping like flies

 

I don't get people complaining about VAR offsides. No matter where you take the point you are always going to have this same issue. And if you just leave it to the officials to decide if it was off enough to rule it out you then get inconsistency between decisions and refs. Its about one of the few instances where VAR works really as its one of the few things that have a definitive answer VAR can come to, most other things var covers is opinion

 

But where do you draw the line over where the advantage is. You can almost always argue that there isn't enough advantage to justify giving offside unless a player is like 10 yards off. And in a sport where at times less than a cm can make a difference, it's hard to say being a cm offside can't make a difference

 

Hadn't it been deemed that play wasn't active? I didn't see the game live just the clip of it so maybe I'm wrong but to get sent off for something that's deemed to happen when the games not active takes certain levels of violent conduct that goes beyond a mistimed tackle

 

But you are then in the realms of inconsistency. You can have a player who is 5 cm's offside and they go with refs decision and in another game (or even the same one) someone given offisde by a cm. The point of VAR is to supposedly remove some of the inconsistency caused by judgement calls but for most VAR decisions it has done that because the nature of the incidents is that they are pure judgement calls, offside is one of the few areas where there is a factual, undeniable correct call and now you are calling for that to go to being more judgement based. Why are we even bothering with VAR and all the time it wastes if its just opinion based

 

It wasn't like he went out to do damage to VVD intentionally, it was just a clumsy mistimed tackle which makes it serious foul play, not violent conduct.

Actually, if you watch it the ref doesn't blow until after the second foul as he waits to see if there is an advantage. As such play is deemed to still be active

 

But that's not the rules of the game. Take away VAR and have the ref flag VVD offside and guess what its no red card

Why are we even bothering with VAR if we go to the onfield decision in close decisions? It's about the only VAR decision you can get a definitive answer on. Yes there is a margin of error, mainly related to the cameras not being in a high enough framerate to get the exact moment the player making the pass releases the ball but when you get the nearest frame its perfectly accurate (The biggest issue is it's really hard to show on TV, Its something I discussed in one of my Better Than Bowyer video, see video at the bottom which is timestamped to the offside goal where I demonstrate the issue . Where the cameras are causes a false perspective which is why you see people disputing the VAR decisions when they see the lines. Some of the times what seems like borderline on the TV even when the lines are put in in reality is more offside than it seems)

Yes, it takes too long. Personally, I wish they hadn't even wasted time and money on VAR because again Offsides is one of the few it actually makes a definitive decision on, everything else is an opinion and there are actually better tech for dealing with offsides that are in the works, the real-time player tracking that many top clubs use in training and for post-match analysis, it's not really ready yet for use during a match and the NFL had a few issues when they tested it but as we saw with GLT when the money is there tech leaps forward massively (the tech firms all said the level of accuracy and speed Football wanted for GLT was impossible, they all failed the first test as well but 6 months later multiple companies had their systems working at a level higher than Football demanded) but we have it so why handicap the one area it actually does its job consistently