Mark Halsey says...
Good morning and welcome to the after-party. Sorry about the all damage. My lawyers will swing by after lunch to bicker about compensation.
VAR is bad.
You do know that whole thing is corrupt?
The game is gone.
This is total BS.
This stinks!
Whatever, let it all out.
I take a view that where there are humans there will inevitably be human error and if you then add football referees into the equation, the weather forecast is overcast with a strong chance of pedantry.
One needs to grasp the cold reality that this isn’t about technology, it is about the application of technology.
Taking four minutes (hours in dog years if you’re at the game) to make a decision based on what a digital slide rule can tell you, is plainly not good.
Former top-flight referee Mark Halsey has looked at it. Kindly pay attention to what he says. It makes sense.
The fact the ball deflected off Sporting defender Flavio Nazinho before it reached Tottenham's Kane is irrelevant because it was not a deliberate play.
Secondly, the fact the ball went backward off Emerson Royal’s head before it reached Kane does not matter either, the direction of the ball never does.
It is whether Kane was closer to the goal line than the ball and the second-most rear defender when it was played.
If Kane was judged to have been behind the ball, he would have been onside.
Technology isn’t foolproof, and can we say Kane was definitely in front of the ball when Royal headed it? I’m not sure.
Halsey is sure of the law, but Halsey isn’t sure what the decision ought to be in this instance.
This only serves to prove my view that technology is either used ruthlessly by pedants, as it was last night, or it is scrapped entirely.
VAR can only make two types of decisions. Ones where there is an absolute certainty to rule on. Or decisions that are legitimately far too close to call, and then whatever it calls causes 50% of the world to lose their minds.
This is the English game we are talking about, and a democratic vote should be put before the fans who go to games.
All the Premier League sides have their members’ contact details. It’s not difficult to take a poll.
Shouting and moaning over things one cannot possibly change induces headaches and in many instances makes the person moaning resemble Eric Jeremy Edgar Dier. Not for me, thanks.
Just saw a clip on bt sports you tube, what a cover up that was....opened with "right come on we've got to clear this up" ....to "but we've found another angle" ...there's no defending any of it, they're having to come up with obscure "rules" that never existed to explain away what everyone can see with 2 eyes or 1 even. Again and again. Goal line technology was valid cos it's black and white. There's no other part of football that's black and white. It's not tennis. It's not cricket. This is facilitating match fixing and scripting and that's all it is no matter how many ex pros stand round a screen trying to tell people they didn't see something.
2 points on the VAR decision
Had the referee made a clear and obvious error in awarding the goal? If it took an eternity to for VAR to reach a decision it clearly wasn't an obvious error and the goal should have been allowed.
Secondly, they draw all these lines and minutely examine if someone's toe is offside, without allowing any margin of error of the technology and seem to ignore the point when the pass is made - with the frames per second of the camera if their judgement of when the player passing the ball touched it, is inaccurate by say 1/10th of a second then the 'offside' player could have moved 1 -2 ft. but again no margin of error is allowed. (unlike say, cricket, where a margin of error is built into the decision making)