I suspect Hawkeye are pretty confident in fairness.
I don't believe 'sporting advantage' features in the rules at the moment either.
Greenlizard0 Weekend Football Thread ** spoilers ** [1st - 2nd January 2020]
- Thread starter Cosimo
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I suspect Hawkeye are pretty confident in fairness.
I don't believe 'sporting advantage' features in the rules at the moment either.
Whether he gained an advantage isn't relevant. VAR has been brought in to make sure the laws are applied accurately. The laws state that if you're even 0.1mm offside then it's offside. The tech isn't perfect but it's considerably more accurate than a human linesman and the guidelines currently are that if the tech says you're off then you're off, no matter how close. The issue here is not VAR, the issue here is people not liking the offside law.
edit: And making changes to the offside law or how VAR is applied is not going to be easy and with throw up other issues. Some of the suggestions being put forward would do far more damage to the game than these close calls are. Maybe the answer is just scrapping VAR, at least until the point in which some sort of tracking technology can be used that instantly informs the lino that a player is off and is so accurate that nobody doubts it.
But they can't say he's 0.1mm offside - the Hawkeye system is only used for goals, offsides is still up to the intereptation of the VAR and they can't be confident in that case that he's offside.
They can, whether you trust it is another matter. You also have to remember that he almost certainly wasn't 0.1mm offside - the camera angle and widening of the offside lines may make you think it was but in reality it was probably far greater. And offsides aren't down to the interpretation of the video ref, it's 100% down to the technology. The current guidelines are clear, if the tech says he is offside then no matter how close it might be, the decision is offside.
As I mentioned earlier, it's possibly going to change so that if a decision cannot be made within a few minutes then the onfield decision will stand. This is a terrible alternative imo. We're still going to spend the same amount of time looking at the decision, supporters will still be sat wondering what's going on and then we're ultimately going to go with the linesman's decision.
VAR offside IS a hawkeye system.
https://www.premierleague.com/news/1488423
It isn't automatic - it's the VARs interpretation of the video.
I think there needs to be some sort of fixed leniency, say a certain number of pixels? If it falls within that, given as onside.
Some of the decisions do just look level, I do understand there is no subjectivity on offsides, but can we be 100% confident the VAR usage on offsides is accurate? We're still relying on a human deciding where a shoulder becomes an arm etc. That's where there needs to be a built in margin of error.
Some of the decisions do just look level, I do understand there is no subjectivity on offsides, but can we be 100% confident the VAR usage on offsides is accurate? We're still relying on a human deciding where a shoulder becomes an arm etc. That's where there needs to be a built in margin of error.
I didn't say it was automatic, I said it's not down to the ref's interpretation. The video ref uses the tech to plot the points and the tech decides whether he's onside or not.
Exactly - until the system uses something like LIDAR to accurately measure players position in full 3D it's total bobbons to say it's accurate at such small scales.
Edit:
I'm an instrument engineer - I would be asking to see their calibration certs and their stated accuracy and repeatability!
As per my edit on a previous post, there's absolutely an argument to scrap VAR for offsides until they can develop a system that's even more accurate and or provides a far quicker decisions. However we're using VAR for offsides now and it makes no sense whatsoever to use the tech, spend ages applying it and then sticking with a less accurate linesman's decision. It completely defeats the object of using VAR for offsides - we'll be getting all the bad side with the delays and crowd uncertainty and the exact same decision as we had before VAR.
I don't see a reason to scrap it, they just need to be honest that they are applying it correctly and be aware of how accurate the system really is. If we're down to the trying to measure things to mm scale with a system where the inaccuracy is of the same order and is operated by humans to tell the system what they're measuring between, introducing an even bigger error then they're probably being too pedantic with applying the rule, and certainly shouldn't be stating with confidence (which is required) that a foul has been committed.
What this boils down to is establishing a grey area where you decide to give 'benefit of the doubt' one way or another.
The problem here is that lets say we state that there is a grey area of 15cm.
All we're going to do is end up arguing about whether it's accurate to decide if someone was 14.9cm offside and should be given benefit of the doubt or 15.1cm offside and should be ruled against. You're not really creating a grey area so much as moving the point of contention.
Personally, i'm happy enough that we use such a system with the accuracy level it provides, as it's still a considerably more accurate and consistent measurement than a linesman is.
Maybe they should do it by a panel - 5 individual operators all pick the two points the hawkeye system is comparing and go with the majority result of on or off, to 'average out' any potential for it being a pixel or two wrong.
It still amazes me that we've been complaining about linesman not being accurate enough, we've improved it massively and now everyone is absolutely livid to the point of claiming the death of football that a few mm is now not accurate enough to be considered more reliable than a linesman achieving, at best, a judgement to the nearest 30 or so cm.
The problem with this is that you're then seeing next to no benefit from introducing VAR (for offsides a least) and all the same drawbacks of VAR. I've always been against VAR because I felt the delays and everything that comes as a result outweighed the benefit of getting a few more decisions correct.
What we've seen with VAR is that lino's make very few big errors, nearly all the overturns have been tight decisions. The tech is not 100% accurate but it's considerably more accurate than the lino and it's fair to say that the vast majority of these overturns have been correct and we're now getting more accurate decisions than before. If we decided that we're no longer going to trust the accuracy of the system then there's no point using it. The alternative would be to use some sort of margin of error and all that's going to happen is we're going to spend the exact same amount of time measuring whether somebody is 10cm on/offside or 9.9cm on/offside and all the drawbacks will be the same as the current system however we'll be getting fewer correct decisions.
edit: I'm not sure how this will solve anything but Klopp's just done his pre-match press conference and he's said it was discussed at a UEFA meeting and the suggestion was to increase the thickness of the hawkeye lines used to measure whether a player is on or offside. We're still going to spend the same time measuring the lines, just from a different point and end up with less accurate decisions.
But you can trust the accuracy of the system, it will be possible to work out (and I would imagine Hawkeye will have stated accuracy for the line positioning system) the overall system inaccuracy, including VAR deciding which frame is the one to use for the ball being kicked and then the VAR deciding where to position the lines. It could quite easily be something like +/- 5cm and most of that will be due to the human subjectivitiy. The system should then have that build in to it's decision that if it measures the difference to be less than 5cm or what ever it is then it's not offside. At that point it doesn't matter if they're absolutely offside.
Soldato
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For me Var is simply helping to enforce the offside rule. Why not simply go back to the ‘in the opinion of the referee’? Be less consistency but it seems some don’t like that
Not sure if people thought my take it on was bobbins or not seen
At risk of sounding like richard keys, just give the power back to the ref, let him make a judgement on it. Above all else unless I’m remembering incorrectly VAR was brought in to eliminate the howler ... So let the ref see action (why not on a big screen to save running over to his private screen). Mic him up so tv can hear him and the foul language used. I’m sure the PR gurus will soon make sure the language is curtailed
Ok, so you use a margin of error, we spend the exact same amount of time measuring whether they're 5cm (or whatever the margin is) on or offside and then we end up with a decisions that is much more likely to be wrong than just trusting the initial hawkeye decision. Where's the benefit? We're wasting the same time, supporters are left getting frustrated, not knowing what's going on and whether they can celebrate and we're getting less correct decisions.
I've mentioned this before, below is a video of a something Neville and Carragher done with the PL officials the other year. At the end of the clip you'll see that they basically say they're having to make educated guesses on close calls because it's physically impossible for them to look at two players at the same time. Hawkeye isn't perfect but it's much more accurate than a lino:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pGMRN5KN8M
