Indeed. Also, it's the one thing that was never over-analysed in forensic detail by pundits before. If it was clear, yes, but not if it was extremely marginal - the assessment would be it was 'too close to call' - the player 'may have been' offside. Because we didn't have the nonsense with the angles and lines.
I think this is what most of us thought we were getting, not the absolute to the mm rule book we now have. Hand of god type incidences, cleared off the line, penalties, deliberate handball, obvious offside etc. I certainly didn't envisage clear and obvious to mean if we closely examine it from multiple slow motion angles for five minutes.
Yes, but try explaining this to PGMOL. They just don't have the nouse or common sense to realise this.
And this is what I don't get. I would strongly suspect that the way I thought things were going to work and how I think they should work is shared by the vast majority of people involved in the game, from fans, to players, club employees etc. So who the f*** is in charge of ignoring the wishes of the majority? If they really cannot manage to separate precision refereeing from clear and obvious then we need another system, I have long been in favour of how tennis and cricket do it. Each team has one VAR call. If the protest is upheld you keep the call, if not you lose it and that's your VAR for the game.
Sadly, many people - even some on here - think it is wonderful to be able to have an 'absolute' yay or nay on offside. They might moan about the time it takes, or about the VAR trying to find ways to disallow goals, but they still go down the line that 'offside is offside' even by a toenail.
It would never ever work if used this way, though, as within 5 minutes of the call, the online world would be awash with evidence that - although very marginal - the call was indeed offside, and the goal shouldn't have stood, or whatever. Whilst on paper it sounds good, it would be about the most controversial way to use the technology. It would make VAR calls subjective, and everyone has an opinion. Bin it.
Agreed, thought a while ago that it would be better to let AI make the decision IF you are going to use technology , it would at least be more consistent once it has been fed a load of previous decsions.
The thing is, the laws are the laws so, whether people expected it to be checking for a 2mm offside or not, they were never going to apply it any other way. To me though, what it's highlighted is the lack of consideration taken for how those rules were going to be interpreted in a VAR environment.
