Dudes vs Lads Fri 25th Nov 1900 uk time joint telly watch

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'm not against precision timing, in principle. But it's like pretending the corruption in refereeing doesn't exist.

Nah, I'm a referee accelerationist. They should get even more and more corrupt until their position becomes untenable.

Americans think that technical impartiality guarantees personal impartiality. This is why they never take their sports seriously enough. for them it's just entertainment. Over here the north south divide is evident, and hence it is inconceivable that refs are totally neutral.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's one or the other: you have rules, or you don't. freeform, free-flowing jam band football would be cool, no judgment either way. but it shouldn't be a grey area.

There are rules. loads of them. what on earth are you on about?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
This WC it’s extra minutes, people follow the coverage around developments whereas the rules are constantly open to precedents over time, only got cameras in recently. It’s a balancing act, too much blatant time wasting and diving but games that fizz so well time (sort of) dissolves

can see both sides yet haven’t been able to commit to games to get a sense of tempo or form to register where it might’ve played as an advantage

Poland getting through was nuts and Australia
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Fifa, galacticos, Chelsea etc etc ruined the integrity of the game though. Everyone has to play by the rule of 50% skill, 50% cheating. That's 2020s football for you. Teams which play fairly are a thing of the past.

This is incidentally why the var thing will never be fixed. You can't regulate a game which is played to find the loopholes in the rules.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
third going with the jam band theory of sports: if you're in a groove, let it ride, man!

it doesn't make sense to have a sport regulated by a clock that essentially disregards that clock in deference to the judgement/whimsy of an official. many would say strict abidance to the clock heightens management of the game.
Do you know what size a football pitch is?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
it's one or the other: you have rules, or you don't. freeform, free-flowing jam band football would be cool, no judgment either way. but it shouldn't be a grey area.
In a sense I agree with this... but not entirely. In the past you had a ref who controlled the game... we don't stop the clock when the ball goes out for instance, but if the ref felt a player was deliberately wasting time to protect a lead - taking too long to take a throw for instance - then the ref could add that time on at the end (and penalise the player, probably a yellow card). And also he would add time if there was a long injury that stopped the game (in fact the time that the ref added used to be called injury time). But the point is that the ref - with the linesmen to help with offside calls and throw-ins etc - pretty much controlled the whole thing including time. And I have no problem with the ref allowing one last promising attack, there are other sports aren't there where the clock has run out but until the actual play ends the game isn't over. And everyone accepted that the timing was pretty loose, the game is ninety minutes long but that's being timed by the same guy watching for fouls and suchlike and who has total discretion as to when he stops the clock for a delay, and also for how long he stops it. So when it was like that you couldn't have a countdown done by a clock on the wall cos that wouldn't know which incidents the ref had seen fit to stop his clock for... no-one except the ref knew precisely how long remained (though of a course a player on the pitch could ask him).

But.... the game has changed, they seem to be searching for a kind of objectivity in timing - and, as I will come to, in everything else - and so the timing is done by a watching official, and at the end of 45 min (first half) and 90 (full time) they hold up a board saying 6 or whatever, which means that the watching official has calculated that six minutes of play were lost to injury or time-wasting or a naked man with "stop oil" written on his penis running on to the pitch. So to me that does put us in a strange halfway house with an imposed semi-objectiveness with the crowd feeling they can countdown those six minutes, although the ref is still the one who blows, and he can add more if there is further delay or if he wants to. If we are going to do it that way then why not stop the clock every time the ball goes out like in basketball etc and have an actual rigid 90 minutes of playing? Of course the games will last maybe 120 minutes a I think in a normal game the ball is only in play for between 60 and 70 min.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
For me however, the big issue is not time-keeping, it's VAR. And this is a weird one for me to complain about cos I like it in principle. Having a replay to overturn clear and obvious errors. To me that's fine, things such as the famous "Hand of God" when ten seconds after the goal had been given every single person in the world knew that Maradona had punched the ball into the goal... everyone in the world knew that he had cheated and that the world cup quarter final was about to be decided by a goal that shouldn't have stood. And I think that makes the sport look stupid - I was a kid then and I honestly thought that the game would be replayed or something to right this unequivocal and egregious wrong, and when I used to play football in London we somehow got to chatting about that and other members of my team, displaying the same childish logic had had exactly the same expectation. Whatever, to me VAR should correct clear errors, when one replay shows beyond doubt that the ref got it wrong, but it's being horribly misused - despite the stated aim being to remove clear errors, it's actually being used in the pursuit of impossible perfection - the goal goes in and there is a VAR check which can stop the game for literally minutes, they watch hundreds of replays from every angle and then finally decide that the player's foot was in front of the defender by 2mm when the ball was kicked and so technically he was off-side.... goal disallowed and game's momentum wrecked.

Someone being 2mm offside is not cheating, they didn't time their run to the thousandth of the second to get that 2mm advantage, the ref didn't make a clear error in not spotting something that was way beyond the capacity of the human eye to see. To me, morally, such a goal should not be disallowed. What they should do is have (say) five people watching the replay, after any incident or decision they have 15 seconds (or some other SHORT period) to push a button saying "overrule" if they are certain the ref got it wrong. If more than half of the VAR officials press that button in the allotted short time then the decision is changed, but if the majority of them could not be certain in that time that a mistake was made then - if there was an error - it was not a clear and obvious one and so the ref's decision should stand. At the moment there is a huge problem where they are using VAR to try and introduce absolutely one-hundred percent error free games, which a) cannot be done cos some things people will argue about decisions after a thousand replays and b) the stopping spoils the game and c) you're getting great goals wiped off that morally should stand even if technically someone was offside by an amount which cannot be detected by the naked eye.

It's incredibly frustrating for a team to stick the ball in the net, it's a beautifully worked goal, the crowd go absolutely fucking wild, players going mad with celebrations - in short, the moment for which people play the fucking game - and then the ref is "wait up everyone, maybe at some point in the build up that guy had his toenail in front of the defender" and then the whole stadium has to sit and wait for some anonymous idiots to watch and re-watch it hundreds of times and then make a call. If the goal is wiped out then it's terrible, but even if it stands then that beautiful moment of ecstasy has been tarnished and tainted.... @WashYourHands would probably call it "ruined orgasm" and he wouldn't be wrong.

Point is, they gotta change this, that is the problem with the game right now, timekeeping issues are definitely a very very distant second.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
For me however, the big issue is not time-keeping, it's VAR. And this is a weird one for me to complain about cos I like it in principle. Having a replay to overturn clear and obvious errors. To me that's fine, things such as the famous "Hand of God" when ten seconds after the goal had been given every single person in the world knew that Maradona had punched the ball into the goal... everyone in the world knew that he had cheated and that the world cup quarter final was about to be decided by a goal that shouldn't have stood. And I think that makes the sport look stupid - I was a kid then and I honestly thought that the game would be replayed or something to right this unequivocal and egregious wrong, and when I used to play football in London we somehow got to chatting about that and other members of my team, displaying the same childish logic had had exactly the same expectation. Whatever, to me VAR should correct clear errors, when one replay shows beyond doubt that the ref got it wrong, but it's being horribly misused - despite the stated aim being to remove clear errors, it's actually being used in the pursuit of impossible perfection - the goal goes in and there is a VAR check which can stop the game for literally minutes, they watch hundreds of replays from every angle and then finally decide that the player's foot was in front of the defender by 2mm when the ball was kicked and so technically he was off-side.... goal disallowed and game's momentum wrecked.

Oh, for god's sake. One can hardly blame Diego for england constantly cocking it up and not hiring a proper fucking coach.

Wait for the nonce southgate to start Rashford, Sterling and Maguire in the starting XI in the knock out 16.

So glad Ben White left the squad if the wasteman weren't going to give him playtime. Although hope whatever the personal reasons for him leaving were not too serious. All the best to him.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
not sure what this has to do with my point

Only obliquely, don't worry I'm not gonna make some argument saying that you're not allowed to have an opinion cos you don't even know the dimensions of the pitch or anything. Where I'm going with this, is, I was just thinking that - if you don't happen to know this, and there is no reason why you should - it might surprise you to learn that, as with time-keeping, the rules governing the size of the pitch are surprisingly vague. Or not vague but relaxed.

According to FA regulations, the dimensions must fall between being 100-130 yards (90-120m) long and 50-100 yards (45-90m) wide. This gives users the flexibility to choose a specific size that suits them

I can imagine that if someone followed NHL (which I don't think is your game of choice) where it is all marked off strictly in 10 yard pieces, then something so lax might seem almost a mockery of what rules are supposed to be like. The width in particular allows a huge amount of leeway, one week you could play on a pitch that is 100 yards by 100 - totally square in other words - and next on something 130 x 50. Even I think that that is pretty weird... a home team that has great wingers could make their pitch wider, one that fears being passed through by more skilful teams can literally make their pitch smaller with less room for that kind of game - and you can also tell the groundsmen how to cut the grass, there was one team (I forget which) that relied on a so-called long ball game where they would boot the ball aimlessly out of their defence to gain territory and then basically chase the ball and put pressure on the defence - and they told the groundstaff to let the grass grow longer in the corners so that such balls were slowed by the grass and less likely to go out of play for a goalkick.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Now I have to read all that due to being tagged with reference to ruined orgasms which, to be fair, seems more Tea’s pun spouting groove
I guess I tagged you cos I first heard that phrase from you... and having looked it up, I believe it (correct me if I'm wrong here) to be a sexual thing where a guy's orgasm is delayed by a woman who is manipulating him, and she keeps kinda almost allowing it and then stopping - basically teasing, until finally he does come but even then she stops so he doesn't get the full, joyful release, but rather a kind of disappointing thing that technically counts as an orgasm but which is really a poor man's version of what it could and should be. If that is not right then please feel free to educate me, but, assuming for a second that that is what it is, then it seems to be, in terms of a goal celebration delayed, teased and finally allowed by VAR, a metaphor that is almost too perfect.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
And it's happening RIGHT NOW in Japan vs Spain in fact... have Japan taken the lead... with two goals in two minutes? The crowd went mental, then unmental, then they waited and waited....
 
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