Since the beginning of VAR I’ve thought a challenge system with a limited number of challenges was the way this should be implemented, and I’ve only grown more convinced of that since.
The video replay should be there to support the ref to be certain they’ve made the right choice. To me, that means having other people in a different booth reviewing and making decisions is wrong. It takes away the ref’s responsibility.
Video review should only be the on-field ref looking at replays of their own decisions and then confirming or rejecting them. And the review should be generated by the teams, not a secondary group of officials.
Cut out everything but the techs queueing up the replays, get rid of the lines and freeze frames, let the refs look at a total of 30 seconds of some different angles of the play in contention, and then move on.
Human error will happen but we’ll only have reviews of actually contentious decisions, and the person accountable will always be make the decisions.
Also, everyone responsibile for the current implementation should be laughed out of their positions.
I have to say, a challenge system (with referee’s calls for ambiguous situations) does create an additional strategic quality. But there’s no point in using a challenge system if you’re also going to deliberately compromise the ability of VAR to reach the right outcome. You’d just end up with a whole bunch of complaints along the lines of “it’s absurd and unfair that we’re getting relegated instead of them because the ref couldn’t spend long enough checking every possible offside and consequently they get to have an offside goal”.
It’s been fairly evident that 30 seconds isn’t enough for these refs, they will often look at the same angle for 30 seconds without making a decision, then moving onto the next one
Since the beginning of VAR I’ve thought a challenge system with a limited number of challenges was the way this should be implemented, and I’ve only grown more convinced of that since.
The video replay should be there to support the ref to be certain they’ve made the right choice. To me, that means having other people in a different booth reviewing and making decisions is wrong. It takes away the ref’s responsibility.
Video review should only be the on-field ref looking at replays of their own decisions and then confirming or rejecting them. And the review should be generated by the teams, not a secondary group of officials.
Cut out everything but the techs queueing up the replays, get rid of the lines and freeze frames, let the refs look at a total of 30 seconds of some different angles of the play in contention, and then move on.
Human error will happen but we’ll only have reviews of actually contentious decisions, and the person accountable will always be make the decisions.
Also, everyone responsibile for the current implementation should be laughed out of their positions.
I have to say, a challenge system (with referee’s calls for ambiguous situations) does create an additional strategic quality. But there’s no point in using a challenge system if you’re also going to deliberately compromise the ability of VAR to reach the right outcome. You’d just end up with a whole bunch of complaints along the lines of “it’s absurd and unfair that we’re getting relegated instead of them because the ref couldn’t spend long enough checking every possible offside and consequently they get to have an offside goal”.
It’s been fairly evident that 30 seconds isn’t enough for these refs, they will often look at the same angle for 30 seconds without making a decision, then moving onto the next one