Also imagine VAR taking 5 minutes on each sin bin decision on top of what we have already
If they had a sin bin and somehow decided the way to implement it was “we will review every sin bin decision and then put the player in the bin” rather than “we will put players in the bin and then review the decision, inviting them to rejoin the game before their time in the bin is up if the binning was unjust” that would be insane.
Okay… what is the problem people have with sin bins (aka orange cards)?
Now that is interesting. When you think bottom-half EPL teams you think “shot stoppers only” and Ramsdale has (imo unfairly) a reputation for being a bad shot stopper. In fact, you’d probably characterise his strengths as sweeping and one on one defending.
I would assume it’s Burnley.
Arsenal’s season in a microcosm… relatively comfortable in defence and seemingly incapable of scoring… but they somehow manage a goal.
I don’t know if I thought Ramsdale was excellent, but I know every time I looked at the statistics for him I thought “What? Really?”
Keepers don’t have any good statistics. More precisely I don’t think the constructs people use to try and measure keepers are any good, which means conclusions drawn from them are unsound.
Ramsdale seems particularly unfortunate where whatever he’s doing that makes him look competent is just not captured by any (commonly used) statistic, while the aspects of his game that I would tend to agree he’s not great at are better measured and he just so happens to do quite badly on save quality measures that, in general, I don’t think are any good but are nevertheless popular.
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”.
Is this Newcastle’s season over? How many games do they have to struggle through before January offers some hope of reinforcement?
Manchester City are boring as hell to watch. And Guardiola wants them to be boring. Control. Control. Control.
If there are lots of draws, sure.
But you can’t win titles in the 90 point era with draws. Draws lose you titles.
Presumably he’d push up a CB, which he does anyway… but Stones is injured enough himself I’d guess they’d buy a CB as well.
I guess another option would be to just not have a winger on that side. Or Reece James would be the nominal winger.
Or maybe Reece James can invert.
Has Rico Lewis really been (a) getting enough game time and (b) demonstrating the kind of quality that suggests an international cap? (This is not a rhetorical question; I do not, as a rule, watch Manchester City games.)
What language is this? And is that fantastic sounding word actually fantastic or is it a false friend?
Okay, why would he want to stay?
He’s a like fascist or something right? Bolsanaro? Ah Bolsonaro.
“Boss, only half the team are right backs!”
“Hold my waistcoat.”
“Boss, only half the team are right backs!”
“Hold my waistcoat.”
In that specific situation you almost feel like the hypothetical orange card for a sin bin could work like so:
This way referees who worry about being blamed for “ruining the game” with an early double yellow might punish players/teams where they’d otherwise find any excuse to avoid the second yellow.
This really would allow for more inconsistent decisions but it would facilitate punishing behaviours that ought to be punished but which routinely go unpunished.
The rules (“Laws” I know) keep getting written to be more objective, but the pursuit of objectivity is foolish when a lot of the decisions are always going to be subjective. Increasing the level of subjective discretion could actually make refs feel empowered to make calls they’re otherwise hesitant to make because everything is so binary and clashes with the human element. Or it might not, but the situation now definitely needs fixing somehow… all that can go wrong is a different wrong.