I don't see how the new rule would make VAR better or easier, it's going to still relay on lines being drawn.

You should only like that rule if you want more goals scored as it gives attackers an advantage.

I like Clrnc's approach, all based on the eye test.

Big Willie wrote:

No way that rule will be approved if there is any sense however when you need to zoom in from 100 different angles to decide if a fraction of a boot was offside should just be waved on as it then becomes a marginal at best depending on when the frame was frozen. These kinds of decisions should favour the attacker but Arsene's proposition is going too far calling for a player to be onside if his whole body is offside save for a heel. That's absurd.

Sounds like heaven to me.

Defences will then sit very deep and try to game the new offside systems resulting in lesser goals and compact deep defences.

Lads this is nothing revolutionary, we had the daylight rule not long ago and it made no difference to the approach teams took. We're talking about tiny changes to the parameters to give attackers the advantage instead of defenders.

You need to figure out who's vision of the game you'd rather go with, Arsene Wenger or Gary fucking Neville.

I may be missing something, but why would this lead to less ambiguity? Won't the millimeter decisions just move from "is some of his body offside" to "is a part of his body onside"?

Exactly. I just feel it should be made simple in the sense that if it's too hard to tell for certain whether someone is offside or onside then it should be onside.

These replays that require 100s of different angles and lines being drawn, with a freeze frame being stopped one frame before or after being the difference between onside and offside then it should just be called in favour of the attacker.

if you can't definitively rule on something in 30 seconds then you go with the ref's decision on the field. if you need 2 minutes then we might as well go to some AI review.

Perhaps need some equivalent to "Umpire's Call" in cricket where if the technology can't definitively say they stick with the on field decision.

if you have to spend 3 minutes drawing lines all over the place and using the pythagorean theorem to determine if a player is onside or offside then you're pretty much admitting that the linesperson had a really difficult job and did the best anyone could.

9 days later

There will definitely be two sides to this story, but some of the logic linkages in that article are a little fanciful. Burgess suggests the team go to Dubai, but then they don't win games! Must be all his fault.

You were in one of the Australian groups to do a tour through Colney with him weren't you Asterix?

Given we were a point off CL I'm happy to lay the blame on Dubai. The end of that season was pure misery.

3 months later

https://twitter.com/hashtag/beINWengerAtoZ?src=hashtag_click

I could hear him talk all day. Recently Beinsport have this A to Z with Wenger.

Some interesting tidbits:

  • In the invincible season he regret the UCL the most. Says we could have won it but he got greedy and wanted to win the FA Cup too. Costed us both.
  • Ibra, Mbappe, Ronaldo are the 3 biggest transfer regrets for him.
  • Kanu his best Jan signing
Clrnc wrote:
  • In the invincible season he regret the UCL the most. Says we could have won it but he got greedy and wanted to win the FA Cup too. Costed us both.

In some ways that was more of an opportunity gone to waste than 05/06. We were a better team than Chelsea and if we could have gotten past them, that semi final field was historically light in quality. Deportivo you could argue even though on the decline still had something about them, but we would surely give them all they could handle, nevermind Monaco and Porto. At least in 05/06 Barcelona had Ronaldinho still at the peak of his powers. The universe gave us a chance to truly cement the Invincibles as the greatest team of the era and we bottled it.

Jens wrote:
Clrnc wrote:
  • In the invincible season he regret the UCL the most. Says we could have won it but he got greedy and wanted to win the FA Cup too. Costed us both.

In some ways that was more of an opportunity gone to waste than 05/06. We were a better team than Chelsea and if we could have gotten past them, that semi final field was historically light in quality. Deportivo you could argue even though on the decline still had something about them, but we would surely give them all they could handle, nevermind Monaco and Porto. At least in 05/06 Barcelona had Ronaldinho still at the peak of his powers. The universe gave us a chance to truly cement the Invincibles as the greatest team of the era and we bottled it.

By product might have been killing Mourinho’s career off. Had he not won the Champions League there wouldn’t have been that special one speech.

Funny thing is if not for a late late goal from Cole in the group stages, we would have been out of it by match day 4. We had a disastrous start to UCL that year

You often here from the invincibles lot how the players that followed lacked the strength in character they had but if we're honest they didn't exactly cover themselves in glory in high pressure situations. I always found it ironic that the generation that followed out performed them quite convincingly in the CL in a much more competitive era.

I don't think that game had much to do with tiredness. We had a narrow lead with the end in sight. Protective instincts set in, pressure mounted and we allowed Chelsea to take control of the second half.

Invincibles rode on ability. I think it's developed into a bit of a myth that they were mentally strong. Those few pics from the United game and the under achieving subsequent teams added to it.