It is kind of funny to me, people talk about letting the officials officiate the game… they still are but they’re still getting it wrong with VAR and it is hardly the systems fault that someone looks at a foul or an offside and still doesn’t get it right. Going back doesn’t change much, people will still not like referees decisions and they will still cost teams dearly.
On current form sure, but they’re not too dissimilar to us. There are a lot of games that could go either way, in United’s case we’ve been unlucky to lose some and very lucky to win others. Chelsea have had some decent enough chances and just not clicked, in saying that they have a newish manager and a young team so I’d not be that worried about this season.
It’s thanks to Emery, they always had decent players and money which I’m sure was part of the draw. I feel like he had a bit of a raw deal at Arsenal, I don’t really think Arteta is leaps and bounds ahead of Emery, but the timing and backing worked out far better. He has always done well with this kind of team, Arsenal and PSG were arguably his low points.
They broke the rules but they’ll also get a heavier punishment and the irony is that you could shave 10 points off City and they would probably still be right up there at the very worst, hell they’d probably win the thing still. But Everton getting points deducted after their hard work and after the last couple seasons? I think it’s skewed.
We have had a ton, but Falcao is the one that sticks out for me. At that time, he was easily one of the top strikers in the world. It’s not really his fault, though. Injuries really changed the middle of his career.
In general Chelsea always had signings I got hyped just to see and they all kind of underwhelmed me granted some were closer to the end of their peak. Players like Shevchenko, Crespo and Eto’o… hell I was even hyped to see Kezman because he had insane numbers in the Dutch league.
I’m Northern Irish and love seeing my national team, I think people find internationals boring because the draws are so skewed, making them almost not worth watching if your team is any good. Where we are seeded tends to get us drawn with one, if not two good teams per qualifying group.
The main thing that bugs me about our international breaks is that the national teams’ games aren’t broadcast free like the England games. Ours are on Sky if we’re lucky, even the South have their on RTE.
Statistically though it does technically reduce the mistakes, the issue is that they even still make them and in many of those cases they weren’t even on subjective ones.
My personal hangup with VAR is around the rule that contact = foul and if they show a freeze frame or a slow mo, it removes the context altogether.
I don’t think anything will ever stop people not liking decisions or consistency because there will always be subjective ones and people will always remember the bad ones especially against their own teams. But again that happened with general refereeing, people remember the hand of god, the Lampard goal against Germany and the Henry handball against Ireland. VAR would arguably have caught all those.