had a fun start to the day this morning talking with my old mukka Dave on the Gooners v Cancer 27 hour podathon this morning. Giving a quick shout out here so if you want to donate as it’s great work Mike and the team do and it’s amazing to see all the guests come on and the charity that they generate, so fair play for the effort and was a lot of fun.
I still find it amazing that I could travel halfway across the world and come across communities of Arsenal fans to share the match day experience of. It’s quite inspiring and as I was telling the gents on the show this morning it never ceases to amaze me as a Londoner that the club I supported since I was a wee nipper has such a wide-ranging appeal on a global scale. I am very fortunate that I get to go to games (talked a little about that yesterday here) as a season ticket holder and perhaps sometimes I take that for granted, but what I don’t take for granted is the amazing community I am a part of.
Anyway, enough of that mushy stuff, how about we talk about what’s going on with The Arsenal?
Oh, wait, there’s nothing.
There is stuff that has come out about the new rule tweaks for the Premier League this season and on yesterday’s Same Old Arsenal pod the peeps talked about these as well as their pre match season previews with Merv, which is worth a watch if you fancy it. But for me I find the discussions around the rule changes particularly interesting.
The problem has been when ‘keepers take a minute for every goal kick and when you have 10 of those and add two minutes on in the game, as a match going fan, it drives you nuts. I don’t really understand why the referee doesn’t just apply a ‘three strike’ rule personally, then book ‘keepers earlier. It’s really easy to enforce as well. Simply say to the ‘keepers / captains before the kick off “if you start messing around kicking the posts, taking two or three big breaths, standing for another 10 seconds before you actually touch the ball, I’m giving you three chances before I’m booking you. If they did that properly there would have been at least four or five ‘keepers last season at the Emirates that would have had first half yellows. Enforce that early on and it will send the message to time wasters and we might see a reduction in it.Apparently only captains can approach the referees now too, with anyone else confronting the refs being carded. This feels like one of those that by October we’ll have seen ignored – feels nailed on to me, so doesn’t really feel like there’s much worth talking about it. Howard Webb even calls it out that it needs to be in place until May and not just disappear, so you can bet that’s EXACTLY what will happen.
The non-deliberate handball yellow card removal is sense taking hold, as deflections off the body, etc that I think we had a few season’s ago, was a load of nonsense so I’m glad they’ve reversed that. It is a bit subjective as to whether it was intentional though, so perhaps one to watch for the new season.
The semi-automated VAR will be a god send though. I saw it in the Euro’s, it makes things a little black and white and it would definitely give Ten Haag absolutely no cause for complaints like he did at the Emirates last season. Although he probably still would. I do wish they could do the same for ball out of play though.
Had that have been in place at St James’ Park last season then we might have had at least an additional point, rather than the ‘desgracia’ goal situation that Arteta was furious about last November. It was a joke to be fair and was the biggest indication of the PGMOL not being fit for purpose since…oh wait, Brentford at home the season before and the VAR ‘forgetting’ to draw lines for Brentford’s equaliser, anyone?
The only down side is that it’s the PGMOL who make the decision on when it comes in and they’ve said it won’t be until after the autumn internationals in September at the earliest. So we’re once again reliant on the ‘Old Boys Network’ at the PGMOL to make sure that their ineffective employees are getting their arses covered enough with this coming in. I honestly don’t understand why there would need to be any delay, but then again I understand little when it comes to that organisation, or how it is still in control of our beautiful game, so there you go.
I’ve also read on the Premier League website about the ‘Referee’s Call’ which is that the referee’s decision is final unless VAR spots that a clear mistake has been made. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but isn’t that just what they called ‘clear and obvious error’ last season? I.e. VAR doesn’t interrupt unless there is a ‘clear and obvious error’. The problem with that is for the last two season’s we’ve seen that VAR WAS still interfering with decisions, so I’m not sure I quite understand what changing the name of something is going to do to eradicate the mistakes of the officials, are you?
The good news for people like me is that apparently the ‘in stadium’ experience is going to be better by showing replays. But you can bet your bottom dollar that nothing contentious is going to get shown, so basically we’ll all know anyway when a decision is controversial because they won’t show it on screen, only show the obvious stuff that most of the time we’re not really too concerned about anyway.
I think I’ll probably leave it there for today. I feel like I’ve gone a little too deep on the cynicism with the new rule changes, but as always we’re going to need to ‘suck it and see’ to see if it speeds up the game, improves the game and makes football a better experience as a result.
Back tomorrow on New Season Eve. Have yourselves a good one!
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