‘It’s clear there’s a vendetta against Liverpool’ and other less mental views | OneFootball

‘It’s clear there’s a vendetta against Liverpool’ is quite the statement from one fan while others claim the offside was fair.

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There is a vendetta against Liverpool

Oh we’re a failure, the worstest champions that ever existed.

(Not yet; we will see where you end up on this list – Ed)

Let’s set some things straight, we’re not doing as well as some may have expected, but we’ve had a lot of bad luck this season. We were unlucky to lose at Manure, unlucky to lose at Chelsea, and then had the clear might of the referees against us this weekend. Giving penalties for nothing, disallowing goals for nothing. It’s clear there’s a vendetta against Liverpool for daring to win a league title against all the odds last year.

This year was never about being favourites, we bought young players who will take time, rather than doing a Man City and just paying top dollar for established players, or doing a Real and tapping up players to join on a free.

Anyone who supports the club was clear that this season was about bedding in the players, hopefully getting into the Champs League again, and doing well in Europe.

All of these things are on the cards and we don’t have the distraction of having any snakes running down their contract to go to Madrid (Except maybe that Konate turncoat…). If we can refresh the squad, maybe get a competent tactical manager in place, the plan to be competitive next season is still going well. YNWA Darren

(Sorry but the idea that Liverpool did not pay ‘top dollar for established players’ this summer is a nonsense. Not as much of a nonsense as a vendetta but… – Ed)

Did Liverpool ‘score’ Schrodinger’s goal?

At the risk of sounding like an embittered Liverpool fan, my team were soundly beaten at the weekend. It wasn’t the shellacking that the media is portraying as Dan pointed out in today’s mailbox, but City were clearly the better team and deserved to win.

I do want to discuss the goal that VVD “scored”, though. It seems to me that VAR has created an issue for itself with its liberal, and deeply arbitrary notion of “clear and obvious”. And the problem here is that had the referee’s assistant not flagged on Sunday, and had they applied the same logic (by no means a certainty, obviously), the goal would have been given.

How can this be? The same officials would have looked at the same situation, and made the opposite decision. Yet it was either a legitimate goal, or it wasn’t, but the referee’s assistant, unless he has the depth perception of a Peregrine Falcon, was merely guessing that Roberston was obscuring the Goalkeeper’s view, and that guess led to Oliver deciding that he hadn’t made a “clear and obvious” error, which is clearly arbitrary to a farcical degree.

So the FA have created Schrodinger’s goal. And they didn’t do it on Sunday, this is just the latest of a long line of decisions that the officials either make or don’t make. I have lost count at the times someone like Gary Neville says something along the lines of, well, yes, it probably is/isn’t a penalty, but VAR isn’t going to overturn that because it isn’t clear and obvious.

I can’t be the only one that thinks this is batshit crazy, can I? Who gives a toss about if an error is deemed “clear and obvious”? All we need is if it is right or wrong. Mat (Liverpool fans calling for Slot’s head are dickheads)

Actually, offside feels kind of right

Irrespective of what the rules says, it feels kind of right to me that the Liverpool goal was ruled offside.

It seems quite plausible that Robertson’s position was causing the City defenders to adjust their position so as to cause him to be in an offside position. At the point they are doing that, they don’t know whether he is going to interfere with play or not.. Robertson doesn’t even know…

I don’t think the offside rule should require defenders to second guess whether or not a player in an offside position is going to interfere with play.

It doesn’t seem within the spirit of the game to have a rule that could allow an attacker to get into an offside position in such a way as to cause defenders to then move away from the goal to make him offside, and then for that attacker to get away with it by then appearing not to interfere with play. And in doing so cause defenders to not be in a position that might have enabled them to prevent the goal.

For me, interfering with play should include positioning yourself so that the opposition players might adjust their own positions.

If Robertson had not been there, there might have been a City defender near that position who might have then blocked the shot, even if their keeper couldn’t do that.

So, all in all, it wasn’t a clear and obvious error (don’t even get me started on that concept…)

The ‘interfering with play’ rule still has a role. Eg an attacker flies off the pitch near the corner flag having made a challenge. And then wanders slowly back onto the pitch, well away from the play going on in front of goal and in that moment is in an offside position as a shot heads into the goal. Not interfering with play there as almost certainly not affecting the defenders’ positions – they are not even aware of him and what he is doing. John, North London (there’s no bias in my view – I wanted the result to be a draw…)

…I’m a Man United fan and dislike Liverpool and City equally, so have no particular horse in this race.

But it seems obvious to me that Robertson was offside for the Van Dijk goal. Or at least it certainly wasn’t a clear and obvious error by the referee to rule him as such – he would have been ruled offside 99 times out of 100 in the pre-VAR era – and therefore VAR was surely right not to intervene.

We can split hairs over whether the goalkeeper’s line of vision was impeded or not: everything happened quite quickly so it’s plausible it was impeded or influenced regardless of what endless probing around camera angles appears to show. But the line in the law about “making an obvious action which clearly impacts on an opponent to play the ball” is unambiguous in my view.

Robertson was in an offside position and he ducked (an obvious action) without which the ball may have hit him in the face. Why duck otherwise? By definition, he was therefore active, and this made it impossible for any player to play a ball that could and likely should have bounced off of him.

At minimum, his actions would have fed into Donnarumma’s decision-making process as he was so close to him, and at maximum his action completely changed the trajectory of the ball (which, had it hit him, which it should have done, would have seen him ruled offside anyway). His ducking consequently had a material effect on the game and he did it from an offside position. Ergo, it’s at least defensible and arguably completely justified that he was penalised.

I’m all for the way the law has evolved in recent years to encourage attacking play, and nobody wants a return to the Arsenal offside trap of the 1980s, except, perhaps, Arsenal fans. But it seems to me that there is a real problem with players hanging around in front of goalkeepers that is just leading to endless controversy, both when it comes to inconsistency in application of the offside law and the fairly frequent attempts to impede them and stop them coming out to catch crosses.

But I think there’s an easy solution to this: the law should just be updated to say that any player in an offside position inside the 6-yard box is automatically considered to be active. Otherwise, if they’re not active, what on earth are they doing there? Matt, Sheffield

Got to love Sunderland

There’s a line in Moneyball that goes “how can you not be romantic about baseball?”.

How can you not be romantic about football? The narrative was about Granit Xhaka pre game and he was brilliant, outshone on the day only by the less heralded Hale End graduate “Big” Dan Ballard, and at both ends of the pitch.

There is something proper, a bit innocent and old school about Sunderland right now. It’s nice to see.

I don’t really get the discourse around the moving of the advertising hoardings from a footballing perspective, because I personally think we’re rubbish at the long throw thing and shouldn’t do it anyway, but I guess it sets the tone, doesn’t it?

I noticed the grounds staff only watered one half of the pitch per half which was possibly more effective shithousing, and fair play to them.

I can never get too mad at Sunderland anyway because my closest uncle, God rest him, was a fan at a time when that was a completely ridiculous thing for anyone outside of Sunderland to be. He would have been insufferably happy this week.

Sentimentality aside, the home crowd was objectively brilliant. Their celebrations sound visceral. They know what they are watching, having really had their loyalty tested in recent times.

“Sunderland ’til I Die” is the best fly-on-the-wall football documentary of them all and, if you have watched it, how can you not be romantic about Sunderland?

Still, it’s Arsenal for me. Come on you Gooners. Niallo, Gooner, Uibh Fháilí

A Manchester United stock take

As we are 11 games into the season and facing another (normally tedious) international break, it feels like a good time to take stock of how things have gone for our teams and what our hopes are up until early January, when we can reconvene and laugh about how things didn’t go to plan.

Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. This break coincidentally coincides with the same period last season when Amorim joined United – we are a whopping 3 points better off (break out the bubbly for that progress). Defensively we still feel a bit fragile, 18 goals conceded tells its own story (12 GC this time last year), the Brentford and City defeats were chastening and of course we had Grimsby. We will always remember Grimsby.

Ruby rightly received a lot of pelters and certainly came under pressure but it hasn’t been all bad. Our attacking play has improved, as shown by GF (19 compared to 12 last year), the underlying stats have been great, and our GK can actually catch the ball. Also, the fixtures haven’t been kind yet we are 6 places better off – right up there in the mix to finish anywhere between 3rd and 13th. And who can forget that sweet sweet victory at Anfield? God bless you Harry.

So a mixed bag with some signs of progress, work to do and nobody getting carried away just yet. On paper the fixture list looks kinder on the run up to xmas but we know football is not played on paper, and there seem to be very few easy games in the PL anymore (not for us anyway!). We need to be consistently putting teams to the sword in the games we are “expected to win” – at least for a team with CL ambitions.

Therefore, I confidently predict (with no confidence whatsoever) that we will be in the Top 5 after the next 10 games by the time we play City in mid-January. That’s the target lads, don’t let me down.

Come on, let’s have at least one from each club. We have a couple of weeks to hear from the likes of Wolves fans (what is going on there), how the bubble has burst at Leeds, Howe-way the lads or away the Howe, Sunder(dream)land, and why it seemed like Palace were world beaters yet are now back in mid-table with Brighton, Brentford and Bournemouth (does that not seem like the most apt mid-table roll call, or what’s their ambitions?). Ron Burgundy, blow that conch.