Who’s up for swapping Thiago for Van de Beek?

How to rank the great strikers
Johnny Ironballs raises a good point in his wind-up emails, when it comes to the discussion about greatest Premier League striker/best striker etc etc, which is that talking about stats are only part of the picture.

I think people should look at it as ‘Who would you most want to build a team around’ as, although strikers can be interchangeable, the very best can define a team and any given match.

Aguero for me actually falls down there, as although he might be the finest finisher in Prem league history, he’s not gamechanging on his own (and has carried an air of the flat track bully about him in some seasons).

Even as an Arsenal fan, I think Kane is somewhat underappreciated as a striker (not that I like him) and would clearly put him above someone like Drogba or Rooney (who weirdly feature more in the greatest Prem striker zeitgeist, likely due to the rabid fervour of Chelsea/United fans). I would have Kane ahead of Aguero in my ‘fantasy’ team too.

But Suarez is probably the best striker in the league since Henry, and I don’t think it’s close (Ronaldo being the best player, but not really a CF). Possibly peak Torres, but Suarez offered the truly magical.

Shearer is a bit before my time (or rather, his Blackburn/Southampton brilliance days) but was also magic. Some of those Newcastle goals, and what he meant to that team. Incredible.

So yeh, my top tier of Prem strikers who offer the goal threat (not including someone like Bergkamp), who you can build a whole team off are Henry, Shearer and Suarez.

The pool below is probably headed by Kane and has Aguero and peak Torres, as well as Cole.

Next tier has peak RVP and I guess peak Drogba, with Rooney, Van Nistlrooy, peak Fowler and maybe Sir Les (again really don’t know).

So that’s my system. Not just the stats, but something more sublime and ‘take the game by the scruff of the neck’. The more you make it conversational, the easier it is to have a more nuanced discussion. Better that than people waving goals in front of your face (Rooney was excellent across the top line, but rarely even the best CF at United in a given season during his career) or some Chelsea WUM shrieking that Drogba has more trophies. My god. Insufferable.
Tom (Ronaldo, Salah etc sit in a different box but are obviously the standout wide forwards), Walthamstow

…Is Johnny Ironballs mad? Kane has scored at least 17 league goals in his last 7 seasons, his lowest tally being achieved from 28 games. He scores with his right foot, left foot and head. He creates goals from nothing. And, most crucially, he does all this for Tottenham Hotspur.

How is Kane not a “proven world elite player”? Messi’s detractors cite his World Cup record yet Kane won the Golden Boot. You cannot have it both ways. Until he plays for one of the world’s best clubs where assists are laid on a plate to him, you cannot truly compare him to the other best strikers.

Do you honestly believe that he would not be producing even higher numbers at Bayern, Barca and Man City? He could lead the line for any team in the world. Sure, Suarez had one sensational season at Liverpool, but he’s past his best now. To repeat my first point, if you took him over Kane on a three year contract then you must be bonkers. And bearing in mind their respective ages, I would take him over Aguero and Lewandowski too.
Jamie Bedwell, Cheltenhamshire

John Nicholson: VAR is both salt in the wound and the knife that cut it

Retort to Johnny
This is going to be long but I can’t let Johnny Nic get away with it:

“Remember the glory days? Remember a time before VAR? When we could just trust the officials to do their best to get almost every call right, moan about it when they got it wrong and then get on with our lives? Great wasn’t it?”

Yeh it was good l, everyone used to moan as much as they moan now, just about referees rather than faceless technology and it’s implementation. But it was less fair for sure.
And it definitely hurt when a decision went against your team and a tv replay shown less than a minute later showed the injustice (and showed it over and over again…).

“On and on it goes and I almost feel apologetic that we have to keep discussing it.”

Awesome, thanks for that, we can get in with our lives.

“But we do…”

Oh for f…

“But we do because it is such a huge change to the great game of Association Football that it has undermined everything we held dear about the game and we must drive it out.”

Oh spot on, this definitely an existential crisis for the game worse than anything like TV, racism, drugs, diving, greedy agents, high wages, foreign ownership, expanded European and International competitions, the 39th game, FFP and Sportswashing. “Everything we held dear”? It’s as is if your right to enjoy moaning about refereeing decisions should be listed under the European Convention on Human Rights.

“You are almost certainly sick of VAR and want it binned as soon as possible. Sick of what it has done to the game, sick of how it sucked joy out of the most passionate moments, sick of its stupidities, its errors, its fussy nonsense, sick even of talking about it.”

Nope. I’m just sick of everyone moaning about it.

“You might still be in favour of VAR, but you’d be in a minority and I am certain you don’t want VAR as it currently exists. You want it ‘properly’ applied as you cling to the wreckage of a system that is antipathetic to the best things about football.”

Yes absolutely, in the same way that I don’t want to bin off the justice system just because it doesn’t work properly. The second part of that is extremely subjective. I highly value the sporting aspect of football, of which fair decisions being applied is a huge part. VAR was introduced to improve that, and even in its current guise achieves it (though I would like to see some stats on corrected decisions).

“Being anti-VAR is not and never has been some sort of old-mannish resistance to change. It’s just been the understanding of why it is not workable and why it will never deliver the satisfaction that its proponents crave.”

I’ve written previously about the statistics between the age divide on this and it certainly seems that a majority of younger people are behind VAR. You’re at risk of sounding a lot like an old man telling perhaps more idealistic young people that they’re too naive to understand the true nature of the world. Judging by some of your other stuff, I’m assuming this is not how you want to come across? I actually agree with you on the second part, because we’ll never get every decision right, but that’s not a reason not to try, nor is it the reason you hate it.

“You simply cannot apply a digital solution to an analogue game. It requires decisions to be made that were never meant to be made in a game played between humans.”

This is wrong. VAR doesn’t make different decisions, it makes the same decisions with higher accuracy. You may disagree with the level of accuracy…

Those marginal offside calls previously fell into the ‘looks about on’ or ‘looks about off’ category.
But the VAR can’t handle that. ‘Looks’ or ‘about’ is no good to it. It needs the question, ‘is it, or isn’t it’ answered, and thus we get down to the width of a sleeve. This is just one of the many pitfalls that was obvious to everyone who opposed its introduction. It’s a pedant’s charter.”

Actually, this is not a fault with VAR, it’s a fault with the law or it’s application. In the law you’re offside or you’re not. This can be remedied to some extent by applying a rule similar to the “umpires call” in cricket, or the daylight rule. It’ll still be fairer than a linesman not looking and then putting his flag up anyway. It doesn’t need to be a pedants charter, it just needs some tweaking.

“Of course it doesn’t stop there. The fact that contraventions of the law can be missed in the run up to a goal as long as it isn’t classed as being in the same phase of play is fine, making a mockery of one of the central tenets of VAR: to make the game more fair. But we’ll brush that under the carpet as well, eh?”

I mean, you can draw the line where you want. But again this is not a VAR problem, it’s an implementation issue. I personally would say only count infringements within ten seconds of a goal. That’s arbitrary but so is saying penalties are taken from 12 yards out.

“Then there’s the endless hanging around for up to three minutes to make a decision that drives most people nuts. I note that no-one is calling for refs to go to the monitor any more, as they’ve started to do so, and surprise, surprise, still no-one is happy. Turns out, that was just another solution that wasn’t the solution.”

Yes because asking a ref to mark his own homework is stupid. If the clowns in the box can’t make the call, stick with the call on the pitch. Again, implementation issue.

“Does anyone know what handball is anymore? If you think you do, you may be wrong, as they’ve probably changed the law again. It used to be so simple: if you put your hand out to touch the ball, it was a handball; if it was blasted against your hand from a metre away, it wasn’t. End of. VAR has given penalties for it bouncing up and grazing a hand, for just touching a hand accidentally, for when it’s booted against a hand, for when it’s next to the body, for when it’s away from the body, for when it’s come off altogether in a threshing machine accident. It’s pathetic and makes football look like a really stupid game.”

What you are describing there is the 25 plus years that I watched football without VAR. And again, this is an issue with the law, which changes every five minutes. For instance, why was it ever decided that defenders could get away with accidental hand ball but forwards couldn’t? That was a stupid rule change which had nothing to do with VAR. I would hazard a guess that on average, VAR has produced more accurate calls on this than we had before. But stats would be nice.

“VAR has been saved by the lack of crowds, so it will return next season for another go, no doubt with another raft of changes. But I’ll tell you here and now – it won’t make any difference. The basic premise on which VAR is founded is fundamentally flawed. It is a game played by humans and refereed by humans, whether that be on the pitch or in a darkened tactics truck by a bleary-eyed man surrounded by scrunched-up tissues and the smell of inadequacy.”

You do know that, I think with the exception of goal line technology (which people only moan about when it doesn’t work), VAR decisions aren’t made by technology, they are made by humans supported by technology? So you have the same thing whether you have VAR or not. You’re railing against technology, but it’s not the problem.

“But 2021/22 will be its last season. As fans return and voice their displeasure, don’t forget they were chanting “f*** VAR” before Covid intervened. It will, at some point in the campaign, be suspended for further consultation. That will take a few months and the results of the consultation will be thanks, but no thanks. VAR, you’re fired.”

Respectfully disagree, because I think the Premier League (if not the FA) a) need to keep TV viewers on side and b) will be looking at what the younger viewers think as they are going to generate more revenue long term. But hey, maybe I’m giving the Premier League too much credit for forward thinking.

“Of course managers and players will still moan about decisions, but we will not listen to them because we tried it VAR’s way and it was awful, so shut your yap and bite down on any errors that occur.”

Bollocks, you’ll all find something else to moan about.

“No-one will miss VAR, not even those who support it. It was never needed and it can never work. The fact it is here at all is television’s triumph. There’s a reason no-one calls for it in the lower leagues.”

I honestly don’t think it’s going away, I agree about it being TV’s triumph but TV makes VAR inevitable. And that’s the reason the need for a VAR diminishes the further down the pyramid you go. Perhaps what you really want is for football to not be on TV?

“It cleaved the sport in two and has stained every game it’s ever been used in.”

I don’t think it’s cleaved the sport in two. It’s divided people who watch the game between those who want to watch sport and those who want to be entertained first and foremost. The second part of your sentence is completely untrue and you know it. There are plenty of examples of VAR being used successfully. People didn’t complain about the use of VAR on that goal United scored at the weekend, they complained about the outcome. (If VAR hadn’t have been used, mails from Spurs fans would have poured into your mailbox moaning about Son being maimed.)

“It has turned referees into little more than delivery mechanisms for the VAR’s decisions and in that, has made them worse at the job. Why wouldn’t it? They’re now effectively redundant in making any or all significant decisions, just as we all predicted.”

Perhaps refs are happy that people have been distracted from their inadequacies and focused on the tech part of VAR which makes no decisions but is definitely easier for people to moan about. Also, they’re so redundant that the ref made the final call in that decision at Spurs on Sunday. And if you can’t do your job as well as can be done by another person or process, are you not by definition redundant? Why is that bad? We could feel sorry for refs, but from what I see there’s more and more of them making decision, good and bad, as a result of VAR.

“Those who still postulate the old ‘what if a bad call is made in a World Cup final and everyone knows it’s wrong except the referee?’ need to get with the programme. What if? I’ll tell you what if. We shrug and get on with life. That’s what if. We might bitch that we were cheated, but it is not worth ruining football on the back of just one, or indeed any hypothetical scenario that may never even happen. We cannot and should not try to insulate sport against mistakes being made. It is inhuman to do so and is a stone put in the shoe of the game by television and people for whom getting everything right is the be all and end all. Those people should never have been listened to. Football is more than their small, narrow vision of it. It does not benefit from the granularity of nitpicking.”

Fair enough, that’s your personal opinion, albeit expressed as fact. But I disagree that it is inhuman to try and innovate to improve things. Human history is a struggle to make things fairer and remove mistakes. Whether we should or not is an ethical question without a right or wrong answer generally. I personally am all for football being as fair as possible. It’s the reason we have laws and referees in the first place. Where we draw the line on that is also a human decision.

“Accepting things can be wrong sometimes is crucial to playing any sport, whether for participants, officials or observers. If you can’t accept that, well, you’re just going to have to lump it, because VAR is not the soothing balm you need for your agitation. Rather, it is both salt in the wound and the knife that cut it.”

Absolutely we should accept that sometimes things go wrong. But not trying to prevent them from going wrong again is completely against our nature and is bordering on insanity. Maybe you’ll just have to lump it, because maybe VAR isn’t going anywhere. What are you going to do? Stop watching football?

In wrestling a lot of the drama comes when the wrestlers break the rules. To the best of my knowledge there isn’t any form of VAR to stop it but it wouldn’t work because wrestling’s all about the entertainment. Every televised sport that I can think of has some form video or technology assistance because ultimately you want it to be as fair as possible. None without controversy, but by and large, it’s an integral part of each sport at the top level. I think football is at a point where it decides whether it’s entertainment for entertainments sake like wrestling or sport like every other professional sport. I think football is a serious sport and the players and fans deserve accurate decisions. I’d replace refs with an algorithm if it gave more accurate decisions made in good time. I don’t think it makes the game inhuman to support humans in making better decisions. If they still cock it up it’s on them and the authorities. The inhuman part is not holding them accountable.

Sorry this has been long but John deserves a proper take down for this constant moaning. Although the timing of his article with this week’s Prick of the Week is perfect. I think Dave just called you a prick, John…
Ashley (love you really) Metcalfe

…I find myself agreeing with most of what JN says about VAR apart from the optimistic prediction that next season will be its last. They have invested too much into it to ever admit the whole thing was a terrible mistake. I’m afraid the pedants have won. We are stuck with this miserable, soul-sucking abomination forever…

Instead, we must still listen to the weird justifications VAR supporters come up with to explain their odd failure to grasp what makes football so good:

“It works in other sports so it must work in football” – yes of course there are other sports where it works, because what do you know, not all sports are the same. For stop-start sports such as tennis and cricket it is ideal. It is in or out – VAR is perfect. Football is a free-flowing game where the majority of officiating decisions are subjective. It is fundamentally unsuited to VAR. ‘Ahh’, I hear the VAR supporter say, ‘but what about rugby?’ Well in case you hadn’t noticed, rugby is a dull, slow-moving game where they spend most of the time on the floor and the fans are only there for a jolly. It doesn’t matter if they make it duller.

“It’s not VAR, it’s the rules” – No!!! It is not the rules. The rules were just fine before VAR came along. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the moment they started changing the rules for the benefit of VAR rather than the sport, VAR had already failed. The rules have evolved over 150 years and there is a very good reason why handball is meant to be intentional – because anything else tends to not be fair. Offside had the simple interpretation that attackers should get the benefit of the doubt. Admittedly, assistant refs were not always perfect at applying that interpretation but that is something they could have been encouraged to improve on.

“It works in Europe.” Well actually only the Germans really think it is ok and even their fans don’t like it very much. The French absolutely hate it.

But now we have to live with VAR. Tedious, pedantic, forensic examinations of every decision. Long stoppages destroying the flow of the game. Reserved goal celebrations because nobody is quite certain if it is actually going to count. All in a futile attempt to make every decision perfect. The best we can hope for is that they find ways to reduce the involvement of VAR as much as possible. If they can somehow revert to the original mission objective of only correcting major mistakes, then some joy and spontaneity can return to the game.
Jim (THFC)

Mailbox: How much has the Premier League regressed in last decade?

Regressed how?
I was going to try avoid this subject because it seems daft to me but after reading the mailbox today I have to pipe up.

People are saying the Premier League has regressed.

How so? It’s still 20 teams, they ll still play 38 games home and away, So we can safely say its not the fixture list.

We’ve seen 5 league winners this decade compared to 3 in the previous decade so it can’t be lack of competition.

The Premier League have signed 2(?) Multi billion dollar TV deals this decade so the sponsors and viewing figures would say the league hasn’t regressed

One mailbox entry referred to the lack of identifiable core group of players at the top clubs. That’s just daft. You can name 5 players from each of the top 6 who start and have contributed massively over the last few seasons. Go on I believe in you.

I think a lot of people feel the Premier League has regressed just to over saturation. There’s only so much pizza you can eat before you’re sick of eating pizza.
Dale (Better in my day) Leeds

Rubentus
I am surely late and might get crowded out by Liverpool fans’ CL mails but I absolutely gotta ask what James, Switzerland has been smoking.

First, of all the clubs in the world, Rubentus don’t get to complain about unfairness. Porto kicked you out in the first KO tie. Deal with it.

So Pirlo is fumbling the league that this squad has been winning with their eyes closed and that too to Inter who are not really very good and yet it’s okay? The expectation was not to win CL? Sure that’ll why they bought Cristiano effin Ronaldo in his late thirties because winning CL was not the immediate priority after the usual stroll to the league title?

They had injuries? Boo hoo. After years of dominance and choosing to splash cash on Cristiano (when CL wasn’t a priority anyway, right?) why was it not spent on quality depth? It’s like all teams deal with injuries at some point.

As a manager, Pirlo isn’t fit to lace the boots of Mourinho, even in his twilight days.
The Vocal Minority (Respect man, respect)

AB-solute Contradiction
In response to the mail from Eric of Galway, I must say that in many ways I understand his frustrations regarding the confusion of supporting a non-English team in Ireland. I am a PSG fan from Dublin since the time I spent in Paris and I also anchor a huge part of my life to those special few months when I was a teenager. In a lot of ways I have never fully moved on. However, I must say that when I took the time to hear my friends out, their rationale of supporting Irish international players or players with Irish roots in English teams, did make sense in a lot of ways.

What I fail to understand however is his stance as an “AB” supporter. To define your enjoyment of the game by the dislike of another team is a backwards approach to any appreciation of sport. Furthermore to state that you will always dislike a club no matter the players, the coach, the owners or the structures in place surrounding them is akin to bigotry. In fact many of the accusations leveled at Manchester United in England could also be said of Bayern Munich in Germany so maybe young Eric doesn’t have a full appreciation of the contradiction of his current stance. Perhaps some reflection is required.
Luvurbals, Dublin