This season's premier league operates under the same ruleset as last year's.
Oh my sweet summer child…
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The ever-changing, confusing, and consistenly unfit for purpose handball rule. A potted history:
The handball rule started life as a rule designed to stop players using their hands to gain an advantage. The criterea was that any deliberate use of the hands was a foul. This recognised the fact that football players generally had hands, and that sometimes they would accidentally get hit with the ball. However, how do you judge intent? Referees can't read minds. If a defender stands with their arms out and a goalbound shot hits their arm, is that deliberate? But sometimes your arms do just kind of flap about when you're playing sport - it's part of keeping your balance. Something needed to be done!
So, referees started taking into account whether the arm was in a natural position (although at times it seemed that they only had a vague understanding of how human beings worked) as well as things like how far the ball had travelled before striking the arm, and how fast it was travelling. But this wasn't enough. There was now a more nuanced approach, but it was being applied by human beings of varying competence, so the rules needed to be tweaked again. The word deliberate was removed. So now every time the ball hit a hand or arm it was a handball. This lead to a number of shockingly unfair penalties, where if an attacking player was good enough they could just flick the ball at a defender that was tightly marking them and hope that it brushed their hand, and if it did, they were rewarded with a set-piece that had an 80% likelihood of resulting in a goal. This began to undermine the whole game, as defending became impossible, and the surest way to score a goal became to actually just boot or flick the ball at any defender who happened to be in the penalty area. This happened at the same time as the introduction of VAR, so it was also easier to check whether or not the ball had brushed that hapless defender's pinky.
Things changed again. The scorched earth approach of treating every brush of the hand as a handball was dialled back. Now referees were issued with pictures of players in unnatural body positions. Yes, I know how that sounds. Following this, the most reliable way of defending became standing with your arms behind your back. This is a ridiculous and difficult way to play a sport that involves running about and quick changes of direction, but there you go. Interpretation of intent came back into the picture, but under the double scrutiny of VAR. Having another pair of eyes to judge a situation, one with the benefit of slow motion and a few different camera angles should have made things better, right? Wrong. In most normal walks of life, having a few people judge a situation and come to a consensus should mean that there is more chance of coming to a sensible decision, but when you're talking about referees, it just means there's more chance that one of the people involved is a madman with a monstrous ego, who overrides everyone else's opinion. This is true in other walks of life as well, of course, but with referees, if you get two of them in a room, it's virtually guaranteed that one of them will be nuts. Interpretation of intent is currently more all-over-the-place than it's ever been.
With the art of defending ruined by the handball rule, the lawmakers moved onto the attacking side of things. When the rule was that accidental handballs weren't free-kicks, it was possible to legally score with your hand. If the ball was blasted into an attacker's hand and rebounded into the goal, that was a goal. It seems unfair, doesn't it? So they changed the rule so that if an attacking player handles the ball in the act of scoring a goal, or the immediate build-up to that goal, the goal would be disallowed. Okay, that seems fine until you give it a few second's thought. It's only the scorer who can be penalised, so you can have one attacker accidentally deflect the ball with their hand, sending the goalkeeper in the wrong direction, and another player tap the ball in, and that's fine. Attacker's arms don't seem to need to be in a natural position either - for some reason that only gets applied to defenders. Weirder than this though, you can have a situation where an attacker might accidentally control the ball with their arm before having a shot. If the shot is saved and tipped behind for a corner, the attacking team is not penalised, and they have the chance to score from the resulting corner. If the ball goes in, the goal is disallowed and the defending team gets a free-kick. So there's a weird incentive for the keeper to let the ball go in and hope that the handball is given.
I haven't even mentioned which part of the arm is considered a handball. That changes from time to time, but at the moment it's below the t-shirt sleeve. So do players in long sleeves get to use their entire arm? No, but then the referee has to guess. Not all kits have the same length sleeves anyway. Oh and another thing - there was a rule introduced last season that if the ball hits a defender's arm that they are using to support themselves on the ground while sliding that wasn't a handball, but that rule got reworded this season so now it is a handball if it's adjudged to be deliberate (how?) so you get situations like the penalty that Portugal got against Uruguay the other day.
That's a lot of rule-changes eh? I must be referencing the whole history of football, right? No, my timeline for this whole rant starts in 2018. The handball rule changes every single season, and the guidelines on how to interpret it change during the course of the season itself on average twice each season. This is just one rule. A post about the offside rule would have been twice as long. If audiences can cope with that, they can cope with Overwatch patches.
don't @ me, @ MPH instead because I think he agrees hahahaha t(-_-t)
