Damn, flying knee to the jaw.
That looked bad.
Biggest underdog of the entire group stage
So was there a massive shift in the line right before the game?
Methinks something fowl is afoot.
Nah lol. That +1100 was a misread. Nearer those odds for a draw than a win. Was +2500 on Betfair at close.
I think the Saudis are just having a great game because theyāre more comfortable in an environment where more human rights are being violated. Itās like a form of home field advantage.
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Sharia is also the plucky underdog of forms of government. Prevailing against all odds/reason
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Did Saudi buy all the good African players from the non-qualifying teams?
I have a financial interest in the Saudis scoring points in the group stage so this is an excellent result.
Maybe Saudi Arabia used the kafala system to fill their national team
Two beautiful goals negated because the Argentinian was āoff side.ā Iām sure soccer apologists will be in shortly to explain why itās a good rule. American football needs to implement the rule too, its not fair that wide receivers can just run past the safety!
Without the off side rule those 2 beautiful goals wouldnāt have happened. Iād like to see it just applied to the foot (I understand why it isnāt) but itās arguably one of the best rule implementations in any sport.
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Maybe but thereās got to be a way to implement the spirit of the rule without the ridiculousness of oh his right toe was in this position for 14 milliseconds. And donāt get me started on off sides traps. How is engineering an off sides call fun to watch?
Before the ridiculousness of the millimeter toe we just had referee judgement calls and everyone would constantly be mad when they were wrong.
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Itās changed and been tweaked over time to implement the spirit. Generally sometimes decisions went against you and sometimes for you, on the whim of the officials. Over the season it generally evened out between what went your way (but were wrong) and vice versa. Technology is actually doing a good job in correcting the wrong decisions. Without the offside rule it would be a different and IMHO a far worse game.
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Soccer really could be so awesome. Take out the absolutely constant flopping, idiotic offsides, totally arbitrary reffing and unknown clock situation and it would be great!
The flopping is really hard to catch in real time. The ones that are obvious in a slow motion replay are less obvious to the referee in real time. I think the only way to crack down on this would be something draconian like allowing third party video review on diving calls and give a straight red to the diving player if the video review referee deems the player dove. Interestingly the NHL has something like this where if a referee misses a big call on the ice (like a goal) then a video review official can call in and say āhold up dude that was a goalā and they will sound the horn in the arena and stop play, award the goal, and keep going. It would be AWESOME if soccer adopted something like that for diving, like after a terrible dive the video review referee pushes a big button and a WOMP WOMP sound comes over the public PA and the player is straight red carded.
Idiotic offsides and arbitrary referring can be two sides of the same coin. The easiest way to get rid of bad ātechnically offsideā calls is to give the referee more freedom to declare a person to be technically offside but not practically offside, but that runs against the idea of reducing the amount of arbitrary calls.
Oh yay, itās been 4 years since I heard a good discussion of everything wrong with soccer.
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It would get old really quickly and is why it became a thing