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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely ridiculous. Unless you want defenders to run around with their hands on their backs, what's the point? Were teams ever really robbed of goals and titles by unintentional handball? Now there will be titles awarded to those winning the penalty lottery instead. I expect this will be changed back in the coming seasons.

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O, yes, handplay has been crucial in many matches and the correctness in awarding a kick or not is a favorite passtime for many fans discussing historical games.

My suspicion is that it will open the game because teams would prefer to attack and keep the ball away from the danger zone. If penalty kicks become to successful though, FIFA might decide to make it more difficult for the kicker instead of going back to the previous chaos. Examples are:

1. if the goalkeeper reflects the ball, nobody can approach it and try again.

2. the goalkeeper could be allowed to leave the goal line and meet the ball.

3. the goals could be made narrower.

I guess rules will be changed, too, but some pro footballers also are fairly good actors, and can intentionally place their arms in the ball’s trajectory so that it looks unintentionally (one way to get there is by not moving it out of the way)

What surprises me is that, for the VAR, they didn’t do what was done in other sports (tennis, field hockey, cricket): only review actions on request by a team (or the referees), and give each team a limited number of times their requests can be rejected.

IIRC, American football has that now, too, after a period in which about every play got reviewed.

I sort of get the argument for not having the rule based on intent - the game's faster than it's ever been, and even with VAR reviewing it, it's nigh impossible to determine intent. At least this gives some clarity to the refs and players. I see it as similar in a way to players going down like a sack of bricks with a light (But legitimate) foul - it's a way to clearly signal to the ref that contact was made (as well as, you know, get a pen) in a game with such tiny margins at the highest level of play.

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