UEFA Euro 2021 But Yet Somehow Still Euro 2020 Finals

  • Thread starter Famine
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Long story short: yes, if they meet the test for violent conduct, but no if they do not.

The implementation of VAR was certainly better than it has been in the Premier League this season. I know people who've sworn off watching any live football now, because they don't know when their emotions and reactions are real any more!

Not so much. They certainly get upgraded quite regularly, as the organic parts find new ways to skirt them, but they don't seem to have any major gaps to my knowledge.

Now... I can't actually find that as a written rule. IFAB Law 12 only mentions arm/face contact once, and it's under "violent conduct":

How that's interpreted by a governing body, and how it instructs its referees to call it, is a different matter - and I think that's actually what you're talking about here with inconsistencies.

It may be that UEFA mandates across Europe, or even a body below that like IFA/FA within its nation, that the straight arm isn't a red, because it dictates that a straight arm uses negligible force compared to an elbow, therefore it's not violent conduct. I don't know, and I can't say for sure, but IFAB doesn't actually lay that down in the laws of the game. It's an interpretation of that from the law, which fits the law but which isn't specifically noted and which may differ between nations or confederations.

This also applies to the "last man" thing we've seen in this thread. It's an extremely common rule - if the defender is the last man and hoiks the opposing player down, it's a red - but it's not actually a law. IFAB only decrees that the "number and position of defenders" is taken into account; confederations and national associations almost always interpret that as last man = red.

That's actually why we hear a lot of the time of teams and players "getting away with" stuff in Europe they wouldn't in the PL (or vice versa). Both operate under IFAB's laws, but the PL is governed by the FA's interpretation of it and ECL/EL by UEFA's interpretation.

In this case it'd be UEFA's interpretation of the IFAB law, and direction to its referees - and referees aren't perfect at implementing the interpretation. All we can say is the referee, or assistant referee who was literally right there, or anyone else who reviewed it (did it go to VAR? I don't know) didn't believe so, and that's that.

Personally, I regard a shirt pull as extremely dangerous, because - even though it's brief - it can kill, in the wrong conditions, though thankfully a loss of consciousness is more common. Basically a sudden neck trauma which constricts the carotid sinus (where you put your fingers to take your neck pulse) leads to instant syncope; it's actually sometimes taught as a self-defence technique, where you slap the attacker on both sides with the edge of your hands. In some cases, particularly those with undiagnosed cardiac function issues (such as footballers Fabrice Muamba and Abdelhak Nouri, and possibly Christian Eriksen, though I'm not aware of anything coming from that just yet), combined with a high heart rate (such as during a football match), it can cause instant death, known as CiRCA.

Of course it's very rare (I am familiar with a single case in real life, and it was a youngster; Edit: two, both kids, with LongQT as an underlying for the other one), but very much a real thing - usually it's just deeply unpleasant, as anyone who's ever been yanked back by the collar will tell you! - but part of why I'd regard any deliberate action against the neck (and head) as over the line.

I fully appreciate people might not agree, and it does come down to how one interprets that line between what is violent conduct (endangering a player through a deliberate act) and what is foul play (disregarding player safety while acting).
I don't think UEFA have got that far in terms of how violent a shirt tug can be. I can't remember anyone getting sent off for a shirt tug that wasn't a goalscoring opportunity. I don't think the ref can be blamed for giving a yellow there.

I'm interested in what you think about the Portugal game offside since it's another instance where we see the rules differently.
 
Both ref's decisions were ok I would say.

Jorginho's foot was on the ball first and then slid onto Grealish. So yellow was ok although it could have been a red for dangerous play I suppose.
Chiellini did a shirt pull which is consistently awarded a yellow. So in that sense it was an ok decision, even if it was an above average dirty pull.
 
UEFA's Team of the Tournament has been released.

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UEFA's Team of the Tournament has been released.

View attachment 1067276
With neither of the top scorers? Weird.
England fans are absolutely feral, no surprise here.
Those England fans are (if they are indeed fans, and not thugs using sport as an excuse to be thugs and give them crowd cover to hide in), but it's really rather unhelpful - at best - to say England fans are.


Connectedly, Anton Ferdinand has said England should be denied host status for the 2030 World Cup due to the country's problems with racism. Curiously can't find his opinion on South Africa hosting in 2010, or Russia hosting in 2018, or Qatar in 2022, or the USA in 2026...
 
Connectedly, Anton Ferdinand has said England should be denied host status for the 2030 World Cup due to the country's problems with racism. Curiously can't find his opinion on South Africa hosting in 2010, or Russia hosting in 2018, or Qatar in 2022, or the USA in 2026...
Mmm, a black professional footballer from the UK says he thinks that his country should not host the World Cup because he believes that the UK has a problem with Racism, which you would think being a black man in the UK he has, and probably continues to have, problems with racism in his every day life. And so hosting one of the largest global multicultural event may not be sending the right message. However, because he has not spoken out in the past about other country's he does not live in, and you would assume, little to no first hand knowledge of racism in those country's, hosting the World Cup, his opinion can be dismissed out of hand. 😳

Maybe some acknowledgement of how sad it is that in 2021 a black professional footballer thinks that racism is still so bad in his own country as to consider such an option may have been the better response. As they say though, ymmv.

I think that the three players who missed penalties in the final being black has been the igniter for many racists to vent their frustrations and show their true feelings and beliefs towards black people, in sport on this occasion. Sadly, even if one or two of the players who missed a penalty were white, I am pretty sure the black player(s) who missed penalties would still be getting more negativity than the white player(s), though it may not have been as overtly racist as the current situation. Sounds like that would be a country that had a problem with racism to me. That is only speculation though obviously, but does anyone think that would not have happened!
 
Mmm, a black professional footballer from the UK says he thinks that his country should not host the World Cup because he believes that the UK has a problem with Racism, which you would think being a black man in the UK he has, and probably continues to have, problems with racism in his every day life. And so hosting one of the largest global multicultural event may not be sending the right message. However, because he has not spoken out in the past about other country's he does not live in, and you would assume, little to no first hand knowledge of racism in those country's, hosting the World Cup, his opinion can be dismissed out of hand. 😳

Maybe some acknowledgement of how sad it is that in 2021 a black professional footballer thinks that racism is still so bad in his own country as to consider such an option may have been the better response. As they say though, ymmv.

I think that the three players who missed penalties in the final being black has been the igniter for many racists to vent their frustrations and show their true feelings and beliefs towards black people, in sport on this occasion. Sadly, even if one or two of the players who missed a penalty were white, I am pretty sure the black player(s) who missed penalties would still be getting more negativity than the white player(s), though it may not have been as overtly racist as the current situation. Sounds like that would be a country that had a problem with racism to me. That is only speculation though obviously, but does anyone think that would not have happened!
This is all true, but one problem, why is it acceptable to use a small minority of idiots to tarnish the mass majority?

I have spent so much time over the last few years arguing with some people how you can't condemn all Muslims as terrorists because of a minority who are extremists...
And for sure i am not going to be silent on this either.

Some stupid idiots acted like buffoons and caused trouble, if every Englishman was involved, there would be no London left.

It is not every Englishman... many Englishmen are in the Police force and security trying to stop this, not to mention how when you slag off 'The English' that includes millions of black and Asian people who are English too....
 
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Mmm, a black professional footballer from the UK says he thinks that his country should not host the World Cup because he believes that the UK has a problem with Racism, which you would think being a black man in the UK he has, and probably continues to have, problems with racism in his every day life. And so hosting one of the largest global multicultural event may not be sending the right message. However, because he has not spoken out in the past about other country's he does not live in, and you would assume, little to no first hand knowledge of racism in those country's, hosting the World Cup, his opinion can be dismissed out of hand. 😳

Maybe some acknowledgement of how sad it is that in 2021 a black professional footballer thinks that racism is still so bad in his own country as to consider such an option may have been the better response. As they say though, ymmv.
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I can't parse half of that, but just to reiterate, South Africa (where racism was actually not only legal, but law, and where institutional racism is far from over), Russia (where ultranationalism is rife, Nazi slogans are common chants - bizarrely, given Russia's role in defeating the Nazis - and where black professional footballers are routinely racially abused from the stands), Qatar (whose world cup is literally built on the bodies of foreign slave labour), and the USA (I think the problems with race in the USA are pretty well documented) are not worth denying World Cup host status due to racism, but the United Kingdom (or England; I don't know the scope of the bid) apparently is.

And that seems rational to you?


Connectedly:

The Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) says shared data with Channel 4 news after the Euro 2020 final highlighted that more than 850,000 tweets were analysed across the whole tournament and showed:
  • 1,913 flagged as potentially abusive, specifically targeting Sancho, Saka, Rashford and Raheem Sterling.
  • 167 posts were considered to be "high-risk" abuse.

The PFA said that, while a number of these tweets were delete, the accounts have not been permanently suspended by Twitter.

"Our preliminary analysis suggests the volume of abuse flagged around the Euro 2020 final, aimed mainly at Jadon Sancho, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling, was higher than the rest of the tournament combined," the PFA added.

Twitter said it had removed more than 1,000 posts over the past 24 hours and suspended a number of accounts for violating its rules.
Given that social media is apparently a cesspit of hate and abuse (and I think we've all seen that chap who is claiming his account was hacked), a hit rate of 99.98% Tweets that were not overtly abusive - and 99.8% entirely not abusive - for a supposedly racist nation isn't quite as damning as you might think.


The reason why racism is an obvious problem in football the UK is because we pay attention to it. We watch for it, condemn it, punish it, and report and act on it. "Fans" are banned from stadia for it, and sacked from jobs for it. We hate racists and we care about getting rid of them.

Meanwhile Russian fans boo (and monkey chant, and wave bananas at) their own black players, without consequence.


We still need to get rid of that 0.02%, and we still need to find out why it's far more prevalent in football than in rugby, cricket, motorsport, or any other sport.
 
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We still need to get rid of that 0.02%, and we still need to find out why it's far more prevalent in football than in rugby, cricket, motorsport, or any other sport.
Couldn't it be due to the demographics of both the players and the fans? I mean, it's safe to say that football is far more popular than the rest of those sports and is watched by a wider spread of people.
 
Vettel used to get booed at Silverstone, pretty sure Schumacher did too, Lewis has been booed at Monza too.
Rossi's fans have been pretty mental over the years.
'Fans' are mental, when it becomes absolutely huge, it teeters on a cult, which is when it can get dangerous... look at some of Trumps supporters.
Football is monumentally huge and many clubs are totally cult like in the adoration of the fans.... this is part of it add in religion (Rangers / Celtic) and tribal territorial stuff and you have yourself a recipe for carnage.

I was reminded to other day to google the abuse Beckham got after that red card in 1998... pre twitter and he got this.

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So the Met police's deputy commissioner has said that the final could have been abandoned had the police not intervened.

I do remember that there was a moment at the start of the second half where Bjorn Kuipers went over to speak to a match delegate pitch-side, I wonder what that was about....
 
England fans are absolutely feral, no surprise here.
This happened to Jules Bianchi on the Champs Elysee avenue in Paris after a (promotional) event. Probably a prepared action, then.
 
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