There seems to be no greater confusion than the handball law.
It has changed so many times in recent years that it has been pretty much impossible to keep up.
“I just hate the handball rule,” Alan Shearer told BBC Sport. “They have messed it up.
“They’ll say that things are better in the Premier League than they are abroad, but that doesn’t wash with me.
“It is so messed up in every single way, there is ‘deliberate’, ‘proximity’, ‘natural’, ‘unnatural’ – there are so many different ways they have to interpret things and it isn’t fit for purpose.”
Shearer did not even mention the contradictory accidental attacking handball law which automatically disallows a goal.
It created an offence for a striker which a defender would get away with.
The law’s application might not feel like it is better in the Premier League but – in terms of penalties awarded – it demonstrably is, with fewer penalties awarded on average than in any of the other major European leagues.
But that does not mean it is good.
There is a misconception that the handball law was changed for VAR, but it happened the other way around.
The International Football Association Board (Ifab) started work on redefining handball in 2014 – two years before trials of VAR began.
Those changes created a menu of justifications for handball.
When the video assistant came into the game, it was too easy to give penalties. It just required finding one clause to tick off – and there was a huge spike in spot-kicks across leagues.
VAR proved to be incompatible with the new law. It has been changed many, many times in recent seasons to try to find a solution.
Fans would love to go back to the days when handball really was a basic judgement call.
But the genie is out of the bottle.
Any change would have to be defined. And with that new definition to contend with, we would probably be no better off.
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