243’2023 (2023-08-31) – Thursday
Today, I learned about:
How exciting sports at top level can be. Sometimes, it is impossible to judge who won the competition and who was only runner up. Some say that we should stop there and give the winner’s award to both, but others think that we should apply measures to find out if one of those athletes was just slightly better than the other and thus win the sole gold medal.
You have probably heard and maybe seen that this month we saw a new champion in women’s football, Spain, who beat England in the final. But before that, we also saw that on three occasions the winner of the match had to be decided in the penalty shootout, because both teams could not be separated, having made the equal amount of goals during the 120 min of normal play.
In the first of those three games, between Sweden and USA, in the round of 16, the decision came when both teams had scored the same number of goals, but where Sweden still had one more chance to win the game. It was then that the Swedish player Lina Hurtig kicked the ball, the US goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher touched it, but not sufficiently to impede it from passing the goal line, with the least possible measure, only possible to judge because of the video recording system called VAR (Video assistant referee). That is the situation you can see in the photos.
A video clip from the match can be found in reference #1 below. You may remember that I already talked about VAR five years ago, in my post 224’2018 (2018-08-12) .
By the way, the Swedish team finished third in the competition, but in sequence was rewarded with the top spot in the Fifa ranking of all nations. Grattis, tjejer!
Men’s World Cup final 1966
In the final of the 1966 Fifa World Cup, held at Wembley stadium in London, the match between England and West Germany, was tied at 2-2 during overtime, when Geoff Hurst shot the ball into the crossbar and the question is if the ball did make it inside or not. The referee decided it was a goal, a very questionable decision. If VAR had existed then, how would the outcome have been?. See also reference #2 below.
To be continued …
That’s what I learned in school today!
Ref.:
What did you learn in School today? 