Nicely worded retort. You're what, a Liverpool supporter? Got it!
Regardless, I agree the law itself is indeed, to use your quaint venacular, "bollocks".
Far too subjective imho. How can anyone really know whether the ball was directed to the hand or vice versa except the most obvious of examples.
I'm in favour of penalizing any hand-ball where the ball comes into contact with any part of the hand or arm (to just below the shoulder)
regardless of intent. As it is, we see some given and some not depending entirely on the ref's perception which, as often as not is anything but reality.
The only point of contention would then be, when an attacking player intentionally flicks the ball at or onto a defenders hand/arm, which we've all seen from time to time. The punishment for that obvious ungentlemanly conduct un-befitting of the game, (aka cheating) would be the attacker/offender gets yellow-carded. This too would be subjective so when in doubt call it hand ball.
Then this foolish "was or wasn't it hand-ball" nonsense would be a non-issue. Instead it becomes a bone of contention almost every week in one game or another.
BTW the bonus of this rule change would be more consistency in referee decisions (always a good thing), a few more penalties leading to a few more goals. Yippee.
Had I been the ref, would have almost certainly given the penalty today but if you watch the incident carefully, Pogba
uses his arm to leverage himself up in the air and CLEARLY attempts to head where he thinks the ball is going to be. In the course of that attempt, the ball makes contact with the arm. There was absolutely no deliberate attempt by the player to knock the ball away with his hand or arm for that matter and
according to the law as it is written today, that is not hand ball and therefore no penalty.
And while I'm ranting about the laws of the game and this is related to the penalty decision; in the lead up to the corner, when Jones got caught on the ball & was cleverly dispossessed by Firmino who prods the ball forward to LaLa-Land who is clearly in an offside position when the ball is played forward and who would have got to the pass were it not for Rojo's desperate defending, why did the linesman's flag not go up for offside leading to a free kick for the good guys and not a corner to the cnuts & therefore no penalty decsion? (I'm sure there's a good reason
![Annoyed :annoyed: :annoyed:](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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