epl Page 16 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Manager Ascends To New Level Of Consciousness, Makes Completely Logical Connection Between The Handball Rule And Brexit
The modern discourse is a never-ending cascade of Expanding Brain memes. Everyone plays their part, and when Deadspin is doing its job well, we provide takes that belong to one of the latter panels, ones hopefully more sophisticated than this but less out-there than this. Proving that our angle on t...

The New Handball Rule Is The Cold, VAR Is Cancer
For the second time in as many weeks of the new Premier League season, the biggest story from the weekend was another ruinously stupid imposition of VAR. The only thing more tiring than having to write the umpteenth anti-VAR post is having to witness video replay poison this wonderful sport from wee...

Making Pass Interference Reviewable Isn't Going To Make It Any Clearer
The play above was flagged. If you didn’t watch—and, dear reader, I sincerely hope you had something better to do last night than watch a Bengals-Skins preseason game into the fourth quarter—can you guess what the call was? Can you guess which player was flagged? More to the point, can you guess wha...

VAR Is Turning Everyone Into Cops
The opening weekend of the Premier League season was in some ways bittersweet—the sweetness provided by the return of the best league in the world, the bitterness from the sad end of England’s noble resistance to the scourge of VAR. To anyone expecting to witness the inherently corrosive effects of ...

Naked Idiot On The Field Rings In The New Premier League Season With A Dong
After a short summer break, the Premier League is back. Liverpool hosted Norwich City in the first match of the season today in a game that featured five goals, several wondrous feats of athleticism, and one pitch invader who made it onto the field just long enough to show the world his dick and ass...

The Start Of The Premier League Means The Start Of Manager-Sacking Season
The Premier League begins Friday. By Sunday, at least one manager will be rumored to be in trouble “if results do not improve.”...

Harry Maguire Is The Best Manchester United Can Do
The fee itself, as gargantuan as it is, isn’t really an issue. Manchester United are one of the few clubs in the sport for which money truly is no object, and so their decision to break the defender transfer record is no cause for alarm. If there is an issue with the Red Devils paying Leicester City...

Christian Pulisic Scores First Two Of What Are Sure To Be Hundreds Of Chelsea Goals
The start of Christian Pulisic’s first Premier League season is just 10 days away, though the former Wonderteen has only spent a few weeks with Chelsea after the USMNT lost the Gold Cup final. Has he had time to get up to speed and prepare for a grueling campaign? With the obvious caveat that presea...

Trevor Bauer Knows He Could Just Not Pitch To Max Kepler, Right?
The Minnesota Twins are socking dingers at a historic pace, and the individual that is currently leading everyone on the roster in that stat is Max Kepler. With that knowledge, it shouldn’t be a complete surprise that he added a couple more in a 6-2 win over the Indians on Saturday, especially when ...

NBA Set To Add Coach's Challenges To Review System Next Season
According to a memo reportedly sent Friday morning, the NBA will be experimenting with adding a coach’s challenge to its current replay review system. The trial will begin with summer league basketball next month, but the league “anticipates using the rule during the 2019-20 regular season as part o...

The Cubs Fell Ass Backwards Into A Very Dumb Double Play
I don’t know why Javy Baez (or whoever’s giving him signals) would have so much faith that a pitcher making only his third plate appearance in the major leagues would be able to hold up his end of the suicide squeeze, but the overconfidence of Baez and the pure stupidity of Willson Contreras over on...

Almost Every Penalty Kick Save Ever Is Illegal Now And It's A Mess
The idea, which is not an unreasonable one on its face, is to “get it right.” The less inspiring extension of that is “to avoid something horribly embarrassing.” There are examples that spring to mind when it comes to justifying VAR’s existence—the people in charge are probably thinking of moments ...

VAR Has One Job, And It's Failing Miserably At It
The most common complaint against VAR—or any form of video review in sports—in one of aesthetics. If referees insist on stopping the game for several minutes to double check every key play, the thinking goes, all the drama and intensity and emotion of the biggest moments will be lost, and the celebr...

The NFL's New Pass Interference Replay Rule Is Going To Be Pretty Chaotic
The NFL’s competition committee issued its recommendations for how instant replay for pass interference will work, based on the rule that had been approved in March. On one hand, some relatively prudent judgement has been ironed into the standards the league will use to review and overturn pass inte...

The Women's World Cup Has Already Been Marred By Some Corny VAR Bullshit
There is no shortage of arguments to be made against the proliferation of replay review in soccer, and I won’t bog down this blog post with points we’ve already made on the site many times over. Besides, the argument against the VAR decision from today’s Women’s World Cup opening match between Franc...

Max Kepler Kept Calling Trevor Bauer's Bluff
Twins outfielder Max Kepler was fantastic in Thursday’s 5-4 win over Cleveland as he went 4-for-4 with three home runs and a walk. There are two ways to look at this performance, and they’re not mutually exclusive. You could say that Kepler had a hell of a night, and you could say that opposing pitc...

Nobody Has It Better Than Liverpool
Along the vast spectrum of possible states a soccer club could exist in, there is a vanishingly small patch that, for my tastes, qualifies as ideal....

White Sox Turn Ho-Hum, Unsatisfying Triple Play
You’d think anything as rare and unlikely as a triple play would include plenty of thrills and chills, possibly one or two spills, even the odd Phil. Back in August the Rangers turned a triple play that could be described as “pretty cool.” Last April the Mariners turned one on a brain goof that a pe...

Be Horrified By Manchester City For The Right Reasons
On Saturday, Watford were set alight and consumed by flames in the latest sacrificial ritual attesting to the almighty powers of Manchester City. The smoke from that immolation announced City as champions of the F.A. Cup, winners of the first domestic treble in English soccer history, and legitimate...