var Page 19 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

VAR Took A Dump All Over This Vancouver Whitecaps Penalty Kick
VAR keeps hitting never-before-seen low points in ways that were hard to imagine when it was first implemented. The Vancouver Whitecaps experienced a new version of outrage during their match against the Montreal Impact on Wednesday night, when replays ruled out one of their goals, due to both the ...

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...

VAR Once Again Steals A Game-Winning Goal From Manchester City
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Manchester City were on the verge of pulling out a late victory against Tottenham at home, and then VAR stepped in to take it away....

UEFA Thankfully Won't Uphold The Dumb VAR Rule That Marred The Women's World Cup
One of the worst-received aspects of the Women’s World Cup this summer was the VAR-induced penalty kick debacle. The choice to subject goalkeepers’ feet locations to exacting scrutiny with video review, and to let penalty takers try their kicks again should VAR detect that a keeper drifted a centime...

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 ...

Yordan Alvarez And The Astros Made A Strong Case For Relegating The Orioles
In only the second-worst beatdown the Orioles have suffered at the hands of a Texas-based team in Camden Yards, the Astros ran roughshod all over Baltimore in a 23-2 win on Saturday. The hapless O’s were only allowed two innings of scoreless respite as the remaining seven included at least one run t...

Canelo Álvarez Seems To Have Lost Gennady Golovkin's Phone Number
Middleweight champion Canelo Álvarez released a statement Wednesday announcing that, for the first time since 2015, he will not be fighting his traditional bout on Mexican Independence Day weekend in September. Álvarez—who’s generally a safe bet to box on that weekend as well as Cinco de Mayo weeken...

Harvard Fires Fencing Coach Over Shady Home Sale To Recruit's Wealthy Father
Harvard University has fired longtime fencing coach Peter Brand, who was involved in an admissions scandal having to do with the extremely suspect circumstances of the sale of his home to the family of a high school junior who was later admitted to Harvard as a fencing recruit....

Soccer Idiots Agree: The USWNT Is Cool, VAR Is Not
It’s Independence Day, the day on which every American feels especially proud to be American, which also now means every taking it upon yourself, as an American, to make sure that every other American is behaving in a suitably proud way re: how American they are. In real life, this holiday mostly re...

Lionel Messi Goes Off On "Bullshit" Refereeing After Argentina Lose To Brazil
VAR has been a disaster at the Copa América this summer, and last night’s Brazil-Argentina semifinal was no different. And as evidenced by his scathing postgame comments slamming VAR and the refereeing in general after his team fell to Brazil, Lionel Messi is fed the fuck up with it....

Jason Vargas Implies That We Do Not Know The Full Story Behind The Mets' Latest Metsing
Mets pitcher Jason Vargas had one of his best starts of the season last night, holding the Phillies to just three hits and two earned runs through 6.1 innings while striking out 10. The Mets still lost the game, of course, but Vargas’s strong start apparently left him feeling a bit sassy. In the loc...

Argentine Soccer Team Orchestrates On-Field Sit-In To Protest Red Cards
In the second leg of their promotion playoff final against Alvarado, players from third-tier Argentine soccer club San Jorge de Tucumán decided to protest what they considered two unfair first-half red cards by sitting down in the middle of the field and refusing to move or play. This lasted about t...

The Women's World Cup Has A Refereeing Problem
Despite what our lovely commentariat might believe, we here at Deadspin do not have a quota of anti-VAR posts to hit. If it feels that way during the Women’s World Cup, it’s only because FIFA, through the kind of casually negligent behavior that typifies its treatment of the women’s game, has put it...

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 ...

Mickey Callaway And Jason Vargas Are Sorry That Their Actions Distracted From The Mets' General Suckiness
The Mets Metsed a lot yesterday, and in response to that Metsing, they prepared some apologies today. Sadly, they Metsed those, too....

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 Mets Are Metsing At An Alarming Rate
The high point of the Mets’ existence on Sunday, and not inconceivably of their entire season, came when the team’s Twitter account attempted to dunk on ... well, on Mets fans. Specifically those who had reacted to the posting of the day’s relatively punchless lineup with horror and disgust and pres...

Mets' Jason Vargas To Reporter: "I'll Knock You The Fuck Out, Bro"
One day after I made the mistake of complimenting the Mets on this site, they’ve gone ahead and returned to the tire-fire form that most people have gotten used to seeing on a regular basis. Today’s Mets meltdown features manager Mickey Callaway and Jason Vargas getting into it with a reporter who w...

The End Of Argentina-Scotland Was A Fucking Mess
Scotland just had to defend a 3-0 lead over the final 20 minutes of their match on Wednesday against Argentina in order to make it to the knockout stage of the World Cup. They couldn’t do it, and as a result will exit their first World Cup after just three games....