Rapids Flat As The Eastern Plains

Well, that was a lousy game to watch.  Colorado was disjointed, flat, and passive for 90 minutes and San Jose took advantage to get a 1-0 win.  Really the team is a bit of a mess right now, with inconsistent play all over the place and we can't seem to get up for a match at all on the road.  This is the first real challenge of Fraser's tenure, and with a tough two weeks ahead (@Minnesota in USOC play, LAFC at home, @SKC, and Seattle at home in a 10 day span) we could be in a bad spot going into Memorial Day against Nashville.  Its quite possible we'll be on a 5 game winless streak unless Fraser can turn things around quickly.

Lets talk about the elephant in the room, the non-handball call on San Jose.  First of all, I think it was a mistake for VAR official Kevin Stott to not send it down for the center ref, Tori Penso, to review.  IMO it was a clear and obvious mistake.  Its not a mistake I blame the ref for making in real-time, we're talking about the difference of an inch or so, but VAR is supposed to see these errors and fix them.

That said, we should also talk about why what seems like an obvious call is actually very difficult in this case.  Every couple of years FIFA and the IFAB (who are the ones who write the Laws of the Game) try to revise the handball rule to make it "clearer", and every time they somehow make it worse.  The current Law 12 defines a handball as, among other things, a ball that hits the hand or arm "below the bottom of the armpit".  Where's the bottom of the armpit?  Well it doesn't define that.  One of the rules of thumb floating around has been "the end of the sleeve".  So when you watch the replay, what the VAR is looking for is a clear shot that shows the ball hit below the "bottom of the armpit".  Here's the image that's been floating around since the game:

Looking at that, that appears to be low enough to be a handball.  But I went and took my own freeze frame for the moment of impact from the video.  Here's what I got:

This is a frame or two earlier than the first picture, and the ball is just slightly higher, to the point that you could argue its hitting on the sleeve, and is in that grey area of the armpit.

Now I still think its low enough that it should have been reviewed, called, and a red card given (for DOGSO-H).  But you can see that since VAR can only send it down if they think a clear and obvious error has happened and the handball rule is vague enough for their to be a grey area, this is actually a much more difficult call than it seems it should be.  And that's not because Stott is a bad ref, or that Penso is a bad ref, or that MLS has bad officials.  Its because the rules are stupid right now.  The league had a second similar issue the next day where TFC was not awarded a goal that was probably a clearer call than this one, so we'll have to see later this week if PRO makes a statement on either call.

Now all of that aside, the Rapids should not have been in a place where they needed the VAR official to make a 1-2 inch determination in order to just get a point out of San Jose.  Good teams don't leave it in the hands of the refs to make a game-deciding call.  We should have taken the game to them and won it outright.

Man of the Match: William Yarbrough.  Not many Rapids had a good game, and many of them had poor games, but Yarbrough kept us in the match and wasn't at fault on the goal.