[F101] Offside : Whats the trap???

Well lets discuss the rule which baffles the new spectators the most , the offside rule and how teams can use it for their advantage and how big a dork they look when the strategy fails.

The offside rule is there to prevent an attacker to hover around the keeper all the time waiting to receive a long ball and tap in a goal without any challenge, so fifa introduced the rule to stop soccer to become a boring longball game and prevent unimaginative teams like england( who has beckham to provide those long balls) to become the supreme power. The rule has undergone a lot of changes since its first avatar so the old schools who haven't updated themselves also gets baffled when they see the flag raised when the Wanchop was clearly behind the last defender when he received the ball. I will discuss the new version of the rule only to avoid confusion.

Well the rule is as simple as it gets :

The player interfering with play cant be ahead of the last defender when a ball is being passed.

Well so kind of confusing well lets see each term individually, a player interfering with play is normally the one who receive the pass but if a player is in position to block a defender who could stop the pass or could have been a possible recipient of pass ( remember he will distract a defender or two so that could be crucial) or in anyway have been distracting the keeper ( discretion lies with referee and assistant officials) he is deemed to be involved in play, in simpler terms if a player can alter the course of game even telepathically he is involved in play.

Now some of us would say well then Rudd van nistelrooy was offside in euro2004 when he scored against czech republic( was a great game which czech won 3-2) but no one complained, well if you see the rule in blockquotes and bold above well he was offside but then fifa says the man has to be involved in play resulting directly from the pass, for eg. in this case Robben crossed to find rudd he was in offside position(as he always is) and was running backwards, the defender headed the ball in direction of robben again( so ball didn't reach rudd and he didn't interfere) robben controlled the ball and he squared the ball for nistelrooy who now had run back and was not in offside position and tapped home a typical nistelrooy goal from what must have been 6 inches out. Well the controversies arises because the referees interpret it differently an Italian ref may have allowed the goal to stand while the English one may have been stricter and as the first ball was meant for player in offside position so he may have raised the flag before the defender headed it so play would have stopped and no one would have complained( surprisingly czech had understanding of the rule so they didnt complain) the goal was legal but a referee could have stopped play in the first play itself and noone would have complained.

The other place where the controversy may arise is if the referee was correct in judging if the player was level with last defender or not. In the modern game the striker always tries to be level with last defender who tries to step up before the ball is played and both movements happen simultaneously microseconds before the pass is made (ill talk about it in next lecture on offside traps), the margin is of millimeters in say less than a second so we should just remember that referee is human and the decision was a tough one to make before passing our judgment after seeing the frame which is freezed for 20 second or so.