In last night’s comment thread on the US v. Colombia game, there were a couple of questions about the offside ruling that disallowed an early US goal. The call was correct, but the question was what is offsides in soccer?
Offside is a field control rule. Almost every sport that involves putting a ball into a designated area (either a net or an endzone) has field control rules. Basketball has back court violations, hockey has the blue line and icing, football has line of scrimmage violations, lacrosse limits the number of players in a zone, and soccer uses offsides to control the pace, location, and styles of play.
Offsides is a multi-part test where all tests must be passed for a violation to occur. The first is that offsides can only be an infraction when Player X is on the offensive side of the field. Secondly, the ball must have been played to Player X by a teammate. The incoming pass must have originated from within the boundaries of play. Next the potentially offside player has to worry about her relative position. She is in an offside position if neither condition is met: there are two defending players (usually but not necessarily the goalie and someone else) between her forward most goal scoring body part and the goal line OR the ball is in front of her. Finally, a player in an offside position must be gaining an advantage from being in that offside position. Advantage means the ball is touched, a defender is getting bodied up, the goal keeper is getting screened etc. Advantage does not occur if the player in offside position becomes a temporary croquet wicket and allows the ball to go through her legs.
Yeah, that is complicated.
And then it gets more complicated.
When do we reset the dynamic offside on a shot? It is reset once the either the shooting team touches the ball again, or the defending team gains clear possession and can make a deliberate, intentional play on the ball. Clear as mud on the last part. The first part is easy, any touch resets the offside line, so three strands of hair, or a butt re-direction or a heel bounce or anything else is a reset of the off-side dynamic. The second part is confusing. Goalkeepers are assumed to not have clear possession of the ball unless it is either at their feet with no pressure, in their hands, or deliberately parried to a teammate far far away. A punch, an outstretched hand, a kick save that puts the ball bouncing in the bounce does not count as possession. That counts as a defensive deflection so we’re still on the offside decision from the time of the shot. Players who were in an offside position at the shot can’t get involved in play, that is why the goal was disallowed last night.
Clear as mud… if you want clarification, we’ll watch dozens of clips of close off side calls and non-calls at training seminars and spend hours debating two or three of the closest/oddest ones. The best Assistant Referees (ARs), the side refs with flags, whose job is primarily about offside, will hit 98% to 99% correctness at professional speed, and they’re getting the closest calls right by effectively sexing the chicken.
Baud
Sounds like soccer would benefit from a replay challenge system. ;-)
MattF
What I know now is that there’s a good reason I’ve never understood the soccer offsides rule.
SFAW
I seem to recall being taught that if Player Y (i.e. the player closest to being offside) is “onside” [sic] when teammate Player X contacts the ball for a pass to Player Y, then Y can rush past the second defender ahead of the ball, and not be offside. I’m assuming that “It is reset once the either the shooting team touches the ball again, ” is what makes that legit.
But I am not a
lawyersoccer/futbol ref, nor do I play one on TV, and thus may be completely clueless. (About this, that is; my cluelessness in other areas is a known commodity.)Eric U.
@Baud: replay would probably kill soccer
Richard mayhew
@Baud: that will happen after the official time is not kept on the ref’s wrist
Jon Marcus
@Eric U.: Yes, but do you see any downsides? :)
Richard mayhew
@SFAW: exactly, it is the moment of touch where the offside decision is made, not the moment of reception
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
A backcourt violation is the opposite of a offsides violation. In basketball it is perfectly legal to “cherry pick” and have an offensive player stand under the basket while the ball is in the other half of the court.
Richard mayhew
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: but the back court violation constrains the playing space
SFAW
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
But back court violations are still control-of-field-of-play rules, which was Richard’s point, I believe. Having an “offensive” player basket-hang does not benefit the team on offense. (Two separate points, I guess.) Basket-hanging is more analogous to lacrosse, but its “equivalence” is tenuous at best.
Paul in KY
Soccer would be a better game if they did away with offsides. Any game where a valid defensive move is to run up & get away from an offensive player so that player will now be behind them & thus get the offsides call is messed up, IMO.
Richard mayhew
@Paul in KY: have you ever seen a game w/o offsides? That is an experiment which happens at various low levels every couple of years. And the game becomes ugly as 22 players are trying to cover 7500 square yards instead of 3500 square yards… Lots more injuries, lot more fouls, lots more pissed off keepers. There is a reason for the rule.
Amir Khalid
@Paul in KY:
No, it wouldn’t. Setting an offside trap for an opposing forward, and then knowing precisely when to spring it, is a very finely-judged group skill for a team’s defence. It’s a contest of smarts and speed for both sides.
FlipYrWhig
@Paul in KY: I totally agree. What’s the problem this rule is trying to address? Is it that the Soccer Gods want all goals to be the result of a rolling surge of forward motion rather than a big forward kick to a waiting offensive player? I haven’t played since I was a kid. Usually the point of rules is to prevent an unfair advantage, and I don’t especially get what the unfair advantage would be if there were no such thing as offsides.
Maybe the comparable rule in basketball is “goaltending,” which seems to have started as a way to crack down on having a tall guy stand by the basket and swat away the ball when it comes down, but slowly gained a bunch of other collateral infractions, like how you can’t touch the backboard (or something like that).
Downpuppy
@SFAW: 3 second calls are more like offsides.
Paul in KY
@Richard mayhew: Do you think it would work that way at the elite level? I’m guessing you do. Still hate the ‘play’ of running up to ensure the offensive player is now offsides.
Eric U.
I’ve heard that they did away with offsides during one World Cup, and it was boring
FlipYrWhig
@Downpuppy: good point — part of the aversion to “cherry-picking” that a lot of these goal sports appear to have codified.
FlipYrWhig
@Eric U.: That’s the risk: offsides or not, it’s still soccer! ZING
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: Doesn’t look too hard to me. Just have to see when the ball is being kicked by the opposition & then make sure the most forward offensive player is behind you. To me, the skill is being the offensive player & not getting caught by the dastardly defensive trickery.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: Richard said something about more injuries/fouls occurring when having to use more of the (admittedly very large) field.
chopper
please god, what is the rest of that sentence?? I NEED TO KNOW
Adam C
@FlipYrWhig: What the offside rule provides is the freedom for defenders to advance to the half and potentially contribute to offense. Without offside, they’d be trapped at their own 18 yard line for fear of a long pass. The game would become very static, with little open space and players spread too far apart for flexible rotations.
Amir Khalid
@FlipYrWhig:
This is considered the crudest, most tactically unsophisticated approach to attacking. It is boring to watch, and it’s not okay for a team to adopt unless its players are very young. You want to discourage older players, and certainly those at the upper levels of the sport, from ever doing this.
richard mayhew
@chopper: Should have been a period and not a comma, will be updated soon.
Sexing a chicken is a reference to being able to make a good decision at high accuracy and high speed without being able to explain exactly how the decision was made.
Baby chickens at commercial hatcheries need to be sorted into males and females. Males get fattened up for roasters, and females become egg layers. There is very little difference between genders. However expert chicken sex sorters can extremely accurately tell which sex a chick is without being able to verbalize how they know it.
The same applies to offside decisions where 1000 frame a second video is confirming referee judgement but the ref can’t quite tell you what body part prompted their call.
Eric U.
@Paul in KY: I don’t watch a lot of soccer, but the offsides trap is not without risks. So the offense and the defense can both do interesting things related to this rule.
Yes, I just said “both sides do it”
Amir Khalid
@Paul in KY:
Try it against Luis Suarez.
whiskeyjuvenile
soccer would be vastly improved if they gave yellow cards for arguing with a referee
SFAW
@Downpuppy:
Perhaps, but JAFRS was addressing back court, not three-second.
Punchy
Now if that had been goats instead, Mickey Kaus would have been all over that.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: Point taken.
Redshift
@richard mayhew:
I don’t know if it’s still true, but I remember reading some years ago that chicken sexer was rated the worst job in the country.
Gin & Tonic
@richard mayhew: In many hatcheries most male chicks, being irrelevant to egg production, are immediately killed . I think having the AR immediately execute the offside player would make soccer a more interesting game.
SP
The Morgan goal was a totally busted offside trap. The two defenders closest to her moved forward simultaneously to put her offside, and thought they had done so, they stopped playing and both raised their arms looking for a call. Unfortunately on the other side of the box there were three defenders at least a few yards closer to the goal so it wasn’t even a close offside call. Good two person coordination, bad 6 person coordination.
I think if you got rid of offside you’d have to make the goal smaller- 1 on 1 in soccer is a huge advantage to the attacker, unlike other sports like hockey or basketball.
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
Could you then substitute the deceased forward, or would the team have to lose one forward per offside call?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@SFAW: That’s my understanding of the rule – if an offensive player is onside when the pass is made, she can rush ahead of the defensive player into space before the ball actually gets ahead of her. But, she has to be onside (even with or further from the goal line than the second deepest defender) when the pass is made. It’s complicated to describe but 99 percent of the time that’s enough information to make the correct call so in practice it’s generally not that complicated. It does require snap judgments in real time but the same can be said for many sports calls.
Redshift
@Paul in KY: I don’t watch much soccer, but I’m convinced hockey would be incredibly boring without offsides rules. Clusters around the goals and lots of long passes, and the occasional bit of excitement when one team risks breaking the pattern.
Paul in KY
@SP: That was my nefarious scheme to get more scoring into this game. Curses!! You are on to me!
SP
The multiple aspects of the rule make it sound complicated but it doesn’t seem that hard, and the replays they show on TV with the greyed-out illegal area that make it immediately clear whether or not the call was correct. AR stays even with the last defender so they have a line of sight straight across the allowed area, and at the instant the ball is played forward they see if any attacker is past the line.
Richard Mayhew
@SP: At higher levels of play, it is slightly more complicated as Player A, B and C can be in an offside position while Player D runs from an on-side position, collects the ball and buries it in the back of the net. Most of the time, that is a good goal unless Player A or B or C interfered with the goalie or the defenders who had a legitimate chance of rotating over to challenge D. But for most games, your description is good enough to not get the AR chased after the game.
Lee
My girls referee the younger levels. U9 is a &#^$%$ disaster for refs. Not because of the players, because of the parents.
Parents are absolutely convinced that know exactly the rules for offsides and will just because the AR is in the right spot to determine if offsides occurs or not will not deter them from having a complete meltdown if they think the AR is wrong.
FlipYrWhig
@Amir Khalid: I find it odd that it would be considered so distasteful. Is part of it that if players were allowed to camp by the goal then defenders would have the job of pushing them away, and then you’d get a bunch of hand to hand combat? It seems a bit like how in U.S. football the forward pass used to be illegal. Different sports seem to want to encourage different kinds of player movements, particularly this flowing, amoeba-ish style of motion that’s more like rugby or ultimate frisbee.
SP
@Richard Mayhew 37: How would the AR position in that case? Stay even with the last defender, or track the forward most attacker? I think it’s still the defender, just noting who is offside and ignoring them unless they play a role in the play.
Lee
@FlipYrWhig:
Part of the reason is because it is just dull to watch and play. The teams could just long ball it back and forth hoping for a break away.
I think it would be similar to watching an American football game made up of nothing but punts.
SP
@Lee: An American football game of nothing but punts, with the change that the kicking team could level the receiving team to recover the punt themselves. Which I think was the premise of the XFL.
SFAW
@Paul in KY:
Possible alternative method: shrink the ball to around 2.5 inch diameter. Then, because it would be a little small for feet-only, give the players a type of basket to throw and catch – maybe call it a “crosse.” Shrink the size of the goal. Allow frequent substitutions.
Give it an unofficial name, like “baggataway,” so that confusion is reduced.
You could probably get the scores up around 10 or 20 goals per side.
Problem solved!
Richard mayhew
@SP: anchor on 2nd to last at the point of touch, haul ass to landing zone, be aware of a,b,c see if D gets ball. If D, reset offside and make next decision If a,b, or ,c flag up, wait for whistle. If D 1 touches ball into back of net determine in conjunction with Center ref if a or b or c interfered with defense/keeper, if yes no goal if no good goal
different-church-lady
@SFAW: Freeze the field into a sheet of ice…
Amir Khalid
@FlipYrWhig:
Another thing about the offside rule is that by discouraging forwards from parking themselves in the penalty area, it also lessens the urge for defences to “park the bus in front of goal” — the just-as-unwatchable counterpart to the unsophisticated attacking tactic you describe in comment #14.
SFAW
@different-church-lady:
Paul in KY wanted MORE goals, not less/fewer. (Well, OK, maybe they’re about equal, but still.)
Plus, one would probably have to learn how to speak Canuck or Russki.
ploeg
@Richard Mayhew: Yeah, but offsides does seem to be more complicated to explain than to see. Also, players who are paying attention aren’t going to allow themselves to be in an offsides position very often because that’s just asking for trouble, and that makes the AR’s job a little easier.
Snarki, child of Loki
The offside rule mostly applies when the ball is at ground level. When it gets kicked up in the air, you have to use the “infield fly” rule, which is almost as complicated.
VFX Lurker
@richard mayhew:
This may have been true in the past, but modern egg factories now cull the male chicks instead of raising them for meat. Today’s meat and egg factories rely on different breeds of chicken for meat and egg production, so the meat factory has no use for the unwanted male chicks of the egg factory.
different-church-lady
@SFAW:
La-FLUUUER
magurakurin
@Eric U.:
How did they know? It’s as boring as paint drying with the offsides rule. Ooops, did I say that out loud? I meant in a nice way, though.
SP
@Richard mayhew: That’s interesting- so if D, who was onside, receives the ball, that resets it? So could D then pass to A, B, or C even though they were offside at the time of pass to D?
magurakurin
@Lee:
uhh, isn’t that what most American football games are anyway? cough****rugby****cough world cupcough september baby****cough
SFAW
@different-church-lady:
None o’ that Frog shit, it’s Canuck, dagnabit
SFAW
@SP:
“The party of the first part shall be known as the party of the first part.”
Omnes Omnibus
@magurakurin: Yes, a good portion of kicks in rugby are offensive moves.
low-tech cyclist
@SFAW: You can’t fool me, there ain’t no Sanity Clause.
raven
@low-tech cyclist: swordfish
cmorenc
@Richard Mayhew:
Usually your explanations of both health insurance and soccer are very clear, but your attempted explanation of soccer’s offside rule reads more like the fine-print legalese in an stock prospectus.
Here, I’ll take a cut at it: Let’s say team A is playing against opposing team B. A player on team A commits an offside violation when BOTH of the following are true:
1) player A was in an offside position when the ball was last touched by ANY of his teammates (“touch” includes accidental deflections) AND
2) player A becomes actively involved in trying to play the ball by either touching it himself, or interfering with an opponent’s ability to play it. It’s not a violation to merely be in an offside position – active involvement with play on the ball or interference with an opponent’s attempt to do same is also required.
THAT’S IT! Well, ok that’s not all there is to it: what do “offside position” and “active involvement/interference with an opponent” mean?
Offside position: A player is in an offside position (which again by itself is not a rules violation) when ALL of the following three conditions are true:
1) player A is in opponent B’s half of the field (i.e. the end where team A can score a goal in their favor): AND
2) player A was ahead of the ball when last touched by a teammate anywhere on the field; AND
2) player A was ahead of the second-to last defender, i.e. the second-closest player on team B to B’s defensive goal.
Notice that neither the worlds “goalkeeper” nor “field player” are mentioned – because it’s irrelevant for purposes of the rule whether either the momentarily last (rear-most) or second-to-last (second rear-most) defender are a goalkeeper or a field player. Most of the time, the goalkeeper will be positioned behind all his or her team-mates, but this is irrelevant for purposes of how the offside rule actually works.
Actively involved means:
– actually touching the ball OR
– interfering with an opponent who is trying to play the ball, whether by physical contact with the opponent or otherwise blocking the opponent’s ability to reach the ball, or by actively, immediately attempting to distract them (merely being nearby where the opponent can see that you would be in a dangerously promising attacking position if you were onside is not sufficient here – it requires some sort of active attempt to distract e.g. by yelling at the opponent).
ONE OTHER CAVEAT: if a defender actually plays the ball (i.e. it’s not merely an uncontrolled deflection off the defender) to an opponent who would otherwise have been offside – the opponent can then legally touch or play it.
SFAW
@low-tech cyclist:
Drat!
magurakurin
@Omnes Omnibus: I love it when they kick it to themselves. That Leigh Halfpenny from Wales is just a madman when he does that. He rushes headlong into a crowd jumps up high with out any regard for his personal safety.
Omnes Omnibus
@magurakurin: I used to like doing little pop kicks that I recovered in the air. Ii was a way to get around an opposing player without risk of being tackled.
Brendan in Charlotte
@SP: As long as A, B, or C are not offsides in relation to D. Once D touches the ball, offsides resets again
Amir Khalid
You Americans and your “offsides”. It’s offside, no plural.
different-church-lady
@Amir Khalid: OK, got it, no plural. Can we go back to not caring now?
Richard mayhew
@SP: yes, new decision to determine if a b c are ok
Amir Khalid
@different-church-lady:
You could, I suppose. For us football fans, this is a very serious matter.
magurakurin
@Omnes Omnibus: I have great respect for anyone who has/had the courage to play rugby in any capacity at all. I really enjoy watching it, but there is no way I could have ever actually played it.
Omnes Omnibus
@magurakurin: I was young and dumb.
magurakurin
@Omnes Omnibus: I was young and dumb once too, but I smoked weed, drank beer and played the drums…..rugby, no way.
MobiusKlein
Many of the indoor soccer variants don’t have offside rules. My daughter played in a winter league, on a basketball court with five on a side. Was a higher scoring, faster pace kind of play.
pseudonymous in nc
@FlipYrWhig:
Goal hanging/scrounging. If you watch kids play matches with no offside, then the natural state of play becomes a forward loitering in the box waiting for balls to be hoofed upfield, who in turn needs to be marked by a defender. Not pretty. A bit like an NFL where the only passing play is a Hail Mary.
The offside rule for the first quarter of the twentieth century was actually more restrictive.
There’s now a World Cup tradition in America of passing judgement on rules you don’t understand in sports you don’t understand. Ah well, it shows you’re paying attention.
Paul in KY
@SFAW: I have thought of a game I call ‘Voccer’. Basically just like soccer, with exception that anytime the ball is shoulder height or higher, the offensive player can use their arms to strike the ball. Defenders could also use arms to block in this situation.
If anyone takes this and runs with it, please credit me :-)
lethargytartare
@pseudonymous in nc:
you forgot the most important part of the tradition – they also have to claim they don’t care about soccer after actively seeking out people discussing soccer.
Amir Khalid
@Paul in KY:
I’m not sure “credit” is the right word. Last thing you need in football is an outbreak of Hand of God goals.
SFAW
@pseudonymous in nc:
That tradition has been around for a long time, especially regarding things like politics/policy. Just hadn’t been applied to soccer/futbol until recently.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
I had not seen the vid from that angle before. Pretty amazing, reminded me of US/USSR Munich 1972 hoop match. As in: how far in the bag were the refs?
BetterYeti
Thank you for explaining the role of goalie possession in the reset. Watching youth premier club soccer I’ve seen many similar goals on rebounds allowed with no call, at least in U-14 and below. In our neck of the woods, ARs are typically high school players at this level and don’t seem to have internalized this aspect of the rule.
dn
The point of the offside rule is a lot easier to understand if you recognize that its origins are exactly the same as the offside rules in rugby and American football. In rugby, which is both a kicking and running game, the offsides rule is more primitive and basically serves to prevent forward passes and upfield blocking. The point is to make the game a test of the ballcarrier’s individual speed and strength. Gridiron football and soccer are what you get when you modify the game to emphasize either running or kicking. Then the game becomes more about particular skills, and the offsides rule gets liberalized to allow more ways of using those skills, particularly by allowing forward passes under controlled circumstances. American football’s down-and-distance rules create an organizing principle of discrete “plays” into which the forward pass can be neatly incorporated, but soccer retains the free-flowing aspect of rugby and so the offsides rule appears much more baffling – but it’s still the same rule at its core.
Amir Khalid
@SFAW:
Peter Shilton’s a foot taller than Diego Maradona, and as a keeper had the right to use his hands. There’s just no legal way Maradona could have beat him to the ball. But then it was the other goal that won Argentina the match — the one Maradona scored by dribbling past five England players and unleashing a shot Shilton could never have stopped.
different-church-lady
@pseudonymous in nc:
We just want you to leave us alone to enjoy the sports we like. Quit insisting we’re missing something by not embracing “football” and we’ll quit with the petty insults.
Tripod
Watch a set piece (corner or freekick) into the box. Particularly in the Men’s game – a bunch of 6ft+, 200lb+, PED users hammering on each other is not a good dynamic, and generates a lot of head injuries.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: It would be legal, as long as ball was shoulder height (to striking player) or higher.
I guess Maradona would have been a natural at Voccer :-)
raven
OK, back to our regularly scheduled freakout:
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday handed President Barack Obama the biggest legislative victory of his second term, with a dramatic vote clearing the way for major trade agreements with Pacific Rim nations and the European Union.
Poopyman
@raven: Well of course it did. The machine will not be denied.
burnspbesq
@magurakurin:
I’m not sure there are any plays in rugby that don’t involve reckless disregard for one’s own safety.
Handball (the team game that you see once every four years when NBC has time to fill in its Olympics coverage) is almost as bad. I played both at club level (rugby in college and handball in law school), and I got beaten up much worse in handball.
FlipYrWhig
@Lee: I think a sport that was basically a bunch of US football kickoff plays only without the ability to control the ball with your hands sounds… kind of cool. But at least the discussion here helped me see what the offsides rule is trying to eliminate.
Along related lines, I’ve been curious about why basketball mandated that the ball be bounced as it’s advanced toward the goal. It’d be a much different sport if you could just tuck the ball under your arm and run down the court before shooting. Also, if Naismith had made the goal 12 feet high instead of 10, think of how that would have given rise to a whole different kind of play…
trollhattan
In case the thread yet lives, in yesterday’s second half a Colombia player kicked the ball back to the goalie who, while within the box controlled it it with her feet and then picked it up and kicked away. Soccer daughter pointed out (with vigor) that was illegal, at least it is in her league.
What’s the FIFA rule?
Mike J
@trollhattan: Can’t pick it up on a back pass. Keeps the team ahead from stalling by having keeper pick it up with no way for other team to steal it.
Keeper *can* pick it up if you head it back, but it is rarely done on purpose, due to control not being as good, risking an own goal.
lethargytartare
@different-church-lady:
I must have missed all the soccer fans who jumped into the Stanley Cup Playoff threads to talk about how hockey offsides was stupid, incomprehensible, and ruining a sport they didn’t care about.
lethargytartare
@trollhattan:
as noted, it’s illegal in all FIFA sanctioned leagues/events. The referree has wide latitude, however, in judging whether the ball was actually played to the keeper, or merely deflected by a teammate.
I gasped at the play you’re talking initially as well, but on review it was pretty clearly an unintentional deflection to the keeper and the Ref got it right, IMO.
trollhattan
@Mike J: @lethargytartare:
Thanks to you both. Haven’t erased the match from the DVR yet, so will review the play leading to the non-call with soccer daughter in light of this added insight. She’s begun reffing munchkin soccer as well as still playing yoot soccer, and needs to continue learning the difference between rules and opinions (of which she is blessed with a few), as well as when they blend into a smoothie of incomprehensibility.
lowercase steve
It sounds like simply doing away with the offside rule would be no good. So are there any proposals to reform/simplify it that still solve the problem but do so without introducing all sorts of confusion/doubt/expensive training?
Richard mayhew
@lowercase steve: for the attacker, the coaching instruction is already clear… Stay aware and even with 2nd to last.
justawriter
How about a shot clock? Sixty or 90 seconds of possession without a shot on goal and the other team gets a corner kick. Or just have the penalty shootout come at the start of the game and be done with it.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
Shilton or not, the “last” angle showed the ball changing direction, and it sure didn’t hit Maradona’s head. And considering the previous angle showed what appeared to be his hand at “relatively” six feet up (Maradona being only 5-8, if I recall), then it was pretty clear that he thought he was playing Voccer.
SFAW
@justawriter:
What would be interesting would be combining World Cup soccer with Game of Thrones. Probably not a great long-term plan, but the first one would be extremely interesting, I’m guessing. Not sure where to get a dragon, however.
Amir Khalid
@SFAW:
Maradona’s 5’4″, Shilton’s 6’4″. It’s obvious from the replays hat Maradona handled the ball. I think he admitted it himself, years after the fact.
encephalopath
What bothered me last night was the play-by-play announcer guy saying that the save by the Colombia keeper was meaningless because Abby was in an offside position.
I was yelling at the teevee, “Do you even know the rules to this game?”
If the keeper didn’t make that save it would have been a goal because Abby wouldn’t have played the ball and just been a non-involved player standing in an offside position.
John Strong is pretty much the only announcer in any of the crews that I can stand to listen to.
Ecks
@Amir Khalid: This is where the phrase “hand of God” came from. Diego responded to a question about it by saying “it was the hand of God”.
burnspbesq
@encephalopath:
The Colombian keeper was having a hell of a match before she got sent off–especially when you consider that she’s a 21-year-old who didn’t even make third team All-ACC in i2014.
Heliopause
And why it’s an imbecilic rule. I occasionally enjoy soccer, but that enjoyment is curtailed by this stupid rule, which often punishes creative and aggressive offense because a defender ran into a bad defensive position at the last moment, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally on account of being a shitty defender. Either way they still are rewarded. For being in the “wrong” position. Hockey’s offside rule makes vastly more sense.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
You and I are violently in agreement.
Morfydd
@cmorenc: Thank you – that was quite a clear explanation! Isn’t one more thing necessary – that the passer is in her own backfield – or am I still misunderstanding?
J R in WV
Football is what Ton Brady is in trouble for deflating to an illegal extent.
[ He is gonna claim he had nothing to do with it, but he is the guy handling the ball on every play, the guy who benefits every play from a tiny teensy bit softer ball that is easier to grip firmly for the throw. I shed no tears for him, it was probably his idea the whole time. There is no way he didn’t know his ball was better for him than legal balls. ]
I dunno what the rest of you guys are talking about. Futbol? Soccer? Rugby? sticks and skates!?!? Whut… LaCrosse – sticks and no skates I think. Soccer with clubs sounds good.
I’m kidding, but I don’t know enough about it to appreciate it, and the scoring is way too low for me to enjoy, even if I did know the rules. I’ve spent 50 years learning American Gridiron Football rules, too late now to change.