The laws of football

I had the dubious pleasure of running the line for my younger son’s under 18 football match recently.

The opposition were winning. On the side I heard the coach planning his substitutions, telling the player about to go on to have a word with their number six.

To paraphrase. ‘Make sure he goes down injured to waste time’.

Sure enough, within a minute he was on the ground after an innocuous challenge. That wasn’t enough to stay down for, so up he got only to take an apparently more serious fall soon after. The referee had no choice but to stop the game and eventually he was back on his feet as though nothing had ever happened.

Then the ball ran through to the keeper. ‘Tumble’ came the cry from the side line and more time was chewed up as he fell to the ground.

In my position running up and down the line, most of the offside situations were relatively straight forward. However, this is an impossible job to do properly. When it’s a really close decision and the ball’s being moved quickly the linesperson can’t accurately assess the situation. You need to be in two places at once and even Superman would struggle with that. If VAR can’t be sure then what chance does somebody with a flag have?

No longer do we give benefit of the doubt to the striker and I wonder what the purpose of the offside rule is. Presumably it deters goal hanging but applying it from the halfway line is excessive. Well worked goals get disallowed by small margins. Allow clear daylight between a striker and defender. Give fans more action.

Returning to Mr. Tumble, the goalkeeper. A rule is already in place to deal with that. Law 12 states that an indirect free kick is awarded if a goalkeeper controls the ball with his hand / arm for more then six seconds before releasing it. That rule needs to be used.

When a free kick is awarded against a team they need to retreat at least 10 yards.  Players don’t move away, yet if the kick is taken with a slight roll on the ball then the attack has to be started again.

I like to have a moan, so this is fertile ground. Consider some of the rule changes that have been made over the years. At the kick-off the ball doesn’t have to go forward, if the ball hits the referee, then the game needs to be restarted and really crucially, the referee tosses the coin before the start of a game.

My request to IFAB is to make some meaningful changes or, at least ensure that the rules are enforced. There are scenarios where things are contentious but tampering with rules just seems to complicate them. Sweep some of them away and start with a blank canvas.

The game is getting lost up its own backside. When an under 18 team is brazenly using timewasting tactics, ask where that has come from. If more senior players are doing it, then it must be okay and the thing to do. Stop the professionals from doing it and you won’t see it at lower levels.

Recently there was a game with six minutes of injury time. At the start of that time there was a VAR check which lasted 80 seconds. The referee blew for full time just after the six minutes. No play could take place while VAR was doing its job, so quite simply there should have been another 80 seconds added on to the game. A solution to that. Stop the clock on VAR checks and injuries to players because it’s usually a player from the leading team that goes down injured.

Take as much pressure off the referee as possible and allow him to referee the game. Make the timekeeping central and don’t give him a spray can. Just give him appropriate measures to enforce the law.

IFAB are confident about the game of football. At the start of their rules, it states ‘football is the greatest sport on earth’. Plenty of people would disagree with that but to help their claim the rules need to be enacted properly and modifications made that impact the game in a positive way.