Arsene Wenger’s offside idea is terrible and would have huge ramifications for the entire game
The Frenchman wants to change the law in response to a number of controversial decisions off the back of using VAR
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Your support makes all the difference.The offside law may often bring football down to mere millimetres, but its actual scale is far greater. It shapes the parameters of actual play more than the white markings of a pitch. Every tactical development, every evolution in pressing and how teams move, is shaped by this single law.
This is by far the biggest reason – of many – why Arsene Wenger’s proposed change is a terrible idea. It should never be brought into practice.
The former Arsenal manager wants to alter offside so that a player is onside if any part of his body that can be scored with is in-line with the last defender.
This really does so much more than move the line for the officials. It moves the entire game. Even before you get to issues like set-pieces, trials, VAR and its total failure to solve the issue it is supposed to address, it already looks a classic case of unintended consequences.
The fundamental idea is to further favour the attacker, since VAR has seen so many goals ruled out for the most marginal of calls.
The actual reality would be to totally shift the game in a more defensive direction.
Consider the most basic example. Since a backline can now be caught out so much more easily, and an attacker could now be onside by a further five feet with a simple motion forward, it will inevitably lead to defences sitting far deeper. They just won’t be willing to take the same risk. It would be the only possible response to such a huge change. It’s obvious. It would thereby fundamentally change the flow of the game, and probably be football’s biggest change since the back-pass rule.
That is no exaggeration. It is entirely in keeping with the history of the sport. Major landmarks – and huge changes in goals scored – can be tracked through the gradual evolution of the offside rule.
It genuinely influences the actual football more than anything else.
This is the massive problem with allowing the very parameters of play to be stretched by at least 10 feet in total, and why any alteration to the offside should be given the most in-depth of scrutiny.
Even within that, though, it would be impossible to trial in any true sense because the mechanics from the rule are so stitched into the game’s structure.
You wouldn’t see the actual effect, and the potential for profound transformation, until a game of actual importance like a Champions League quarter-final.
There, it is entirely logical think that an intelligent reactive coach like Diego Simeone will come up with a way to game the offside – some more sophisticated withdrawn backline perhaps – that starts to send tactical ripples through the sport.
It would only be then that you’d see what moving the offside line really means.
For their part, IFAB’s Lukas Brud insisted to Sky Sports there will be no change to the offside law this month, while making sure to “welcome” Wenger’s views and “further dialogue”.
That is all it should be, given the genuine fragility of this law. It really shouldn’t be thrown out so lightly.
There’s then the issue that it isn’t the law that’s the problem. It fundamentally works fine. It has fitted perfectly with the current state of the sport, which is one of the most attacking and goal-laden we’ve ever seen.
The problem has been a new technologically-aided ability to apply an almost sub-atomic scrutiny through VAR. That isn’t a problem with the law. It is a problem with how accurate football really wants to be.
Wenger’s suggestion doesn’t change this. It merely moves the line, and may well move the entire sport.
This is also why, even if Wenger’s law suggestion does not come in, the entire story should be valuable and instructive.
It should remind everyone just how dramatic any change to offside should be – and whether they really want that.
The likelihood is they don’t.
This, after all, isn’t a question of mere millimetres or metres.
The offside is not about whether two players are in line. It is about the entire field of play. Any change to that changes the game.
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