I don’t watch those sports, so I cannot appreciate why they have a rule that seemingly discourages scoring and fast breaks.
The only sport I really watch is basketball, and this looks to me like the equivalent of outlawing the fastbreak. Fastbreaks are exciting, allows you to score quickly, and usually pumps up the crowd
As far as I can tell with my admittedly limited knowledge of soccer and hockey, it lowers scoring for no good reason. Its not like it has no risks. A defending team can choose to leave a defender in the back court and hope to get lucky on defense with one man short, and they can either succeed or get burned by the risky strategy. Reading the wiki on offside traps makes it seem even more legitimate as a high risk/high gain strategy. I dont understand why this is against the rules because I just dont see a downside to allowing teams to implement this
My WAG is that the officials need to have the players corralled somewhat in order to do their jobs effectively. E.g. if a hockey player held back, maybe he and the goalie would be messing with each other and the referees wouldn’t be able to see it, since they’d be at the other end.
Soccer used to have no offside rule. If you like soccer to be a game where you punt the ball wildly upfield so one of the mob permanently encamped there can bundle it into the goal, that’s up to you - the point is that it used to be played that way, and was found wanting as a spectacle and a contest. Maybe basketball needs a score every ten seconds, but soccer players and watchers alike have different expectations. You want to advance the ball, you take it there yourself, or if you want to try kick and chase, your chaser can’t have a start on the defence (the same principle applies in Rugby).
It’s for the same reason for each sport – to prevent someone from camping in front of the goal and waiting for a long pass.
Hockey has actually opened up a bit – it once banned a forward pass and up until recently banned a pass across two lines (or, rather, no longer counted the red line when a pass was made).
If however you do like that it sounds a lot like Gaelic Football, our national sport in Ireland. I’m not a geat fan but I’d watch the odd game. There is no offside line but because its played on a much larger pitch than soccer you need midfielders to relay the ball on.
Also due to there being no offside line it does suffer a lot from players getting digs in when the referee is at the other side of the pitch.
Hockey needs the offside rule for more than just to prevent camping. The offside rule allows a team to effectively defend against the rush. Without the offside rule, forwards could skate from the neutral zone past the defenders looking for a pass. If the defenders follow them to defend against the pass, the puck carrier has a free lane into the offensive zone. This situation makes it basically impossible to defend in transition, especially in against an odd man rush.
I’ve very occasionally seen Gaelic Football and slightly more often Australian Rules, which is very similar in spirit though played with an ovoid ball and on an even bigger pitch. Again, you can wait more or less where you like for the ball but the size of the pitch means you can’t just get a long ball booted to you directly from in front of your own goal, more or less. As to the digs, I got the impression the game would be considered boring if there wasn’t the odd bit of niggle going on.
In informal schoolboy football there’s usually no referee and hence no offside, but when I was a lad “goal-hanging” was deprecated socially if nothing more.
I didn’t even know about the American football rule. As AF seems a lot more static (ie. lots of dead time) and doesnt just have people running around non-stop, I thought it best to differentiate
Offsides has a similar purpose in soccer and hockey in terms of how it regulates game play. Offsides in American football is an entirely different animal, really just preventing players from getting a jump start on the play prior to the ball being snapped. The rules regulating who can make a forward pass, and when, are far more similar in purpose to the soccer/hockey offsides rules.
I can see how soccer would get real boring if you could just boot the ball down the field to a teammate hanging out near the goal, but they could tailor the rule to prevent that. For example, the rule could be that any pass is fair game as long as you’re in your opponent’s half of the field and the recipient of the pass isn’t hanging out in a certain area (like that box around the goal).
Personally, I find the offsides trap to be more offensive than a player camping near the goal.
In Association Football, or soccer, there is no “offsides” rule. There is an offside rule. Adding the extra s sounds just plain wrong. And while I am at it, it is a pint of Harp, not a pint of Harps.
I love how the suggestion regarding this all seem to be attempts to Americanize the beautiful game. “But offside reduces the scoring!” Oddly enough, many of us who love the game don’t need a 7-5 game for it to be considered entertaining.
The offside rule developed because the game flows better than way. Changing it, as suggested by MOIDALIZE to some convoluted system whihc doesn’t seem to make the game any better strikes me as a little pointless. I’d like to see them enforce the not interfering with play rule a little bit more, but overall, it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it.
They could, but that would still mean that the game would be intensely vertical, with long, hopeful kicks to players camped deep in the defensive end. Possession would quickly become a much less important tactic.
I love teams that try to trap my team. Traps are beatable, and when you do, it’s a very easy goal.
No, it isn’t, really.
First of all, a pedantic nitpick: it is “offside”, not offsides. I point this out because it helps understand the rule in all its variations. The rule establishes an area from which an offensive play can begin. You can either be “onside”, meaning you are on the correct side of the demarcation line, or you are “offside,” meaning you are on the wrong side of that line. In American football, that line is static, and plays are individual, but there is no reason that it has to be that way (look at the craziness that is a Canadian Football backfield prior to snap!). In hockey, the line is static, but the play is dynamic. In soccer, that line is dynamic, as are the plays. But the same objective exists for all of them: limit how an offense can attack a defensive goal area.
Basketball doesn’t need to create an offside rule to prevent inappropriate attacks on goal; it uses the 3-second lane violation to avoid so-called “cherry picking” and uses the “over-and-back” rule to limit the offense in what area it can attack from effectively. If you saw a large amount of cherry-picking in basketball, you’d soon see a rule to eliminate it, such as an offside rule.
How is my rule convoluted? If anything, the current rule is more convoluted because it makes the refs and players constantly have to determine whether 2 defenders are in front of them. My rule sets a defined area where you can pass the ball to anyone.
I assumed you were keeping the two defender rule, if not, the rule makes no sense whatsoever. So the referees have extra things to look for - where is the pass coming from and where is the player - has to be in the penalty area.
In other words, bring the ball just over the half way line, have your goal hangers on the edge of the penalty area (unless by that ‘box around the goal’ you mean the 6 yard box, which would be even more crazy a rule), and hoof the ball in. It isn’t a fun game to watch.
I’m now tryign to parce your rule…
So is a pass from your own half automatically not fair game, regardless of where the recipient is?
Is a player ever to be allowed into the ‘box around the goal’ to be passed to? What if the passing player is right at the goal line, so is passing backwards to a player in the ‘box around the goal’?
It doesn’t work as a rule… There’s nothing wrong with the present one that enforcing the ‘not-interfering’ exception wouldn’t change.
I realize that Soccer has a rich history and is pretty much the most popular sport in the world, but I do not understand the seeming backlash to making it a higher scoring affair. Speaking again from a basketball perspective, if you have a score of 1-0, then it seems like so much of the game is wasted. Momentum and cheering by the fans amount to basically nothing if it produces no score. In the NBA, when there are momentum shifts, teams can go on a 10, 15, or 20 point scoring binge and the other team can utterly be demoralized. I guess I just want to know why people have something against that. If you dont, sorry for the characterization
I think Soccer, Hockey, even Football and Baseball can do with more scoring. Theres no denying that the fans love to watch a home run or a touchdown, and I dont think it would destroy the game of Soccer to make rules that allow easier scoring. Whats wrong with that? Now Soccer’s so impossible to score on that a 2 point lead with a few minutes to go basically makes it a really really steep uphill climb for any team. In basketball, the last 2 minutes of a game are the most exciting. Why cant Soccer prosper with 10-9 scores?
There’s no reason that a game of soccer, as the sport is played now, that ends 10-9 couldn’t be entertaining. It’s not that soccer fans don’t like goals. But changing the game just for the purpose of getting consistent 10-9 scores would not make for an entertaining game.
The smallish team sizes in hockey and basketball severely limit the effects that cherry picking would have-sure lurk back near our goalie while giving us a de-facto power play all the time (same effect in hoops). In soccer there’s more players so you can (could) get away with it more. I still would prefer NASL-style blue lines (tho the NASL didn’t call them that)-I definitely dislike offside(s) being called when the ball is even with the top line of the penalty area.
Why not? Obviously depends on the changes but it seems like someone could come up with something. When I watch soccer, I see a zillion failed attempts to get anything going, 1 (sometimes 2) good passes and then the other team breaks it up.
One of my kids plays lacrosse, that’s a fun game to watch (at this age at least). It seems like they can hold onto the ball long enough to make a play and there seems to be a decent amount of scoring but not too much (basketball renders a score pretty much meaningless).
