Ok, I understand how a defender would want to raise an arm to let the official know that he thinks a player is offisde. What I don’t understand is why many players seem to do this in a manner that hinders their defense should the offside be discounted? I know I am not being clear, but I have literally seen players almost stop defending when signalling for offside, and as a result the other team sometimes gets a bigger advantage and maybe scores, whereas if the defender would have just kept playing, he could have defended the play anway. You see basketball and football players whine about fouls all the time, but the don’t stop in the middle of a play to do it. An example is last week Liverpool was playing someone, the defenders seem to stop when they note that Cisse was offsides. The ref did not call it and Folwer scores, whereas if they had kept defending and not raised their hands, etc. Fowler might not have scored so easily. Is there something in the rulebook which makes players do this? Any why do managers allow it? I mean, to me, if the ref is going to call offsides, the player holding his hand up is not going to matter.
You see examples of similar behavior in baseball, football and basketball quite often. Players are always taught to continue playing, but boys will be boys.
Yup, pisses me off. Even if they’re raising their hand while sprinting, they’re still slowing themselves down. And they’ve been playing long enough to know they’re not going to influence a referee so easily.
FWIW, you won’t see similar behaviour in rugby, which has a much stronger play-to-the-whistle ethos.
Its called not “Playing to the whistle”. Its what your taught on day one of P.E. at school. But you constantly see professional footballers, earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, make this mistake.
A related hijack:
Has there ever been a call to make offsides passing legal in football/soccer?
I ask because it would seem that a long, sweet pass over the defense would be an extremely exciting, crowd-pleasing play. Then again, legal offsides might lead to what we call “snowbirding” in the U.S. (hanging around the goal neglecting to play defense … not uncommon in full-court pickup basketball).
There’s a well-known baseball example from the playoffs a couple of years ago. It was a Red Sox game, and involved a player who may or may not have touched home… damn, the details escape. Help!
I believe Chuck Knobluach of the Yankees stopped play to argue a call in a playoff game, allowing a run to socre. But that was one guy, caught up in the moment. In soccer it happens several times in every game, and drives me nuts!
Not that I’m aware of, and I don’t imagine many people would go for it, because it would destroy the whole way a defence works, and the way a midfield feeds through to strikers. As with anything, Wikipedia is a good place for a general background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offside_law_(football)
Oh man this drives me absolutely nuts! I rmember the play with Cisse you were referring to. I think the ref ruled that since Cisse didn’t touch the ball he ws not involved, which was total nonsense, to be sure. But that is in no way an excuse for the defenders to stop playing. Happens all the time.
What also drives me batty is when players immediately raise their hand and look toward the line judge when goal has been scored when it is clrear they haven’t any idea if there was offside and they are just hoping. It doesn’t mean much, but it is just aggravating that players cannot take responsbility.
Actually I had a pit thread many moons ago about stuff I hated in football as it currently stands. Here it is. I stand by all of them.
Does that link work for anyone else?
EDIT: NM … I think the placement of that last parenthesis was causing the trouble.
Something interesting over in that Wiki article GM linked:
I, personally, would be intrigued to see “test” football matches in which the offsides rule were tweaked in various ways. Totally ignoring offsides would be one way. Other ways might include letting the attacker (?) get a only a certain distance behind the last defender (excluding goalie) … say 5 or 10 meters, beyond which offsides is called. Or how about allowing offsides passing only when a certain number of the attacking team’s players are across the midline? It just seems cool to me that the faster guys in football would be allowed to fully take advantage of their speed.
I guess the obvious defensive response is to park defenders around the goal at all times … perhaps the area in front of the goal would be too clogged too often. Not sure how these tweaks would really play out.
Gangster Octopus, agree with all of your pit points. The one I would add is regarding diving- I assume that one was a given. The Dutch Diver for Man U. is about the worst in my opinion, coupled with his dirty play and inability to score anything but on a cross or a rebound and for the life of me I can’t understand how this guy is considered a “star”…
Mike Golic of ESPN Radio’s Mike & Mike In The Moring was talking about whether NFL guys do payback like baseball pitchers throwing at a guy if their pitcher threw at your guy the game before.
He said no, in the NFL guys are killing each other every play, so it’s not much of an issue, but he did say you’d be well advised to keep your head on a swivel. He mentioned “playing to the echo of the whistle.” Heh.
As for NFL guys doing the lame move from the OP, Jeremy Shockey did it just last season. He felt he was interfered with, so turned to the linesman and spread his arms demanding a flag. No flag came. Sadly, the guy Shockey was complaining about had actually intercepted the ball and ran the other way, which Shockey could have stopped if he’d, you know, kept playing instead of whining to the refs like a pussy.
There are few things in the world that piss me off more than a defender on my team raising his hand for offsides and slows down… I know players play the refs, but my lord, that’s a bit much!
Sometimes, the offside gesture can be used to as a kind of psychological weapon–the attacking player runs onto a through ball, sees a defender or goalkeeper waving his arm, and maybe–just maybe–he’ll hesitate for a moment, expecting to see a linesman flag for offside.
This is hopeful thinking on the defenders’ part, however, as usually a striker will be accustomed to these kind of mind games and will simply ignore their gestures.
My favorite example of this was an incident a few years ago in an FA Cup match between West Ham and Man U. Di Canio (playing for West Ham) runs onto a pass as the Man U defenders move up, trying to trap him offside. No offside flag, and Di Canio keeps on going, with only the Man U goalkeeper, Barthez, between him and the goal.
What does Barthez do? He just stands there, rooted to the ground, his arm up in the air–presumably hoping he can outpsych Di Canio. To no avail, however, as Di Canio aims and shoots at what, other than the immobile figure of Barthez, is basically an open goal, and scores easily–the only goal of the match, thus knocking Man U out of the FA Cup. How I laughed…
You can relive the hilarity (unless you’re a Man U supporter) here (video clip):
http://www.kumb.com/vid/di_canio_280100.mpg
and a good summary of the whole incident:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/1142645.stm
But isn’t that what the offside rule allows?
The absence of the offside rule would make the game slower and more boring. Strikers woul not need the skills to beat the defence, you could park some lumbering giant behind it in the box.
What’s interesting, is that from the video, it looks like he was indeed offside when the pass was made. In general, I think most offsides mistakes are calling it when it shouldn’t be called, rather than vice versa. But in this case you can freeze a frame that shows the ball on the passer’s foot, with Di Canio behind every defender. Admittedly, the isn’t great on that part of the clip, so it’s not ironclad, but I wonder if the shots in the clip with better angles weren’t intentionally edited to start after the pass, so his offsides wouldn’t be so obvious.
Not that a missed call is an excuse for the goalkeeper in any way.
Given the difficulty of stopping someone so alone so close (with an unmarked teammate coming on in the middle of the box), though, the psychological ploy may indeed have been the keeper’s best chance.
It seems to me that the offsides rule hamstrings the fast guys when they DON’T have the ball. Let me explain …
It’s probably just me not understanding things 100% … I have visions in my head of some seriously fast guy on the attacking side – without the ball --streaking behind all the defenders. The defenders give chase, but just can’t hang. The fast guy is a good 10-15 meters behind the defenders.
Meanwhile, the fellow on the attacking team with the ball, around midfield, boots this perfect long pass to the fast guy … drops it in perfectly so that all the fast guy has to do it get control of the ball and square off against the goalie.
And this goes on all game long – both sides’ “fast guys” creating breakaway opportunities set up by long, precision passes downfield. Sort of like having the anticipation of corner kicks going on dozens of times a game.
…
But don’t ask is correct – the defenders would do the obvious thing and just camp out near the goal all game long. Then you’d have to have a rule akin to basketball’s 3-second rule on defense, preventing defenders from staying near the goal all the time.
Probably too big of a shakeup to the nature of football/soccer as we know it 
But I still think that allowing attacking players sans ball to get some short distance (5m? 10m?) beind the defenders before receiving a pass would make things interesting. There’d still be an offsides rule … it would just be adjusted to give the offense a break. I like the idea that if a team is up 3-0 with 30 minutes to play, the game’s outcome would still be very much in doubt.
As the game is at the moment, this is pretty much exactly what happens. A good defence holds a square back line, so a striker has to time a run perfectly so that the pass is made just before they go offside, and then they need the pace to keep ahead of the defenders. And the precision of the pass is crucial, and depends on knowledge of teammates’ pace.
Errrrrm…sounds pretty boring to me. And it wouldn’t result in lots of corners (don’t forget if an attacking player puts the ball out across the goal line, it’s a goal kick)
Could be interesting, but all you’re doing there is tinkering with the relative advantages given to defenders and strikers. And also, given that the offside rule is so difficult to enforce at present (and consequently so poorly-applied), do you really want to make the job more difficult?!