16th January 2023
There was a controversial offside decision this weekend in a high-profile football match.
Usually, for anyone with an interest in the game, it is plain if a player is offside or not and, if so, whether there has been an offside offence.
But this understanding is rarely based on someone studying the laws of association football.
Instead it is often based on watching hundreds – thousands – of instances, playing in matches, discussing incidents with others, reading reporters and hearing commentators.
Over time, someone can build up a good working knowledge of the rules and how they should and should not apply.
In a word, for many football fans, the knowledge of the sport is lore, rather than law.
And this is no different for many games and sports, and indeed it is true for most people in every day life about the laws of the land.
But every so often something so distinct happens that the common folk knowledge of a rule, and how it is should and should not be applied, can seem deficient.
And so we had the sight on Match of the Day of the pundits putting Law 11 of the laws of association football on the screen for viewers to read the offside offence themselves.
The one thing which struck me was one single, awful word which has no place whatsoever in any formal rules or laws, either of association football or of anything else.
“…clearly…”
Those who are geeks about the rules of football may be able to explain the purpose of that dreadful “c” word in this code.
But the job of any formal law, rather than lore, is to provide a precise rule capable of being applied to relevant facts so as to create a binary situation: the rule either applies or does not apply, and if it applies it has either been infringed or it has not been.
It is not clear (ahem) what the “c” word adds to the rule, and it seems to make the rule less precise.
As it happens, most people who watched the incident, using only the lore of offside, believed an offence had been committed.
But the referee who had to apply the formal rule said otherwise.
And, as is so often the case, lore gets things right, and the law does not.
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