Online Reporter
Bill Shankly once said that “football is a simple game, complicated by people who should know better”.
Shankly, in charge of Liverpool between 1959 and 1974, managed in a simpler era, a time without rolling news, social media and, of course, the video assistant referee (VAR).
If he were managing today, he might consider using stronger words.
From handball, to offside and VAR, it has become difficult for supporters to follow what is going on.
Has football really become a more complicated game? And if so, who is to blame?
Handball — the law that has everyone guessing
There seems to be no greater confusion than the handball law.
It has changed so many times in recent years that it has been pretty much impossible to keep up.
“I just hate the handball rule,” Alan Shearer told BBC Sport. “They have messed it up.
“They’ll say that things are better in the Premier League than they are abroad, but that doesn’t wash with me.
“It is so messed up in every single way, there is ‘deliberate’, ‘proximity’, ‘natural’, ‘unnatural’ — there are so many different ways they have to interpret things and it isn’t fit for purpose.”
Shearer did not even mention the contradictory accidental attacking handball law, which automatically disallows a goal.
It created an offence for a striker, which a defender would get away with.
The law’s application might not feel like it is better in the Premier League but — in terms of penalties awarded — it demonstrably is, with fewer penalties awarded on average than in any of the other major European leagues.
But that does not mean it is good.
There is a misconception that the handball law was changed for VAR, but it happened the other way around.
The International Football Association Board (Ifab) started work on redefining handball in 2014 — two years before trials of VAR began.
Those changes created a menu of justifications for handball.
When the video assistant came into the game, it was too easy to give penalties. It just required finding one clause to tick off — and there was a huge spike in spot-kicks across leagues.
VAR proved to be incompatible with the new law. It has been changed many, many times in recent seasons to try to find a solution.
Fans would love to go back to the days when handball really was a basic judgement call.
But the genie is out of the bottle.
Any change would have to be defined. And with that new definition to contend with, we would probably be no better off.
Ducking and diving — the subjective offside
There have been several contentious subjective offside decisions this season — when a player does not touch the ball but impacts an opponent.
Take Virgil van Dijk’s disallowed goal for Liverpool during their 3-0 defeat at Manchester City on 9 November last year.
Andrew Robertson ducked under the ball and was ruled to be affecting goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma. It caused a lot of controversy.
There were complaints that the lawmakers had tinkered too much — that offside was now too complicated.
Yet this has always been in the laws.
The 1903-04 edition, external, states that a player cannot “in any way whatever interfere with an opponent or the play”.
Otherwise attackers would have carte blanche to stand close to opponents, or make movements, in the hope of influencing a goal.
Considering how the “dark arts” seem to be on the rise, changing this would have unintended consequences.
It might be annoying, and there will always be edge cases, but this is not going to change.
“Deliberate play” — not all is
what it seems
When is deliberately playing the ball not deliberate? Well, when it is a “deliberate play”.
And that sums up this law perfectly.
It was introduced in 2016-17 season to define how a touch by a defender might reset an offside phase.
But referees were applying this strictly, so offside players were benefitting unfairly.
It was tweaked after Kylian Mbappe’s controversial winning goal for France against Spain in the 2021 Uefa Nations League final.
Eric Garcia had stretched for a ball, made a small amount of contact and it played Mbappe onside.
The Ifab clarified the law to say a defender needed to have the expectation of a controlled outcome.
But it is still called “deliberate play”.
So, a defender can deliberately play the ball — but if they do not have control it is not a “deliberate play”.
Clear as mud. — BBC
