The British Offside Rule… and VAR

I know that football is a different sport outside of the UK, my American friends have it renamed as soccer. (Is it me or does calling it ‘soccer’ diminish this great sport?) Our soccer is their American Football, which I like by the way. It is meant to be like our Rugby, but I have watched the England Women’s Rugby a few times and I’m not sure about the similarities.

Anyway! With the pandemic affecting sports fans everywhere and TV boffins seeming working out options to have us be able to follow our team in virtually every match last season no matter what service package we had (hooray!), we had wall-to-wall football, thus I saw a lot of more of what really annoyed me.

The stupidity of the FA’s offside ruling — the attacking player had just to thrust a finger offside for the goal to be ruled out. Are you kidding me?! Sometimes it was an elbow, or a shoulder. Look. It has to be a body part that you can score with in order to be offside, in my opinion. I’m not sure that a toe counts either!

Don’t get me started on our VAR. What’s the deal? In American Football, the referee/official is in charge of the match — he can jog over to the sideline to view the VAR footage to make the decision himself. That’s right folks, because he is in charge of the match! If we continue using VAR as we did last season, forget about it — who is in charge, the technology or the ref?!

It’s a highly valuable tool to review the playback in tennis also. They review VAR on the football field in Europe, so why can’t the British referees do this? The amount of time arguing about a decision would be halved! The ref would be able to keep control of the match as he or she always has, but their decisions would be enhanced by VAR technology. After all, goal line technology has been a boon to the modern game.

Which reminds me… Why can’t yellow cards be reviewed? Why only red cards?