Millimetre offsides made the high line safe and the football worse

Technology took the risk out of stepping up, defenders noticed immediately, and the game lost something in the trade.

Before the cameras, an offside trap was a gamble with a human being at the end of it. A defender stepped up, an assistant referee somewhere behind him made a judgement at speed with imperfect sightlines, and everybody accepted that a proportion of those calls would be wrong in both directions. The gamble was real, so the reward had to be worth it, and plenty of coaches decided it was not.

Now the line is drawn to a fraction of a boot and defenders know it. Step up, and if you are marginally right you are completely right. The uncertainty that used to make the trap frightening has been engineered out.

So everybody steps up.

You can see the consequence in the shape of matches. The pitch has compressed. Play happens in a shorter and shorter band, the space in behind is administratively rather than physically defended, and the strikers who thrived on running into gaps have had a large part of their job automated away. The compensating skill, timing a run to the millimetre against a line that is deliberately gambling, is now less about beating a defender and more about beating a rendering.

And here is my objection, which is not really about accuracy. The rule was written to stop a forward gaining an unfair advantage by loitering behind the defence. An armpit two centimetres in front of a knee is not an advantage in any sense the framers of that rule would recognise. We took a law about intent and turned it into a measurement problem, then congratulated ourselves for solving the measurement problem.

The daylight version, where a forward is only offside if some clear part of him is entirely beyond the last defender, would restore the spirit and would take about ten minutes to implement. It would also hand a genuine advantage back to attackers, which is the point.

Semi-automated systems have made the decisions faster and that is a real improvement over four minutes of watching someone drag lines on a screen. Fine. But speed of adjudication was never the complaint. The complaint was that a goal celebrated by twenty thousand people gets removed because of the position of a shoulder, and no amount of processing speed fixes the thing that feels wrong about that.

Defenders have adapted brilliantly and rationally. That is not their fault. It is the fault of a law that now rewards precision over judgement, and rewards it every single time.