LIKE bad food and inane mascots, shouting at linesmen is one of the universal features of modern football.

Attend any football match from Melbourne to Manama and you’re bound to hear disgruntled fans, players and coaches waving their arms about and suggesting some assistant referee needs to visit their local optometrist.

Now, as we all know, Lawrie McKinna is too much of a gentleman to cast aspersions on match officials, but you could see he was gutted when he spoke about Macca’s disallowed goal against the Victory. Some Mariners fans were understandably, less polite, suggesting that only poor refereeing could produce such a glaring error.

There are few things more aggravating than seeing our team denied a perfectly good goal because of an incorrect offside decision. Except, perhaps, seeing an opposing team allowed a goal scoring opportunity when they clearly were offside.

Next time you feel the need to blame the inadequacies of assistant referees, consider the convincing results of a ground-breaking study undertaken in 2000 by a group of human movement scientists in Amsterdam (where else?).

The results of this study were published in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, yet seem to be little known in the football community and appear to have been ignored by FIFA. Perhaps the facts revealed are just too problematic to contemplate.

The study analysed data from five national competitions (Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, England and Germany) as well as the 1998 World Cup. The researchers also conducted their own field experiments involving 200 potential offside situations during matches played by two elite youth teams.

A whopping 20 percent of these potential offside situations both in the experiments and in national/ World Cup matches were wrongly called. This was not because of the fact that the linesmen involved were ‘idiots’ or inexperienced, but purely because of the limitations of human perception.

The researchers made an amazing discovery: when a linesman stands about a metre goalside and looks across a pitch and the attacking player is further away from him than the defender, then the attacker wrongly appears to be offside. This is exactly what happened to poor old Dylan on Friday night.

Of course, the opposite is also true: when it is the attacker that is closer to the assistant ref, he appears to be onside when he isn’t. In the past, this phenomenon was believed to be because of the time lapse between the linesman switching his gaze from passer to receiver. The Dutch scientists ruled out this theory by equipping linesmen with head-mounted cameras(LOL). No shift in gaze was detected.

The study concluded that the reason assistant referees so often make errors in judging offside is purely because of the relative optical projections of the players on their retinas. It’s not about bias, or stupidity, or lack of experience or better training, it’s about the fundamental limitations of being a human being.

Scientific discoveries have had a profound influence on the modern game. Training methods, boot design, recovery from injury, the psychology of winning: these are just a few of the numerous ways research has changed the way football is played.

Why should this discovery be any different?

The researchers concluded that "given the high stakes in modern football, this incidence of (inevitable) errors suggests that alternative ways of judging offside should be developed, such as off-line analysis of video images taken from an adequate observation point."*

And if we really are unwilling to go there, we must simply accept that the offside rule is fundamentally...OFF.

So next time you’re tempted to yell at a football match, yell at your attacking players. Tell them to run closer to the linesman: that way the odds for human error may just be stacked in their favour.

*( Oudejans, Verheijen, Bakker, Gerrits, Steinbruckner, Beek in
Nature, Vol 404, 2 March 2000. www.nature.com)