International Football Association Board

Rule...

Law 12, the IFAB...

No, pulling an opponent's shirt inside the box is never legally allowed under any circumstances.

It's a bit like the offside thing.

So that season is now finished.

So IFAB have now kind of decided they probably don't want to pursue this based on evidence gained from what's happened in that league this year.

So just read some of this out.

This is from statistics from the BBC's website.

So the IFAB's football and technical panels made up of former players, coaches and referees were told that the trial had led to a 54% reduction in offside decisions.

and 13 additional goals across 112 matches.

Yay.

Now...

I don't know if I saw something on the build-up to the season on Sky that was incorrect or what have you, but IFAB banned that.

Even if the broadcasters are getting a feed, they are not allowed to broadcast it.

The Premier League are petitioning to get IFAB to change that so that they can broadcast the decision-making process, but they are not allowed.

Would that be a good thing, Don?

I think so.

In football, that's still not the case.

We've contacted the lawmakers of the game, so IFAB and FIFA, and asked them why they would not introduce temporary concussion substitutions.

And their response makes sense to a degree because they say that they believe the safest way is to have a concussion sub where they're taken out of the game totally.

But as you say, if you're a player, and we said earlier that it could be the medical staff saying, okay, we think they're all right, put them back on.

But I think for past generations, it's a real challenge.

And we see that now in some of the cases that they're bringing against some of the governing bodies of their sports for not looking after them.

Yeah, I went to the dark side refereeing and IFAB don't know whether Arthur or Martha when it comes to rule changes.

So I don't believe a word they say when it comes to that.

And that's why I think it is important whether a strike is on target or off target, because then there is a definitive demarcating line between what could be attributed as a goal or not a goal because if we're saying now that a shot towards the goal but not on target and deflects and goes on the goal can still be chalked off well then how far off target does it come before you say well actually it's a cross not a shot and that's where it becomes very subjective and that's why I think it is important that it should stick to on target or off target.

Hence why Mende, and I can tell you right now, the officials didn't know definitively if That was the case in regards to if it's off target, should it stand? They had to go to IFAB.

Right.

Apparently, what came back was there isn't a clear definition in the wording.

So there's been a bit of a fuzzy interpretation.

So our referees wanted to go to IFAB to get a bit of confirmation here.

Is that what you're suggesting? Yes, that's what happened.

Right, so what confuses me out, did you see the one in the English Premier League a few weeks back? And it was Harry Maguire, Man United goal, which was allowed to stand because the shot was off target and he was offside.

I'll happily pass this over to someone else.

Yeah, I think Arcel got away with one a little bit on this decision because, yeah, I was going into the IFAB laws, as you do.

Just a lovely little Sunday afternoon activity for me.

um but essentially in the ifab laws of the game law 12 a handball is generally not penalized if the ball hits a player's hand or arm directly from a teammate's kick or header so it shouldn't have been a penalty really i think Arsenal fans will be hanging on to that word generally in that, you know, maybe there's some cases where it isn't, but I think potentially they're more kind of like if there's a bigger distance between two players.