With Celtic’s Speed Machines, An Offside Rule Change Is Good News At Last.

Somewhere, in some deep, dark corner of football, there is a committee room where a group of men sit and come up with the next abomination for our sport. The last one, sin-bins and “blue cards”, appears dead on arrival, or so we can hope.

Those rooms have vomited forth all kinds of nonsense down through the years; thankfully the crazier elements have stayed in those rooms. There was one some years ago about splitting the pitch into zones and giving you more “goals” depending on where you score from, just as happens in basketball where a long-range basket is worth three points instead of two.

One of the problems we’ve seen since the implementation of VAR has been the constant tinkering with the handball rule. It has been used to cover a multitude of sins. If people left the damned rulebook alone for a spell that would work better for everyone, and it might not give certain people so much to hide behind. Yet not all change is change for the worse.

The reports that the offside rule is set to change – again – is welcome, because it restores some common sense to what used to be a fairly sensible situation. Right now, if a single part of a player’s body is over the line it’s offside. This absurdity has penalised pace. It has penalised those players who can think that bit quicker than others on the pitch.

In short, it’s actually served to erode the meritocratic principle in some ways, and when the rules of a game are actually altered to punish those who are just that bit better at it than others then it’s ceased to function as it was intended. It’s ceased to be a sport where the cream rises to the top. Anything that restores that principle is to be welcomed.

These proposed changes will do that, by moving football back to where it previously sat. The offside rule will now state that a player’s entire body has to be in an offside position for the offside to count; no more of this nonsense where you can be “level” with someone and your boot is sticking out that little bit further, or your head is bowed at such an angle as to technically put you “over.”

The current offside rule is stupid and had to go. This makes things better.

And it is clubs like ours, with players like Maeda and Kyogo and Idah and Kuhn, who will benefit from just such a change. Maeda terrifies teams right now as it is – I ignored the absurd comments from a former Japanese international the other day on him, that’s a classic example of a former player not being able to read the game properly.

With a change like this his pace will be even more devastating and he’ll be even scarier to play against.

Kyogo will really destroy sides though, because he plays right on the edge of the last man already and anything that makes his natural skills stand out more, anything that hands him the slightest advantage, will make him murderously difficult to stop.

That’s why we should be pleased with this. It may not be in time to impact this season, but if it’s in place before the next one we might really see something especially as pace is one of the key traits that Rodgers wants to see in this team.

Interesting development. This is one that any football fan should welcome.