Mark

[Mark Granza @markgranza]

The problem here is 'legalism', not scientism. Forget whether the player's hair touched the ball or not. Here's what the offside rule was originally created for: a striker breaks through the defense early or purposely stays behind, finds himself with ten yards of open grass between him and the last defender and only the goalkeeper in front. The rule is one of the oldest in the game because the people who first played it saw something clearly unfair about it, i.e., an advantage that doesn't require skill to create, which, if allowed, would have made the game unwatchable. The problem is that over time people began to conflate the advantage aspect with the mechanics of detecting it, especially since TV programs in the 70s began showing slow-motion replays of gray-area calls over and over in post-match analysis to keep football fans endlessly arguing and their ratings high. This is how you get, for instance, cases in which a forward who times his run perfectly, catching the defender off guard (often running in the opposite direction) and then scoring, is still called "unfair" by other fans because his shoulder or nose or whatever was ahead when the pass occurred, despite the fact that if it would have been behind, if anything, it'd have given him even *more* time to score. It's the same thing that often happens in court. A law is written to stop a particular harm, then lawyers spend decades arguing over the exact wording until the very harm it was meant to stop gets almost forgotten and the letter becomes the law. Nobody watching Croatia's disallowed goal possibly believes that the Croatian player’s touch (even if it happened) created an advantage for his teammate. The ball clearly reaches the latter thanks to the (non-deliberate, thus irrelevant) deflection off the Portugal player. But nobody is thinking about the purpose of the rule anymore, only the technicality of its wording. Hence scientism, which is downstream of legalism in this context and eventually convinced the entire sport that it needed sensors inside the football to detect a hair touch because... why not?

[AshenSoul @0xashensoul]

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