Wednesday 20 September 2023

Martinelli's disallowed goal - correct but also wrong

There was a lot of controversy surrounding Martinelli's disallowed goal against Everton.

This was a Schrödinger's cat of a refereeing decision in that it was both right and wrong at the same time. Or, to put it another way, the decision as the Law stands was technically correct, but the Law should perhaps be amended.

Think of the offside rule like the pass back to keeper rule: Beto's touch would not have counted as a back pass and therefore isn't considered a 'deliberate pass' here.

This rule was made, sensibly, so that a slight deflection on a through ball will not count as a pass by a defender, thus playing a player onside.

It doesn't seem appropriate to enforce the rule here because the ball was a long way from goal and Gabriel wasn't attempting a pass to Nketiah. However, the VAR assistant applied the letter of the Law.

This is a case of unintended consequences. This situation was not considered when the rule was devised. Perhaps there should be an amendment to the rule to take account of whether the attacking player intended to pass the ball to the player in an offside position - which in this case Gabriel did not.

As an aside, it was touch and go whether Martinelli was offside when he received the through ball from Vieira and because of the Nketiah offside this was never looked at. But that's a whole other discussion.


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