Centre backs hate it, strikers love it: Offside trial coming to Canadian Premier League

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If the ball doesn’t hit your elbow, should it matter where while you’re trying to score a goal in soccer?

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That’s the fundamental question at stake in the “daylight offside” trial set to start this weekend in the Canadian Premier League.

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As conceived by former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, the FIFA-sponsored rule experiment that Canadian soccer fans are going to get front-row seats to is going to be quite entertaining, one way or another.

In short, the rule states that rather than determining the offside line by drawing a line through the last part of a defender’s body, offside will now simply be a question of whether there is any gap between an attacker and a defender when you look across the pitch.

A striker can be sprinting past a defender, be almost entirely past that defender, when the pass is struck in their direction, but if even a portion of the attacker’s heel is overlapping a defender’s foot, the attacker will remain onside.

“That’s crazy,” Whitecaps centre back Tristan Blackmon said this week, when told about the trial that will go on this season in the CPL, which, to be clear, is not the league Blackmon’s squad plays in. “He gets running behind me? I’m screwed.”

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His teammate Ranko Veselinović was a little more measured in his analysis. Unlike Blackmon, who hadn’t heard of the trial, Veselinović had. Like Blackmon, he can see there will be a lot more difficulties for defenders.

“Your instinct is it’s interesting for the fans. Mores goals, but also, in recent years, also annoys me when I am a millimetre off, or something like that. It’s gonna be harder.”

Whitecaps striker Brian White’s grin grew wider when he was told how much his teammates disliked the concept.

“I love it,” he replied with emphasis on love.

“You should see how much those two call offside in training,” he added with a laugh.

His feeling is it will simply make “video assistant referee” reviews easier and maybe even less common. In effect, the trial is taking away the narrow-margin decisions of the past. At least on the surface of the question, anyway.

“It’s not only to make it easier. I think sometimes you feel a little bit hard done by, like, your toenail’s offside,” he said. Your toenail’s position shouldn’t make a difference in the final result, he implied. The defender was beaten and the razor-thin margin that has been in place and indeed more heavily enforced in the review era has given poor defending a repeated out.

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Canadian Premier League CEO James Johnson’s grin was obvious, even over the phone, when he was told of the observations of the three Whitecaps, who obviously will be only observers like the rest of us when the rule rolls out.

The whole point of the trial, which is being packaged along with a new video-review system — called FVS, where teams will be allowed twice per game to ask the match officials review a goal, offside or red card decision — as well as speedier substitution and play restart rules, is to improve game flow.

“Game flow, tempo of the game is the theme. That’s correct. That’s a strategic objective, and that’s why we think this will improve the product on the pitch as well as football,” Johnson said.

It’s also an opportunity to put the Canadian Premier League on the global stage. Their task is to build up Canadian soccer, but it is also to keep the league front of mind. Being a willing partner in a global trial, one that could have long-term positive impacts on the game, is exactly who they want to be, Johnson said.

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“We see ourselves as an organization, we see our league as being innovative,” he said.

“We’ve got a new generation of fan. Fans like to be engaged these days. They like to have discussions that go over and beyond just what happens on the pitch, and this, of course, happens on the pitch. But we’re expecting a lot of debate, a lot of discussion, not only about the games themselves, but how this new rule — and also FVS — is being implemented because it’s relevant, not just for Canada, but the rest of the world. Great to be at the centre of that conversation.”

This is going to be fun to watch.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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