Lizzo wrote:
I still don't understand how they can judge off-sides but not forward passes. It is exactly the same principle, except it is even harder to judge off-sides because the kicking player and receiving player are often not even in the same frame.
Because for offsides you are only looking at the position of one player relative to another at a specific point in time. And both players are on the ground, so you only have to judge the relative positions of two large slowish objects in two dimensions.
For a forward pass, you are assessing a direction of travel over a period, when (as I said above) the ball usually already has momentum before the pass - so the direction of actual travel is not the same as the direction the pass was made in. And on top of that the ball is travelling in three dimensions not two, so you don't have the common reference frame of position on the the ground to help you as much and what looks to be forward may just be an illusion because of the camera angle.
As an example of the latter, lets say player A was attacking the Western Terrace end at Sheddingley, up the left and is about 30m from the line. He wings a pass up from near his feet to a player running in support up the middle of the park who takes the pass at head-height and runs in for a try. To the camera in the middle of the South Stand gantry, next to Pinky and Perky, that pass will look forward when measured against say the 30m or 20m line. In fact, its flat but a combination of the camera angle and teh gain in height of the ball in the pass makes it look otherwise.
I used that example deliberately. Several years ago, in the good old days when we regularly beat Leeds on their own midden (let alone ours) we scored a try off exactly that situation. I THINK it was Robbie and Brad McKay, but can't remember for sure. What I DO remember was an extensive heated debate on various message boards about it (bit like last Friday, really...). I watched the replay a few times, and instead of watching the ball I watched the position of the players' feet. To me, that proved conclusively that what the great unwashed fekkwittery on Substandard refused to see as anything other than a forward pass was actually flat.
What that told me was that the only way you can really judge whether a pass is forward on the screen is to look at the position of the players' feet at the time the pass is initiated. And even then, that may only be conclusive if both players were running the same way at the same speed at that point, and continued to do so until the pass was caught (which is what happened in the example above, nore or less).
