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This is a post on football (no, I”m not talking about American football – man, how can you call that football? you play it with your hands 🙂 I”m talking about soccer,,). So, if you don”t like, just don”t read it 🙂

If, like me, you”re a fan, then you surely know that Euro 2008 is happening on Austria and Switzerland. Btw, Portugal has already qualified for the next round! hurray!

Ok, the objective of this post is to try to argue against this. It”s interesting to see that UEFA always tries to prevent us from seeing that their referees simply screw up sometimes (yep, like everyone else!). Ok, let”s see what Mr. David Taylor says about the offside goal scored by Netherlands:

I would like to take the opportunity to explain and emphasise that the goal was correctly awarded by the referee team,” he said. “I think there”s a lack of understanding among the general football public, and I think it”s understandable because this was an unusual situation. The player was not offside, because, in addition to the Italian goalkeeper, there was another Italian player in front of the goalscorer. Even though that other Italian player at the time had actually fallen off the pitch, his position was still relevant for the purposes of the offside law.”

Well well…It happens that the Italian player got injured after a clash with his goal keeper and was out of the field! I think that out is the important thing here! If he”s out, injuried, then he surely isn”t between the goal line and Nisterlrooy, right?

Interestingly, if you read the rules, you”ll see that there is no special case there for these scenarios. In fact, if you look at the videos available on the FIFA web site, you”ll quickly see that the offline position is delimited by the goal line! And that”s it. If the injured guy laying down outside the pitch is enough for not making Nistelrooy offside, then I really can”t read English…