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Limiting what constitues forward movement

Roar Guru
2nd March, 2011
35

This is my first article for a while, so bear with me. Quite a simple premise actually: why is that in all football codes the law-givers, makers and shakers have uniformly conceived that you simply cannot move the ball forward at whim… a free market of movement of the ball/man if you will?

In all sports where there is an offside (and even in Australian rules Football where there isn’t but is something roughly similar in terms of not being allowed to move the ball more than 15 metres without a bounce) The codified rules and conventions which makes up the game quite deliberately limits players’ opportunities to play the ball forward.

In all codes one can move the ball forward in some capacity: in Rugby Union and Rugby League this involves both a forward-pass rule to prevent the hand-passing of the ball from player to player across a theoretically straight (that is 180 degree) plane.

It also involves the most stringent offside rule in all of the football codes (stringent in that only the ball-carrier can be ahead of the ball when it is struck.

Also in Rugby Union various laws about the ruck/maul, scrum (same in theory in Rugby League), line out allow very occasionally for players to be ahead of the ball, but as always the ball cannot be hand-passed forward or kicked forward and then approached by a player offside.

The end result seems to me to be that like with many other things between Rugby Union and Rugby League, there is shared heritage of limiting the tactical possibilities of forward progress.

In American Football offsides only applies at kick-off, punts following a safety and at the line of scrimage before the snap. Similar to its Rugby antecdents, but less stringent. For mine the blocking rules are a continuation of this, whilst allowing players to move ahead of the ball if eligible to be downfield.

If not they can go to the line of scrimage [I think!] (which is ahead of the ball from the snap onwards until forward progress is gained)Again this prevents a truly (tho more opportunities are presented) laisez-faire approach to moving the ball forward. Not surprising as all three ‘Rugbyoid’ codes have a shared heritage.

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But with Australian rules football for example there is not a whole lot of evidence to suggest that there is a shared heritage with Rugby school rules at all…that the game was codified with a pick-and-choose method between all the various school football rules.

Without an offside, players are on the one hand able to move forward when/whereever they want. But on the other the hand-ball rule and the 15 metre rule and the mark even, prevents a truly laisez-faire approach to moving the ball forward, even tho players are in no way impinged in their movements forward.

In Association Football there is a much different offside rule from the ‘Rugbyoid’ codes, but even here with a code that has been for almost all of its history possessed a passing component (the first few years were more kick-chase/ dribbling) there seems to be a significant correlation with other football codes.

I can’t quite articulate it, but the offside in Soccer seems to do a very similar job to the modified no-offside of Australian rules Football…in that the players movements (and I say movements forward into empty space rather than into other players) are not completely laisez-faire.

Players positioning themselves is all to do with their relationship with the ball-carrier (or player in possession of the ball).

In Soccer this is regulated by off-side amongst other rules and in Australian football this is regulated by the hand-ball rule and the 15-metre mark rule etc. Both games with perhaps the least in common, have this ‘traffic-control’ if you will mechanism to effectively prevent playing of the ball whenever and wherever one could possibly want.

I’m not being critical of this it is an interesting and enjoyable quirk of football itself, it merely begs the question for me that how can it be that all codes (I didn’t do Gaelic and I hope someone who is an expert can help me there)seem to have this built into them. Now you could say that this applies to all sport…that you can never do whatever you want whenever you want in any sport, but there does seem to me to be a particular correlation in the footballs.

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Why did not one of the modern footballs evolve a truly laisez faire approach to forward progress? Something let’s say akin to medieval football, where the playing field was regulated entirely by having (bloody) fun…than playing the ball forward in a respectable way (as much of the orig justification of these kind of quirky rules was that doing it the way X code did it wasn’t manly/gentlemanly enough for Y code)?

Finally there in pretty much lies my premise: why are there not such measures to prevent players from moving the ball back as laisez-fairedly as a mad-hatter? Why is an offside or hand-ball rule seen as more fair than a principle which encourages talent to speak for itself?

Talent tends to be shown more in spite of guidelines (a la creativity in the arts) , whereas skill cannot truly show itself without first following the guidelines…

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