Graham Kelly: Blatter climbs down over FA's punishment system

The Football Association won a major concession at the International FA board meeting in Belfast on Saturday. The board said it would allow referees to continue studying video evidence of controversial red card decisions and, if necessary, allow decisions to be rescinded in cases of mistaken identity and other errors. Earlier this season the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, had instructed the FA to scrap such appeals, but he now realises the strength of the FA's argument concerning its automatic system of punishments.

No doubt in response to the economic crisis that grips the game, the delegates from the football associations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and from Fifa decided to permit advertising to be carried on players' shorts and socks subject to the necessary rule changes in individual leagues and competitions.

However, the international board's main business was the proposed amendments to the laws of the game. Discussion centred on how to avoid controversial goal-line decisions such as Crystal Palace's "goal" that never was in the recent FA Cup tie against Leeds United. The FA had been experimenting with technology and hoped to be able to persuade the board of the merits of a wider experiment, but was unable to do so. Further trials will be held in England instead.

Michel Platini's suggestion of placing two additional goal-line assistants behind the goal was dismissed because it smacked of refereeing by committee. I hope that referees will be encouraged nevertheless to be vigilant in future in watching for offences by defenders at set-pieces.

Another idea that was thrown out was the sin-bin gimmick. The pattern of a match would be disrupted if a team were reduced to 10 men temporarily by disciplinary sanction. We have all seen so many times that a 10-man team hangs on against all the odds. It isn't pretty, but it can be mighty effective and the game as a spectacle is ruined. The laws of the game do not need any further complicating by grading offences so as to allow for sin-bin sanctions.

The 10-yard advancement experiment has been approved for a fourth – and possibly final – year. I am pleased that this seems to be on its last legs, because I dislike importing ideas from other sports, no matter how well they work there.

The offside law seems to have escaped scrutiny this year, surprisingly so, given the problems in the 2002 World Cup. Assistant referees have an impossible task, as any study of video replays will demonstrate. The assistant has several duties: to spot misconduct the referee may not detect, to indicate ball out of play and to indicate offside by watching when the ball is played forward from a position alongside the second-last defender.

The "mistakes" made by assistants in the 2002 World Cup proved that television is king, that the human eye is fallible and that it is impossible for an assistant referee to be looking in two places, several yards apart laterally, at the same time. Attackers can be sprinting one way, defenders the opposite way.

Although changes in emphasis have been made to the offside law in recent years in an effort to promote attacking play – in line is no longer offside and the concept of active play has been introduced – the last major amendment took place almost a century ago. An attacker became offside if he was nearer the goal-line than the ball and the second rather than third-last opponent in 1925.

Goals immediately increased in the Football League, from 1,192 in the First Division in the 1924-25 season to 1,703 in 1925-26. The centre-half, previously an attacking player, became a stopper.

William McCracken, Newcastle United's Irish international full-back was the player most associated with the earliest offside tactics and a player who, if the doyen of football writing, Don Davies, who lost his life in the 1958 Munich air disaster, is to be believed, irritated opposing fans and players in the manner of an original Martin Keown.

"He [McCracken] was a specialist in offside tactics and was the cause of more demonstrations of hostility and resentment than any other player," Davies wrote in Jack Cox's book Don Davies – An Old International. "He had the same demonic qualities as Spofforth, the same ability to get on players' nerves and his sardonic smile as he went about his disruptive task could rouse passions to fever heat. Few had the patience to acknowledge the beauty of McCracken's technique in the abstract. Who but a snake charmer would fall in love with a serpent? Matches usually degenerated into dull repetitions of tiresome infringements and stoppages. Tempers frayed and angry scenes developed. On one occasion he teased and tormented the Manchester City forward line to such purpose that the crowd felt obliged to intervene."

Maybe now the referees are professional we should simply scrap offside?

grahamkelly@btinternet.com