To The Letter of The Law, But Outside Its Spirit

There was unanimity among those I was standing with while watching the Manchester derby in the bar before the Jersey Bulls v Romford game last Saturday that United’s equaliser by Bruno Fernandes should have been disallowed for offside against Marcus Rashford, and there was incredulity when the goal was allowed.

It was widely held that Rashford was both seeking to gain an advantage and was interfering with play, but in saying so, most people were quoting from a half-remembered version of the offside law that no longer applies. The offside law has changed so frequently in recent years that very few of us have been able to keep up with those changes. But none the more for that, there were good reasons why the goal should have stood…but reasons why it should not have too. With offside calls, it’s possible for the decision to be simultaneously wrong, and right.

The concept of gaining an advantage has changed over the years such that this is deemed to have occurred only when a player who is in an offside position plays the ball after it has rebounded off a post, or bar, or an opponent, but not merely by their lurking in an offside position.

As for interfering with play, Rashford could only have been deemed to have been doing so if he had touched the ball – which he didn’t - or if he prevented an opponent from playing the ball, or made an action that impacted on the ability of an opponent to play the ball, and he didn’t do either of those things, so therefore he was unequivocally not offside. Or was he?

Two eminent former referees could not agree on the decision in the aftermath. Keith Hackett had no doubt; “Rashford is offside,” he wrote in The Sunday Telegraph. “To allow Fernandes’s goal to stand is a total nonsense.”

Being in an offside position is not an offense in itself of course, but Hackett goes on to say that Rashford was offside because he was “clearly attempting to play a ball which is close” (Law 11, section 2). Hackett also rightly pointed out that Darren McCann, the assistant who flagged Rashford offside, is one of the most experienced in world football. McCann has given more offside decisions than most of us have had hot dinners and got the vast majority of them right too. Hackett would therefore have supported McCann’s decision.

Meanwhile, speaking on Sky Sports, another former top-class referee, Dermot Gallagher opined that had he been the man in the middle, he would have stuck by assistant Darren McCann’s flag and called Rashford offside. But he then went on to say that referee Stuart Attwell would, from the view that he had, have formed the opinion that Rashford had not impacted on his opponents and was therefore not offside, hence him allowing the goal.

Gallagher also said that this was not a factual offside, but was a subjective one. Which tends to support a view that I have held for a long while: Offside decisions can be given that are technically correct, but which are morally, ethically, and subjectively, completely wrong. To avoid that conflict, and to return to Keith Hackett, “The law is awful and requires a complete rewrite.”

In this instance, because Rashford does not touch the ball, he is not technically offside. The ball however, is clearly within playing distance – defined in the laws as “(the) Distance to the ball which allows a player to touch the ball by extending the foot/leg or jumping,” and as it was within Rashford’s playing distance, there is a strong argument that he was in possession of the ball and therefore technically offside as well as subjectively so.

The Twitterverse has come up with a number of examples from seasons past where players in similar positions to Rashford’s have been given offside, but these are largely irrelevant as the laws have changed since some of these incidents occurred.

Although I would agree with Darren McCann’s decision to raise his flag and say that the goal ought to have been ruled out, I can see both sides of the argument in much the same way as Dermot Gallagher did. I suppose the acid test is, if my team conceded an identical goal, would I accept it graciously, or would I argue in favour of it being disallowed? The answer is that I would be spitting feathers! 

As a result, we’re back to the subjectivity of it all, and the biggest problem with that is – and I’ve said this before – that football is quite precious about having laws, and laws should not be contradictory, laws should not be subjective. To put it bluntly, laws must be objective, so in this I fully support Keith Hackett’s point of view; the law is an ass and needs a rewrite.

One could sum up this decision by say that while it was correct within the letter of the law, it was clearly not within its spirit, a consideration that the laws say that referees must apply when making a decision.

One controversial decision in one game in one country is unlikely to be enough to prompt a change in the law. It could result in a change in the way it is interpreted in England, although the fact that the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) - the body responsible for referees in the Premier League - have backed Stuart Attwell’s decision suggests that that might not be the case.

At some point in the near future, the offside law will change – again – and just about the only thing we can be certain of is that the change won’t add clarity but will simply produce more grey areas and more subjectivity to the decision making. That’s something to look forward to.

 

Strike!

Workers in the UK banking industry have never been particularly militant. During the thirty-six years I worked for Midland Bank/HSBC, there were, to the best of my knowledge, only two disputes that led to strike action. Largely this was due to the fact that the trade union was weak; the majority of staff were not union members.

At some point during the late 1970s or early 1980s, a union rep from what was then either the National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE), or the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union (BIFU) – the name changed in 1979 – came to the branch I was working at in Romford as part of a recruitment drive. He was told to leave by the branch manager and not darken our doors again after he called non-union members “f*****g parasites” for accepting pay rises that the union negotiated.

The only times strike action that I can recall being taken during my time in work came in the late 1970s, and then in the mid-1980s, and that second one was somewhat feeble to be honest. In the late 1970s, workers at Midland Bank’s data centre in Brent, north London, went on strike for two days a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) for a while. The majority of customers would have been blissfully unaware that any industrial action was being taken, but for those of us who worked in branches, it was pretty inconvenient.

At some point during the 1980s there was a dispute over working on Christmas Eve. When 24^th December fell on a weekday, we closed at mid-day, but one year when the last working day before Christmas was not actually Christmas Eve, and we were expected to work a full day, the union decided to flex its muscles and a ballot was called to see if union members were in favour of striking and walking out at lunchtime.

The ballot having been called, the vote went in favour of strike action. I recall that at Midland Bank, Barking – where I was working at the time – the majority of union members voted in favour of striking, but some were somewhat reluctant to follow it through. In the end, I was one of those that walked out at mid-day. To be honest, it was pretty insignificant and a full day’s work in similar circumstances became the norm in later years.

I was always of the opinion that had there been any further disputes in the bank, then a work to rule would have been much more effective than a strike. Most employers rely on workers going the extra mile, doing unpaid overtime and shortcutting processes in order to get the job done. I worked in a number of departments where, had everyone decided to do their jobs exactly by the book, work their contracted hours only, and work strictly in accordance with their job descriptions, then the bank would have ground to a halt. I’m sure that many workers, in many other industries, would say the same.

The 1970s were rife with strikes in many industries and it was almost an act of faith by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to reduce the power of the trade unions, and as a result, membership fell from 13 million in 1979 to around 7.3 million in 2000. We have therefore become used to a period of some decades in which industrial action and strikes have become a rarity. Now, however, many industries are seeing strike action; railway workers, nurses, ambulance workers, junior doctors, university lecturers, and teachers are all striking or threatening to.

The very people who were applauded at the height of the covid pandemic, the very people who were lauded as heroes, the key workers without whom we wouldn’t have got through lockdown, are now being vilified because they are striking in pursuit of reasonable pay rises. I mentioned the former editor of The Sun, Kelvin McKenzie, in my last blog as he called the men and women who drive ambulances as “vile shitbags.” He has subsequently decided that the NHS is full of vile people, that firemen are more interested in their other jobs (pretty sure that this is an outdated, urban myth), and that he looks forward to unions being fined and public sector workers being sacked when they strike.

I’m not picking particularly on McKenzie, it’s just that his vitriolic tweets keep appearing in my Twitter timeline, despite my not following him (coincidence or not, but since Elon Musk bought Twitter, my timeline now seems full of people I don’t follow), and his views seem representative of a section of society – and members of government – who have decided that fighting for a reasonable pay increase is a heinous offense. There have been suggestions that – as McKenzie alluded to – the government may legislate to sack public sector workers who strike. This of course is a bonkers idea; imagine an industry in which workers like nurses or paramedics, or doctors, need several years of training and cannot be replaced overnight, and having those very workers dismissed for going on strike. That really would improve the level of service.

The language used in describing some of these disputes is interesting. “Hard working people” will be unfairly affected if certain workers strike, they say. But the strikers are hard working people too, hard working people who would like to be fairly rewarded for their labours. And as for nurses and others in the health service, there’s a suggestion that what they do is less a job, and more a vocation, the implication being that that somehow that justifies poor salaries, that these workers should be selfless and regard a job well done as reward itself. None of which puts food on the table nor pays energy bills.

It’s difficult to be envious of people with extreme wealth sometimes, but the man next door, who normally earns the same as you but who suddenly gets a generous pay rise, is fair game for our jealousy and resentment, or at least that is how we have been programmed to think by the government and the media.

It’s true that strikes inconvenience ordinary members of the public as much, if not more, than the employers, but in the disputes currently taking place it seems that there is a lot more sympathy among members of the general public than is often the case. In most of these disputes, it seems that the public recognise that the striking workers have legitimate grievances. It also helps that in the dispute on the railways, RMT union leader Mick Lynch is a much more reasonable and measured figure than his predecessor, the late Bob Crow, who was much more combative.

One way or another, the current disputes we are seeing will be resolved. What sort of reaction this provokes from the government in terms of legislation to limit union powers even further than Margaret Thatcher’s did remains to be seen. Perhaps if striking becomes more difficult, then unions may have to look to alternative forms of action, like the work to rule, because surely you can’t be punished for doing your job properly, can you?

 

 

 

 

Motivated Reasoning

I haven’t written a blog for more than three months now; the last one that I published was just after the death of the Queen. It means that 2022 was my least productive year in terms of blogs with just 13 published, the lowest since 2018.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I’ve been busy writing other stuff. You may know that I write for Romford FC’s programme, which entails three pieces (two of 800 words each, and one of about 500) for every home game, and between August and Christmas, there have been twenty-two programmes to write for; in the same period last season, it was ten. On top of that, I’ve been writing articles and match reports for the football club’s website, which amounts to about 2,500 words a week, so time available to write blogs has shrunk.

Secondly, and probably more pertinently, I’ve run out of inspiration. More than once I’ve written an opening paragraph and then not even bothered saving it because I got bored, or because I’ve written something similar in the past. Then there are some subjects that, no matter how I feel about them, I have consciously decided to avoid, politics in general and Brexit in particular, and Covid (especially the conspiracy theories and again, the politics of it all).

When it comes to these subjects (among others), it seems that views, once set and entrenched, are difficult to change. The tribalism that exists in say, which football team you support, is equally evident in politics and recently, in views on the industrial action being taken by nurses, postal workers, and railway workers. Look at people like Kelvin McKenzie, former editor of The Sun, who I’m certain was among the cheerleaders of the NHS staff during the pandemic, but who recently described some of them as ‘vile shitbags,’ or Isabel Oakeshott (journalist) who seems to believe that nurses don’t deserve a pay rise because she believes that they spend all their time standing around and drinking tea, but who would have been leading the Thursday night clapping back in 2020.

There are people – and McKenzie and Oakeshott may well be among them – who don’t accept the lived experience of others if they don’t conform to their own beliefs. And it’s no use countering prejudice and opinion with facts because these people have formed an opinion, found one fact (or more likely, factoid), that supports their position and stick rigidly to it, despite a veritable cornucopia of evidence against. This is particularly applicable to the outcome of Brexit. On TV programmes such as the BBC’s Question Time it’s possible to find an audience member bemoaning the negative impact that Brexit has had on their business only to be told by a member of the panel (usually a Tory MP, often Jacob Rees Mogg) that they are wrong, that their perception of their lived experience is wrong.

Politicians are at the head of the queue of people with limited expertise or knowledge of a given subject who will pontificate and pronounce with absolute certainty, even though they are completely wrong.

Some nurses may earn £30,000 a year, some nurses may use food banks, and some may not be good at managing their finances, but Anderson confidently asserts that the majority of nurses fall into all three categories, even though it is highly improbable he could find any evidence to support the statement.

People who will not be swayed, or are unwilling to change their minds when faced with facts that discredit, debunk, or disprove their position are usually displaying motivated reasoning, where emotional biases lead to justifications or decisions based on their desirability rather than an accurate reflection of the evidence. This commonly manifests itself when someone who denies that something like Anthropogenic Climate Change exists, and rejects all facts and research that support it, homing in on anything that supports their view. Climate change is an interesting subject in that many people without any scientific qualifications (nor it seems, any significant knowledge of any science whatever) feel able to express opinions on the subject and be taken seriously, purely because they aren’t convinced or believe that it’s all part of some conspiracy.

A lot of this becomes evident through the BBC and it’s aims of impartiality, balance and objectivity. To quote Emily Maitlis, the former Newsnight presenter when speaking at the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival last August, “It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it. But by the time we went on air we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.”

As a result, it’s not unusual to find an expert in a particular subject, be it climate change, Brexit, Covid, or whatever, debating their specialism with someone who holds a contrary view based on limited understanding of the topic, but whose voice is given equal weight, even if their sole argument is “I’m not convinced.”  There’s an element of Dunning Kruger at play here, with being unconvinced shorthand for “I’m a clever person, but I don’t understand this, therefore it cannot be true.”

In this way, the BBC have pitted climate scientists with decades of experience in the field against the likes of Nigel Farage or Nigel Lawson in their quest for ‘balance’ on the subject, despite the fact that the broadcaster had to admit that in 2017, they had allowed Lawson to lie, unchecked, about the subject in an interview on the Today programme on Radio 4.

It’s very rare to find anyone changing their mind in TV or radio debates, or on social media. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone whose opinion, which may be based on prejudice and little knowledge, change their standpoint because a well marshalled argument, backed up with evidence, is presented to them. In the same way, once we form an opinion of a media figure, we are unlikely to change that either.

Nigel Farage and Piers Morgan are probably the ultimate Marmite men of British broadcasting. If you disagree with Farage’s views on Brexit and immigration, you will probably be hard pressed to agree with him on other topics, so when he recently expressed the perfectly reasonable view that travellers from China arriving in the UK should be tested for Covid, his critics’ knee-jerk reaction was to disagree, even if they fundamentally would have agreed with the idea had it been espoused by someone they admired.

Piers Morgan has so many opinions on so many topics, that I imagine many people simply expect to disagree with everything he says and do so on principle. The problem with that is that when he says something sensible (it happens, honestly) it can be hard to agree because of who he is and not for what he said.

If 70% of what someone says (or a newspaper publishes, or is broadcast on TV or radio) is offensive or we simply disagree with it, reasonable views and content that they promote get lost in the noise. We may feel unable to agree with one position that actually chimes with our own standpoint because we may feel tainted by association with someone whose views on other matters we find abhorrent.

Too few people change their minds, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Personally, I've never had a problem admitting that I'm wrong - and I've had plenty of opportunities!