Boundary Conditions
What the Off-Side law needs...
Anxieties about Off Side under the VAR system puzzle me. There is a tension between the letter and the spirit of the law. The letter of the law is enforced with measurable precision under VAR. Every off-side decision is correct under VAR.
This has had the interesting effect of commentators grumbling about this precision. If referees enforce the spirit of the law, commentators grumble about the lack of precision and the unevenness of refereeing interpretations.
The law is not written to accomodate the precision made possible by the machinery. Boundaries are meaningful only under the specific conditions under which they can be identified. Cricket’s solution to translate between two different systems of evaluation (the umpire being the first, and the ball-tracker being the second) where a boundary lies is the inclusion of ‘Umpire’s Call’ in the DRS protocol. To understand what ‘Umpire’s Call’ really is, think of it in the following way:
Imagine that there is no longer an umpire standing at the bowler’s end to give a decision. The bowler bowls a ball which pitches on off-stump and hits the batsman’s front pad in front of middle. The ball-tracking projection predicts that the ball would hit only the outer half of the leg-stump, squarely within the orange umpire’s call zone. Now, imagine that the bowler gets to flip a coin. If the batsman calls correctly, the batsman gets to stay. If the bowler wins the coin flip, the batsman is dismissed.
This is effectively how marginal LBW appeals are decided under the ‘Umpire’s Call’ protocol. Instead of the coin-toss, you have the umpire’s original decision which decides who wins the coin flip.
Under VAR, the off-side rule has a similar problem. So when an off-side situation is being evaluated, a ‘referee’s call’ zone could be established, and if the estimate of the situation falls under this defined referee’s call zone, then they should just flip a coin.
This may sound flippant. But what this will mean is that the situation does not fall clearly enough on one side of the boundary, and so the coin toss is the fairest way to decide whether or not it was off-side. It is the only systematic way to identify and separate extremely close situations. The first step is to establish whether the situation is too close to call. And if it is, the matter is decided pseudo-randomly.
My podcast episode [published Feb 24, 2020] on VAR and DRS with Daisy Christodoulou, Daniel Norcross and Jonathan Wilson is a good discussion of this subject area and may be of interest.