Charlie Adam from his own half against Chelsea

I watch other terms more now that I’m in a fairly competitive FPL league with a bunch of mates

The basic rule is that when you play the ball forward, there have to be at least two opposition players between your most advanced team-mate and the goal line. A player can’t be offside in his own half of the pitch though, and you can’t be offside from a throw-in.

In practice, the goalkeeper is almost always one of the two opposition players, so you’re normally looking at whether there is a defender between your most advanced team-mate and the goal line.

The purpose of the rule is to prevent goal hanging and compress the play into a smaller area (if you watch a match in person having normally watched on TV, it’s surprising to see how small an area of the pitch almost all the players are in). The game is what it is today pretty much because of the offside rule.

There’s also various additional details that are important in practice (e.g. is the offside player “active”, what part of his body counts as being offside, what phase of play are you in etc.) but they’re all fiddling around the edges of the basic rule.

The VAR has to have more authority to just make a decision IF it’s something the ref hasn’t seen.

If the ref HAS seen something, they can discuss with the VAR but ref has the ultimate call.

And I think almost all the “controversial” decisions wouldn’t be as big a deal if everyone heard the conversation and understood the logic for the decision.

As it stands it sounds like a complete mess with no one knowing who’s doing what (at least that’s how it seemed when they released the recording of the Liverpool disallowed goal).

VAR technology isn’t the problem. The idiotic Premier League referees operating it are the problem.

My conspiracy theory is that they never wanted it and so are operating it badly to try and get rid of it.

There’s no easy way to say this…but Lord Bendtner has retired