Question Number: 25258

Law 5 - The Referee 7/27/2011

RE: Under 16

T Maerz of Chatham, Ontario Canada asks...

An interesting situation has come up in a league that I mentioned I would try and find the answer to. The situation goes like this.. If during play the AR signals an offside but it is missed by the ref and the offense carries the ball towards the goal and ends up scoring thereby making the play a stoppage, can the ref now call back the goal and award the indirect kick for offside or do they award the goal because the play continued and the call made by the AR was missed by the ref and the play was now dead?

Answer provided by Referee Dennis Wickham

Yes. The referee may disallow the goal and restart based on the offside on information from the assistant referee as long as play has not restarted (kickoff).

The assistant referee should keep up a flag raised for offside until one of three things happens: (a) the referee waves down the flag; (b) the defense gets clear possession and control of the ball; or (c) the ball goes out of play with a restart for the defense. Eventually, players will shout and the referee will notice the flag.

I go over this in every pregame match that I referee (and demonstrate my wave down signal).

Note: when an apparent goal is scored, the procedure in the US for the assistant referee is slightly different. A raised flag is used to indicate only one thing: the player who scored the goal was offside. In all other situations, the assistant referee stands at attention. The referee can then learn who was offside and decide whether the act on the information from the assistant. The AR should not let the referee restart the match with a kickoff until the referee has the information from the AR about the offside.

Answer provided by Referee Joe McHugh

Hi
Law 10 states that a goal is scored when the whole of the ball passes over the goal line, between the goalposts and under the crossbar, provided that no infringement of the Laws of the Game has been committed previously by the team scoring the goal.
In this case an infringement of Law 11 happened before the goal was scored. The referee if he believes the AR call was correct then he must disallow the goal and restart with an IDFK to the defence.

Answer provided by Referee Michelle Maloney

If the referee accepts the AR's information as correct, then the decision is considered to have been made at the moment the AR made the offside decision - which clearly was before the ball went into the goal. No goal - restart with IDFK where offside positioned player was located when the ball was last touched or played by a teammate.