IFAB checks 8-second rule in clampdown on goalkeeper time-wasting

March 3 – Soccer’s lawmakers try once more to cut back time-wasting by goalkeepers, one of many bugbears of followers worldwide.

In a radical new rule change, The Worldwide Soccer Affiliation Board (IFAB) introduced Saturday that goalkeepers who maintain on to the ball for greater than eight seconds can be punished from subsequent season with conceding an instantaneous nook.

The brand new rule will first be used on the Membership World Cup in June after which in home and worldwide competitions.

It replaces the present and principally unenforced rule that states a referee ought to give an oblique free kick to the opposite aspect if a goalkeeper holds the ball for greater than six seconds.

The eight-second rule has been trialled in additional than 400 video games in three totally different competitions, stated IFAB, which revealed there had solely been 4 situations of conceding a nook suggesting goalkeepers see it as a major deterrent.

Keepers can have no excuse for being unaware of the time restrict, with referees instructed to depend down the ultimate 5 seconds on a raised hand.

“You possibly can see it has a major affect on goalkeeper behaviour,” Patrick Nelson, chief govt of the Irish Soccer Affiliation and an IFAB director, informed a press convention in Belfast after Saturday’s annual IFAB assembly.

He stated the six-second rule, and the failure to implement it, had “been a bane of many individuals’s lives for fairly a while”.

“Some motion has been taken on that. The outcomes of (the trials) have been very, very constructive, and so we’re going to transfer ahead to attempt to put that into the legal guidelines of the sport as quickly as attainable.”

The IFAB additionally voted to proceed offside trials during which the attacker can be dominated onside if his torso is stage with the second to final defender.

In the meantime, an “oblique free kick with no disciplinary sanction” can be awarded if a member of both bench touches the ball as it’s leaving the pitch, if there’s “no intention to intervene unfairly”.

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