March 3 – Football’s lawmakers are trying again to reduce time-wasting by goalkeepers, one of the bugbears of fans worldwide.
In a radical new rule change, The International Football Association Board (IFAB) announced Saturday that goalkeepers who hold on to the ball for more than eight seconds will be punished from next season with conceding an immediate corner.
The new rule will first be used at the Club World Cup in June and then in domestic and international competitions.
It replaces the current and mostly unenforced rule that states a referee should give an indirect free kick to the other side if a goalkeeper holds the ball for more than six seconds.
The eight-second rule has been trialled in more than 400 games in three different competitions, said IFAB, which revealed there had only been four instances of conceding a corner suggesting goalkeepers see it as a significant deterrent.
Keepers will have no excuse for being unaware of the time limit, with referees instructed to count down the final five seconds on a raised hand.
“You can see it has a significant impact on goalkeeper behaviour,” Patrick Nelson, chief executive of the Irish Football Association and an IFAB director, told a press conference in Belfast after Saturday’s annual IFAB meeting.
He said the six-second rule, and the failure to enforce it, had “been a bane of many people’s lives for quite some time”.
“Some action has been taken on that. The results of (the trials) have been very, very positive, and so we are going to move forward to try and put that into the laws of the game as soon as possible.”
The IFAB also voted to continue offside trials in which the attacker will be ruled onside if his torso is level with the second to last defender.
Meanwhile, an “indirect free kick with no disciplinary sanction” will be awarded if a member of either bench touches the ball as it is leaving the pitch, if there is “no intention to interfere unfairly”.
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