It’s a rite of passage for male soccer fans the world over. You might never know quite exactly when it’s going to happen, but most of us must eventually face a subtle, daunting, delicate task:
Explaining soccer’s offside rule to your girlfriend.
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For me, it was a long time coming. Most of the times I’ve been partnered up coincided with yawning chasms in the Toronto and Canadian soccer scenes. I don’t recall more than once or twice I’ve ever taken a date to a match – and I don’t believe the offside rule came up either time.
I was blissfully unattached when Toronto FC came into being, and remained that way for all of the Canadian MLS club’s first three seasons.
Then, right around the time of the Jersey Swamp Meadowlands Meltdown that brutally destroyed all hope for TFC ’09, I met and began to fall very deeply in love with a wonderful gal from the Kawarthas. Lilli runs a holistic healing centre in Peterborough, and bless our hearts, we simply adore each other.
She’s very interested in my world, and actually came out partying with the Red Patch Boys on one of our very first dates. Never been much into soccer, but she played hockey as a girl – and was red-headed hip-check queen of Brantford, Ontario, in her glory days.
So I scored a pair in 221 for the Chicago game this past Saturday, and made the carefully thought-out decision that the offside rule was something that needed to be … addressed.
Soccer’s such a simple sport, isn’t it? There’s the field, there’s the ball, don’t use your arms.
But offside explanation remains a tricky task. Several hilarious movie scenes have been devoted to the problem. The guy goes all earnest and increasingly baffled, while his lovely mate gets confused, condescending or outright catatonic.
It’s all in how you approach the task. Charts and paper can be really confusing, because offside is a fluid and changing situation. It’s not like hockey, where the blue line is bolted down. Soccer’s blue line – the second-furthest-back member of the defending team – is a thinking, moving human being. He can be brilliant, banged-up, or having a bad day. It’s hard to show all that on paper.
So I just went with the available resources. In my case, the bed and a bunch of stuffed animals.
With whatever skill with words I might have – and some genuine patience on her part – I was able to explain to Lilli that the forward-most attacking penguin cannot be ahead of the last purple mastodon before the trailing penguin kicks the ladybug paperweight forward.
Once that was clear, I stressed that the purple mastodon can actually time the trailing penguin’s pass, and create an offside by moving forward suddenly just as the ladybug paperweight gets hoofed.
That didn’t go as well, but eventually we came to a rudimentary understanding – at least enough to get us through the weekend. (I didn’t even get to the most-confusing point: that the polar-bear goaltender counts as one of the two backmost defenders, just in case he gets caught wandering and the penguins suddenly reacquire the paperweight.)
As it eventualized, Toronto FC’s wind-blown and quite delightful 4-1 romp over the visiting Chicago Fire was a largely offside-free affair. Lilli – seeing soccer for only the second time in her life – was able to follow the ball easily, and cheered and cringed at all the right places. We got separated by BMO Field’s appalling concession-stand crunch at halftime, but were reunited just in time to watch Chad Barrett break in alone (and onside!) to score Toronto’s fourth and final goal.
It was a lovely – if cold and blustery – day at the park. And the fact there were no actually penguins or mastodons on the pitch didn’t seem to confuse things at all … although the penguins would have been very much at home in the prevailing weather conditions.
What’s your best offside-explaining story?
Onward!