U.S. Men’s National Team v. Jamaica, Kingston, 6.7.13: Is the Linesman to Blame for Jamaica’s Goal?

Here are the key points of the U.S. men’s national team’s 2-1 World Cup qualifier victory in Kingston on Friday: Jurgen Klinsmann started the same group of players in consecutive games for the first time in his position as U.S. head coach. Brad Evans, a peripheral figure for the U.S. two weeks ago, has seemingly emerged as the team’s regular right back, and he netted the dramatic game-winning goal in stoppage time after being shifted to midfield due to a Jermaine Jones injury around the hour mark. Jozy Altidore has now scored in back-to-back games after having failed to score in his previous eleven international matches. Graham Zusi, who assisted on Altidore’s goal, played well, as did Michael Bradley, who assisted on Evans’s. Fabian Johnson did not play particularly well. Clint Dempsey had a drab, largely invisible performance—a tendency of his that is not widely recognized—and the U.S. back line looked at times disorganized, giving up what seemed to be a heartbreaking soft goal off a free kick a minute from time.

That soft goal is perhaps the most intriguing storyline of the game. I watched the game in a Boston sports bar amidst hundreds of Bruins fans watching game 4 of the playoff series with the Pittsburgh Penguins. There was only one other soul in that huge, crowded bar besides myself who was watching the soccer game, a genial twenty-something previously unknown to me who spent as much time looking at and fiddling with his smart phone as he did watching the match. After the Jamaica goal (scored by Jermaine Beckford) he informed me, “People are saying the Jamaica players were offside.”

Perhaps my young fellow USMNT fan was following SI writer Andy Glockner, who, according to a Bleacher Report article by Tyler Conway, tweeted after the match: “I still can't believe JAM's goal counted. Beckford was clearly offside. He was the only guy that was. How do you miss that?” In his Bleacher Report article, Conway seems to share some of Glockner’s disbelief, but adds, “most will forget about the poor officiating after Friday night” because of Evans’s subsequent goal.

But was this really a case of poor officiating? Highlights of the game can be found at the following mlssoocer.com page. Replays of the goal can be seen from three or four different angles on those highlights. After reviewing the play, I agree that Beckford was in an offside position at the moment of the strike. So, the goal should have been disallowed.

However, we should as always in such cases remind ourselves that linesmen do not have the luxury of pausing and re-pausing plays after the fact to get a call right, as referees have in some other sports. A linesman must put himself into a position to see the exact moment of the ball strike as well as the exact positions of the last defender and the attacker furthest forward. Pace Glockman’s unsympathetic tweet (“How do you miss that?”) the offside call leading to the Jamaica goal was not an easy one to make.

If the highlights mentioned above are paused at various points in the 3:51-3:52 range, we can see just how difficult it must have been for the linesman to make the right call. Just a fraction of a second after the ball is struck—when it is maybe five yards off Rodolph Austin’s foot—Geoff Cameron has tracked back into an area that would have kept Beckford in an onside position if the ball had been struck at that moment. Well, you might argue, the ball wasn’t struck when the players were in that position, it wasn’t even close. To which a reasonable person would counter: it is not possible that a human being can process all of this information so quickly in real time over such great distances and with so many moving players involved in such a crowded space and get every close call right. To repeat: the call, or rather no-call, was wrong but understandable, the kind of no-call that happens all the time in soccer, not a howler, certainly nothing on the order of, say, the call that disallowed Maurice Edu’s goal against Slovenia in the 2010 World Cup.

More to the point, players simply cannot trust that an offside flag will go up in the chaos of a free kick taken near the box, especially when playing in another team’s park. On such a play, I believe a coach should instruct his players to forget about zones and offside traps. Players should mark their men goal side and stick to them. This is no easy task, because attackers will simply take any forward position they can if a defender marks goal side, which is why there is so much grappling and shoving prior to free kicks around the box.

In any case, it’s clear from the video that some U.S. players—like Evans and Bradley and Cameron—kept themselves between their marks and the goal. Other U.S. players—most notably Omar Gonzalez and Eddie Johnson—did not. (This is another reason to forget about drawing attackers offside on a set piece—it’s too chaotic and too crowded to get everyone on the same page.) Johnson (not Gonzalez, as some have written) was marking Beckford on the play and let him have a free run to the goal. If Beckford hadn’t scored on the play, Gonzalez’s mark—about two yards behind Gonzalez when the ball dropped into the six-yard area—almost surely would have.

In short, if there was anything notably “poor” about the Jamaica goal, it was not the linesman’s no-call but the defensive marking of Johnson and Gonzalez. And fans, commentators, and coaches should not be taking the linesman to task, but the players.