High lines survived video review better than the offside trap did

Playing a high line and springing a trap are different things, and only one of them got harder when the margins shrank.

The offside trap as a deliberate act, the coordinated step forward at the moment the pass is played, used to be a gamble with a generous error bar. Get it roughly right and the flag went up, because a linesman looking across a line of moving bodies would give the benefit to the defence more often than not, and everybody accepted that.

The error bar is now the width of a shoulder. That is what changed, and it changed the trap far more than it changed the high line.

Those are separate ideas and they get muddled constantly. A high line is a positional choice: defend forty yards from your own goal so that the pitch is compressed and your press has something to press into. A trap is a timing action: step up together to catch a runner who has gone early. You can play a very high line without ever springing a trap, and the best modern defences largely do exactly that.

Why? Because the payoff on the trap fell and the risk did not. If you step and get it wrong by half a yard, you now have a striker through on goal, the same as ever. If you step and get it right by half a yard, you get a review, a delay, and a decision that goes against you often enough to make the whole thing a coin flip. A tactic whose upside is a coin flip and whose downside is a clear chance is not worth rehearsing.

What replaced it is less dramatic and better. Hold the line high, do not step, and defend the ball rather than the runner. Squeeze when the man on the ball cannot play forward, drop when he can. The line moves for reasons that come from the ball carrier's body shape, not from a striker's positioning, and that is a rule you can execute without gambling.

There is a nostalgic case for the trap that I have some time for. It was thrilling, it produced arguments, and it rewarded a specific kind of defensive intelligence that we now see less of.

It was also, always, a defence deliberately handing the game to an official. We should be a bit less sentimental about missing that.