[Forgeties79]

The issue is countless teams had opportunities to do this in the past - they all knew it was an option - but they chose not to. Then suddenly one team decided “well there’s no rule…” even though it was clearly established that everyone agreed not to do it. It’s not like they discovered something new, they just broke convention with no warning at a very consequential time after many teams undoubtedly could’ve done the same to them. It’s dirty.

We all saw this on the school yard as a kid and none of us appreciated it. It’s annoying to have to enshrine literally every situation into the rules. Just play the game as intended. This is part of what has made American football become less fun to watch (besides learning about CTE’s…). Soooo many rules, constantly stopping play to assess every little mm of the play. It’s boring as hell for all involved. It’s why you often hear “just let them play!”

[scott_w]

I actually suspect they didn’t know. When a sport is played one way for 200 years, you don’t read the rule book to check, you just copy what everyone is doing!

[sejje]

On the local elementary school field, sure.

At the highest levels of the sport, they know the rulebook like the back of their hand.

[_thisdot]

Have to disagree. Even in cricket, I've seen players often get stumped when a rule gets enforced and they had no idea. The 2019 CWC final had multiple such events. An overthrow that hit Ben Stokes and went to the boundary got England six runs when they'd run only two (actually, even by the rules they should've gotten only 5 runs. The umpires made a mistake there). It's something that'd have gotten Ben Stokes out had he done it "intentionally".

[scott_w]

I disagree: players rarely know the rules in-depth. A great example is a YouTube video I watched where a Premier League and World Cup referee told the camera that most players didn’t know where they needed to be placed for kick off and that they needed to kick the ball forward. It was so bad that IFAB changed the rules to allow kick off to backpass because it was causing so much conflict at the start of football matches!

[Forgeties79]

Even the commentators knew. They called it out as it happened. It was absolutely common knowledge.

[scott_w]

Commentators typically know more than players. But in any case, the article quite literally contradicts you. The New Zealand captain believed it to be illegal and the commentator said “you can’t do that,” implying he believed it to be illegal at first.