And of course there’s offsides, and there’s what the Assistant Referee decides is offsides.

In my opinion, it is the hardest decision to make in sports, mainly because it is physically impossible to watch (1) when the ball was kicked and (2) the second to last defender, simultaneously when those two events could take place 60 yards apart from each other.

Unless the Assistant Referee can independently control the movement of each eyeball.

I’m probably offsides hypersensitive this weekend because my favorite French player by my count got called for offsides SIX times on Saturday. But he also scored the winning goal, so all is forgiven.

I can’t seem to line up the (YouTube) player so I can see what you mentioned in regards to the third goal. I’m going to try to set my computer up to take TIVOed footage from my Tivo, and maybe I can slow things like this down to help.

I’ll address the third goal first. It’s not a good angle to tell, but I think the Ecuadoran player in the middle of the field probably kept Beasley onsides. He’s just kinda hanging out at the bottom of the center-circle when the ball goes flying by, and it seems pretty likely that Bease started his run well before passing this guy, and was therefore onside.

If you pause it with about 12 seconds left, you can see the ball just crossing mid-field, in the air, and you can see the Ecuadoran central defender’s shadow just enter the left side of the picture. That guy ain’t moving too fast, and if the man marking Beasley didn’t keep Beasley onsides, it seems like this central defender certainly could have.

As for the second goal, I believe it was clearly onsides. I used the pause button to capture the moment of truth from the above video, and I’ve enlarged and posted it at http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/6718/onsidedg6.png for your review and comment.

The third goal we can’t tell from this clip, since Beasley was definitely in front of the Ecuadorian when receiving the ball, but he could have sprinted ahead when he saw the ball being kicked (and still have been on side).