Nothing to do with “partisanship”. I’ve been saying the same thing about marginal offsides since VAR first came in.
I only casually follow England anyway as I spent a lot of my childhood there. I’m always kind of glad when they lose (especially in controversial circumstances) because of the large Tommy Robinson element they take wherever they go.
Fair enough regarding vested interest, but it still leaves you not understanding the reasoning behind the off-side rule, because it is one of the most objective and simplistic rules in football for a good reason. Yes, it’s simplistic. Even though a lot of people have trouble with the wording and often can’t differentiate between “two players” and “two players, one of which may or may not be a keeper” and for example think it’s not off-side when the keeper is out of position or a second defending player is standing behind the backline to lift off-side because they would argue he is out of play outside the field (like the goal by van Nistelrooij against France or Italy controversy iirc).
VAR is particularly well suited to fairplay on minor transgressions that are otherwise hard to tell. And why else apply VAR if not to arbitrate what a referee may have missed?
Arbitrarily ruling out harder rulings would make it a mockery of fairplay and doing justice. A foul is a foul after all, in that sense the only limits to a VAR would be its system’s capacity to be accurate and fair. Not introduce deliberate unfair rulings or introduce deliberate “rule breaking allowed” exceptions to rulings.
Apart from in sports like cycling who crosses the line first is the entire defining factor of the sport. Offside is just a (very flawed) rule in a much more complex sport.
Whereas scoring a goal from an off-side position isn’t important to the outcome of a match and therefore not “defining”?
If you think cycling is less complex, you might just be wrong. It’s different, but timing, reading opponents, knowing when to make a move, how fast you need and can go alone or as a group, therefore maintain the appropriate pacing and positioning with regards to track and aerodynamics is probably too complex to comprehend for the average footy player. It’s not just being the fastest at the end, the whole build up to it determines how it plays out in the end.
In football the end moment does not matter. Instead, goal scoring moments influenced by potential rulings like on whether it is or isn’t off-side are everything to the outcome of the match.
Point is that off-side is defined very clearly as an attacker not being allowed to stand closer to the goal than the second nearest defending player at the moment of play. This means anything over zero is nearer and thus disallowed. This is done to avoid controversy and allow for objective, arbitrary judgment. Your rule interpretation is not just wrong, but far too vague to be applicable im a consistent manner and therefore unworkable. Worse, it is against the spirit of fairplay and against the concept of objectivity.