Nothing that a mere Parliament or a League of Nations is likely to do will come home to the masses who follow professional league football or even the average schoolboy so much as the news that the International Board has adopted the alteration of the offside rule.

Welcome to It Was What It Was with me, Rob Drape.

I'm here with Jonathan Wilson, and today we're joined by a very special guest,

the former Sports Editor of Financial Times,

author of numerous books on sports history, including Fon Avin,

the story of the 1967 Grand National.

David Owen, David, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much, Rob.

You've given him that builder, but of course, David's most important role in sports journalism

is that he is the editor who gave me my first job on a national newspaper.

Of course.

And therefore, in a sense, he stands as the Oppenheimer of everything that's happened and gone wrong since.

Yeah, well I think there might be quite a few people taking an issue with that,

and David, you might be castigated widely by our audience and others,

but here we are, we're stuck with Jonathan, and we'll have to get on with it.

But more importantly, even than that, in 2018, he wrote a lengthy piece to the Blizzard,

and do subscribe to that at the Blizzard.com.com.com, at the UK, about the 1925 changing

offside law. And we stand on the brink of a major centenary that on the 13th of June, 1925,

the offside law was changed and I would say this probably

stands as one of the two biggest tweaks of the laws in the 20th century is that is that fair maybe

even more significant so how how important do you place that change David well it's pretty

fundamental to to go from three players needing to be goalside of the attacker

...