The Premier League are likely to introduce semi-automated offsides eventually, but only after further determination on which body parts will be considered relevant.

Henry Winter spoke to the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust this week on a number of topics, including the potential introduction of semi-automated offsides in the Premier League.

According to Winter’s comments (via Walid Arsenal), semi-automated offside technology will be introduced, but only once there is agreement over which parts of the body will be considered offside.

Presumably, the fear here is that we’ll see a lot of offside calls made because one player’s upper arm was an inch offside, leading to backlash from supporters who don’t think goals should be ruled out for that kind of thing.

But the fact is that semi-automated offsides would be so much better than the current system for accuracy, reliability, and speed of decisions that it would be worth the complaints over marginal calls.

Better to have fans a bit annoyed that their striker was called offside by a few centimetres than to have a player incorrectly given onside because the VAR official forgot he was supposed to check that player.

Better to have a debate over whether the offside rules should be changed to exclude certain body parts than to have to wait minutes over every check while lines are drawn on blurry frames of partially obscured players.

Reports from elsewhere suggest the Premier League is recommending adding four additional cameras just outside each penalty area to improve the accuracy of the current Hawk-Eye offside system, rather than moving to the semi-automated system.

Trials will take place for the semi-automated system, but the feeling within the Premier League is that the system is less effective, as the images take longer to come through to the broadcasters.

To be clear, there’s no disputing the fact that the semi-automated system is significantly faster than the current system when it comes to actually making these decisions.

It’s only slower to make the images of the decision available to broadcasters.

But that’s the same system we have with goalline technology. The decision is made in seconds, but we often have to wait a while longer to see the goalline animation on the TV broadcast. In the meantime, the game goes on.

If it works so well for the goalline decisions, and you so rarely hear complaints that the animation wasn’t shown quickly enough, why should it be different for offsides?