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12th Mar 2017

MLS referee deserves an award for not ruling this goal out for offside

Call of the century

Ben Kiely

There are few football injustices more heartbreaking than scoring a perfectly good goal, only for it to be ruled out for offside.

If a lesser man had been in the middle of the park for the MLS clash between Chicago Fire and Real Salt Lake City, Nemanja Nikolic could have been a very unhappy man. Luckily for the Chi-town man, Kevin Stott was refereeing.

Nikolic sent his side 1-0 up after 11 minutes, but on first glance, it looked like the referee had made a grave error by waving off the protests.

However, the replays showed that Stott had made a brilliant call. It wasn’t a Chicago Fire player who provided the assist, but rather Salt Lake’s Sunny who played Nikolic in with an interception. Sunny got his boot to the ball last, meaning that Nikolic wasn’t offside when he took possession of the ball.

The goal stood, as it should have.

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