You know Usain Bolt? He’s quite fast he is. He covers 100m in approximately 10 seconds.
I’m gonna use him as my very fast guinea pig in my maths lesson for footy fans.
Don’t worry, all numbers are approximate and any resemblance to real numbers is purely coincidental – just like when LiVARpool are playing.
Anyway. Back to Usain Bolt. He covers 100m in about 10m per second. So in half a second he covers 5m. And in a tenth of a second he covers a whole metre.
Now Joe Willock is no Usain Bolt. So let’s say he is half as quick for ease of numbers. This is a disservice to Joe as he’s loads quicker than a 20 sec 100m runner.
Anyway…So based on the above, Joe would cover 50cm (half a metre) in a tenth of a second. Now students, hands up who knows what a tenth of a second looks like, sounds like etc etc. Its a tiny, tiny measure of time that we can’t even guess. It’s on a par with how long I spend trying to make Mrs Toon happy apparently.
Anyway, from Joe we move on to the ball. You know that soft thing that absorbs the impact of the kick from Jacob Ramsey before leaving the foot and travelling on to Joe. How long does the impact to the obvious departure of the ball take?
Now I’ve already told you Joe covers 50cm in a tenth of a second. Last night at Tottenham he was given offside by his hair. Let’s call that 10cm.
So your homework is to tell me what fraction of a second he took to travel 10cm. If you can work that out please send your answer to VAR and tell them to focus on exactly when the ball is kicked and be very very clear about it, absolutely precise in fact, as they don’t want to be making mistakes do they!
Next lesson students, we are all going to watch the Jacob Ramsey to Joe Willock pass. Freeze time when we think the ball is kicked. I guarantee we will all have different times. We will all be out compared to each other by the fractions required to have Joe onside.
And by the way, the answer to the homework was that it takes Joe 0.02 seconds to travel 10 cm, or two hundredths of a second. So if you are 0.02 seconds out, you have just decided Joe is onside or offside depending on your mistake.