England's goalkeeper-removal trial begins in the League Cup on Saturday, and on Thursday — the last pre-data record — the genuine-injury override in IFAB's protocol remains assigned to no one in writing. [1]

This is the eve-of experiment this paper anticipated with the July 29 account of IFAB publishing the goalkeeper-timeout protocol in writing: a real rule with a real hole. An injured goalkeeper must leave the field for one minute under Circular 34; whether a collision counts as genuine or tactical is a judgment the circular declines to give to anyone — not the referee, not the physio, not the fourth official. [1][2]

The crackdown frame is easy to love, and the preview press has loved it. The refereeing community has been doing something more useful: gaming the exploits, mapping how a theatrical tumble and an honest collision trigger identical treatment under a rule that cannot tell them apart. Both readings will be tested at once; the trial is designed to generate exactly the data that would close the argument.

Saturday supplies the first data. Whether the override gap produces an incident, and whether IFAB amends mid-trial, is the next edition's record. The stopwatch starts August 1. [2]

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London