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The offside trap is a negative and fairly risky football (soccer) strategy which tries to prevent a team from scoring by tricking their strikers into being offside.

A player is offside when, as one of his* teammates plays the ball forward, he is in his opponents' half and closer to the goal-line than all but one of his opponents (usually the goalkeeper). He also needs to be 'involved in active play' - so unless he goes on to receive the ball or gets in a defender's way, he's not offside.

To play the offside trap, you need all of your defenders to move upfield as a unit, hoping that a striker will fail to keep up and end up on the wrong side of the last defender when the ball is played. Traditionally, whenever a striker runs past you, you stick up your arm and appeal to the linesman or referee (or anyone else who'll listen) for offside.

It is difficult to play reliably because strikers are given the benefit of any doubt, and because it only takes one defender to zone out and lag behind for all of the strikers to be onside. A further risk is that when it fails, your defence is running in the opposite direction to the attackers, meaning that they have a free run on goal unless you're very quick.

* or her... throughout.

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