Regardless of the debate around the original decision, I can't see how they can keep issuing new interpretations during the season.
As others have already said, I don't think they are issuing a new interpretation here, I also think they're just pointing out what the intent of the law was already supposed to be anyway.
As I said in my post on the closed thread, I always thought the "challenging an opponent for the ball" clause was the correct one to apply here, not the "receiving the ball from an opponent who deliberately plays the ball" clause that the PGMOL initially (and others on here, I might add) wanted to invoke.
It always seemed to me that actively taking the ball off an opponent is not the same as "receiving" it from them - in fact, in some ways the two concepts are pretty much diametrically opposed.
So maybe my thinking wasn't so old-fashioned after all.
As for the debate over how long to allow before the opponent can be challenged, I would say it's more a question of timing rather than any fixed number of touches.
I would agree with anyone who says the defender isn't allowed an unlimited amount of time on the ball after receiving it, before being challenged and exactly how much time is allowable is going to be somewhat open to interpretation but I certainly think it should be longer than Mings had in this incident. Based on my timing of it with the stopwatch feature on my regular wristwatch, Rodri takes the ball off Mings' toe 57/100 of a second after Mings' first touch of the ball with his chest.
I think that however much time you're going to allow before a challenge is legitimate, is has to be longer that that.
