Football coaches and their teams would always seek to exploit anything that might give them an advantage over opponents. The sizes of football pitches is one of such things that can come into play. Regulations state that a pitch must be 90-120 metres long x 45-90 metres wide. As expected, this flexibility of range is ripe for manipulation.
Graeme Souness, the hard-nosed former Liverpool captain, turned hard-nosed manager, and currently a hard-nosed pundit, smelled an opportunity to gain an advantage over an opposition team in a 1987-88 European Cup tie. Souness was managing Rangers of Scotland and they were 1-0 down from the first leg of their tie against Soviet champions, Dynamo Kyiv.