CHANGES to the Laws of the Game are usually made after experiments are carried out in certain sections of football.

One such experiment was approved by the International Football Association Board at their March meeting.

This is another law copied from Rugby Union, the use of sin bins, or more properly called, ‘temporary dismissals’.

The philosophy is that a team punished by the temporary loss of a player, during the game in which the offence took place, is better than a totalling of cautions (yellow cards) to miss a game at a later date.

In a normal game of 90 minutes, the offending player would spend 10 minutes off the field.

Sounds simple but there might be a snag.

It is intended that this experiment is to be carried out only in youth, veterans’, disability and grassroots football.

There is talk about the temporary dismissal being spent in the technical area and supervised by the fourth official or neutral assistant referee. These are seldom found in those levels of the game.

This means, of course, that it will all fall on the lone referee.

Sin bins already apply in some small-a-side competitions where referees are equipped with blue cards rather than the normal yellow cards, which the new system will continue to use.

I have refereed in competitions with blue but have never had to use them, so have no personal experience of the problems temporary suspensions might cause.

It will be down to each football association or federation to decide whether they adopt temporary dismissals.

There are also suggestions that they will be able to choose whether to include all cautionable offences to be punished by a temporary dismissal or whether some will still just receive a yellow card as at present.

Also, will two temporary dismissals result in a sending off? Will they have to be recorded?

A lot of questions are still to be answered before we are likely to see sin bins in local football next season.