Offside goals in Borussia Dortmund - Málaga CF

The performance of the Scottish refereeing team headed by Craig Thomson in yesterday's quaint tie between Borussia Dortmund and Málaga CF is currently subject to immense criticism also heated by an official complaint lodged by the Spanish side. 

Besides some errors typical of every referee performance, the assistant referees' performances were characterized by two crucial mistakes with a severe impact on the course and resulst of the entire match. Both AR1 Derek Rose as well as AR2 Alasdair Ross thus failed to disallow one goal of each team in the last minutes of play. These decisions should be exposed in the following to make them clearer despite the already led discussions in the comments underneath the respective thread.

After a simple turnover in the midfield, Spanish talent Isco passed the ball to Julio Baptista who appeared free in front of BVB goalkeeper Weidenfeller. A mixture of a pass and a shot was taken and Eliseu only had to slide the ball home. But exactly this player, Eliseu, was in an offside position (approximately 30-50 cm) missed by AR1 Derek Rose due to suboptimal positioning:

Derek Rose failed to gain an optimum position by 2,1 metres

Dortmund did not really recover from this (illegal) goal and they had to wait until the 90th minute, then, they finally scored the equalizing goal and took fresh heart from it. In the second/third minute of the additional time, Dortmund managed the miracle and turned the original defeat into a 3:2 win. But also here, the goal should not have counted. AR2 Alasdair Ross even missed two offside positions in this situation:

Schieber (the upper yellow player) was offside when #9 played the ball

Santana was positioned irregularly as well

While the first missed offside position may be accepted as a normal error of perception, the second one is tremendously grave: Ross surely was positioned half a metre away from the goalline and nonetheless failed to detect Santana's clear offside position. The goalkeeper (red kit) took the role of the 2nd last defender in that moment so that Santana's position became illegal. Even the second additional assistant referee Kevin Clancy could have noticed that, while it must be clear that it was the assistant referee's area of responsibility.

One may presume that Ross did not raise the flag either due to the dynamic pace and extra-ordinary nature of this situation or due to the fact that the crowd behind and besides him was heated in a way which produced a pressure he was unable to cope with by losing his mental alertness and concentration.

It does not justify anything, but in the end, it was kind of equal injustice football as a game can sometimes benefit from.