suit. Adjustments made to the rules in the late 1970s created definitions removing the ability for players to bounce the ball or handpass to themselves as ways to avoid holding the ball free kicks or win holding the man free kicks. footballer Kevin Bartlett was particularly well known for using these tactics to avoid being penalised for holding the ball, and the rule changes are generally associated with his play. The next and last major change to the holding the ball rule was the introduction of the 'prior opportunity' rule. The rule was initially introduced in 1986 and known as the "perfect tackle rule": tackling a player who had an opportunity to dispose of the ball before being tackled was defined as a perfect tackle, and the provision for a perfectly tackled player to have a reasonable time to dispose of the ball before being penalised was eliminated. The rule was introduced to speed up the game. This later became the modern 'prior opportunity' rule in 1996, and it was the first time that different holding the ball interpretations had been applied on the basis of what had taken place before the tackle was laid. As part of this change, the five specific scenarios which did not attract a free kick from the 1948 Laws were divided: scenarios (a) and (b) were still not considered 'holding the ball' under any circumstances; scenarios (c–e) were now considered 'holding the ball' if there was prior opportunity, but not 'holding the ball' without. Since then, only small adjustments have been made to the holding the ball rules. A rule under which a ruckman was considered to have assumed prior opportunity immediately upon catching the ball on the full in a ruck contest was added to the Laws of the Game in 2003, then removed in 2019. The definition under which a player ducking and driving his head into an opponent is considered to have had a prior opportunity was introduced in 2015. Finally, in 2019, the increasingly unwieldy law was copyedited and its wordcount in the laws was reduced by more than half, without significantly changing its intent: among the changes, the five scenarios added in 1948 were removed from the rules and replaced with the two more general clarifications in the present Law 18.6.3; and a paragraph which clarified the scenario of the ball being held to an opponent's body by the