While I agree with your points, my main beef is that FIFA has been extremely blase about the elephant in the room this tourney, which is that their officiating is incompetent to an astonishing degree. Not being a huge soccer watcher, I don’t know how much of this is the refs fault - I watch a lot of NBA basketball, where the refs make between 5-50 horrible calls a game. We kind of give them a pass though, because they have an insanely difficult job, they generally even out the horrible calls for both sides, and 1 blown call here or there won’t make the difference in the game (unlike soccer).
Seems to me that soccer shouldn’t be that hard to ref. One obvious solution is to put more on the field - the NBA has 3 on the court, plus some on the sidelines handling video replays. Considering the size of the field, I would think soccer should have more than 1 ref and 2 sideline judges (do the sideliners do anything other than offsides calls?). I can think of a number of other ways to improve it, but the point is it is clearly broken to me. Every single game I have watched has had at least 1 blatantly missed call that had a large impact on the game, but FIFA doesn’t seem to think it is an issue. They went on record saying they were “very, very pleased with the officiating” and then they pull this crap, it just seems like they don’t care that they are putting out a faulty product.
Oh now that was just ridiculous. They penalize you for a rabbit punch (to the back of the head) in BOXING, you’d think a sucker rabbit punch would be a red card in soccer.
FIFA’s attitude is “the whole world is watching already, so why bother improving our product?”
Obviously, it’s annoying, but what are you going to do? Short of a mass defection of fans to rugby (should be noted that the IRB actually cares about what fans think) they’re not going to change.
Extra time for Paraguay and Japan then. It’s looked on the cards since the start, really, and I think we’ll soon see the first penalty shootout of the tounament.
Edit: having said that there have been more chances in the first 10 mins of extra time than in the whole 90 mins!
Well, that article doesn’t exactly give me a lot of hope that all of the more egregious errors will be dealt with.
In the article, Blatter says that they’ll consider goal-line technology that would have awarded Frank Lampard’s goal against Germany, but not the type of replay rule that could have reversed Carlos Tevez’s goal against Mexico.
I think that’s a terribly narrow-minded position to take. Unless his position is that the assistant referees have been missing calls like this intentionally, and the situation can be fixed with just a stern talking-to, i think he’s exhibiting a head-in-the-sand attitude here.
While some of the errors in this World Cup have been really bad, i don’t for a minute believe that they have been anything other than genuine errors. The fact is that, the way the offside rule works in soccer, it’s a damn hard rule to officiate correctly, especially at ground level. The official needs to be in perfect position, and to be able to look in two places at once (where the ball is kicked, and where the attacker starts his run). It’s really a very difficult thing to do.
Paraguay through on pens after Yuichi Komano hits the bar with Japan’s third kick. Tough way to go out but they completely failed to take risks during the match.
Hard luck on Japan, but they really should have cashed in at least one of their chances.
Who would have wagered that Paraguay and Uruguay would both reach the last eight? And that, had Chile not had to face Brazil in the round of 16, we might be looking at five of the last eight being from South America?
So that is 4 teams from South America, 3 from Europe, and one from Africa. The only South American team to not move on was Chile and they lost to another South American team. Pretty impressive showing for SA.
Can someone explain why they don’t move the penalty kicks back, say 8 yards, and give the goalie a fighting chance? I think that would be way more fun to watch than this current thing, which is basically “whichever team egregiously fucks up first loses.”
I absolutely despise penalty kick resolutions. There’s just so much luck involved, it ruins the whole game for me. I think they should just play for a golden goal —eventually, somebody has to screw up, since the players are already pretty tired. Seriously, penalty kicks are stupid.