Gee I enjoyed the FA Cup Final, even though before the first goal I was about to go to bed but deciding it by penalties - yuck. All our work lunchtime competitions decide games (soccer and touch rugby league) by playing extra time with drop-offs (every 2 minutes each team loses a player) - it never takes long for someone to finish on top and seems far less unsatisfying.
Because I usually don’t care who wins something like the FA Cup I just feel terrible that in this case West Ham lost, having led twice and hit the post in the last minute of extra time.
I posted this in answer to the same question a couple of weeks ago:
Strange how we have another Liverpool cup game ending up the same way again this season.
I was interested to read about withdrawing players during extra time though because I didn’t realise anyone actually did this. I’ve put forward this idea loads of times in talking ways round the shoot out, I thought I had an original idea.
By the way, that last minute West Ham effort hitting the post was because Reina made an incredible fingertip save!
I have to say though that it was a good game to watch with plenty of flowing end to end football, and for the neutral football fans, a really exciting game.
I hope the Champions league final this week is as good and doesn’t end up with penalties.
And of course there was another “last minute” incident when the ball fell to poor Harewood, who by that time was barely able to stand up and desperately improvised a shot which unfortunately went nowhere near. Meanwhile Sheringham was looking on helplessly from a couple of yards away… had it only come to him, chances are he’d have buried it and West Ham would have taken the Cup home. Heartbreaking.
Yes, it’s a stupid way to do it. But I don’t like the idea of reducing teams, either, because a team which works well as a team is disadvantaged, whereas a team which just happens to have one striker with decent pace could win by hoof-and-hope tactics.
Also, you need to have a reducing-team rule which does allow for the score to remain level…at which point do you stop reducing? Do you carry on playing 3-a-side indefinitely?
I agree that a major final should not be decided with a penalty shoot out. Although I have always enjoyed penalties from a first person point of view. I played as a keeper through school and in various 5-a-side teams, a penalty shoot out gave me the chance to be a hero for once, the pressure on the keeper is nothing compared to what the striker is feeling.
I think the budweiser approach could liven things up.
Yet again, I am hoarse and disbelieving. How many best-finals-ever can we win, exactly? West Ham were excellent, but their goals were sheer excrement and Liverpool didn’t turn up for half an hour. Our first was a great Cup Final goal. The second was an absolute belter. The third … words simply cannot describe it. If I can never see the team of my birth in the city I now live in, Gerrard’s goal was an almighty farewell.
And penalties? You try scoring against a top class keeper. A penalty competition is an excellent test of technique, nerve and background research. Scoring a penalty against a half-decent amateur keeper in front of a few tens of people is difficult enough - against top class keepers who know your penalty history in a deafening crucible you either have to find the corners hard, try some balls-of-steel cheeky feint or just thump it and hope, and a first-two-methods team will beat a third-method team at least 80% of the time IMO. Did losing on penalties make defeat in a final more painful for West Ham than, say, Middlesbrough’s 4-0 drubbing in the UEFA cup final a few days earlier? Surely not.
The problem with these “eventual goals from open play” is that due to the sheer exhaustion of both teams, they often involve far more luck than skill - much more so than penalties, as evidenced by players dropping like flies on Saturday. And replays are IMO an enormous anti-climax, an often just delay the penalties anyway.
I think penalties are less of a lottery than the match itself, and certainly less so than extra time.
While it would be pleasant to stage a replay, there are practical difficulties of booking large venues, clashes with later competitions (here the World Cup looms) and TV coverage.
Given that there is already chance in the FA Cup (random draw each round for opponent; random home/away for early rounds), I am quite content to have a penalty shoot-out.
It doesn’t tire the players (especially the injured ones), gives a clear result and lets the goalie take centre stage.
It’s also pretty memorable - I have no difficulty remembering where I was when Stuart Pearce missed a penalty against Germany. (I also remember Pearce scoring one years later - that was a great feeling.)
Major cup finals should not end in penalty kicks. Period. It is like ending a tie American football game with field goals, or a basketball game with a free throw
contest. The winner should be decided on the field, not by which goalkeeper is
better at guessing which way to dive. Granted, you may get a three hour match, but it is the last game of the season, the players have the summer to recover. Making, extra time first to score wins would help, too- what’s the use of playing all that extra time if you can still be tied after its over? Also, the players are usually exhausted after 120 minutes anyway, so a goal should be easier to score at this point of the game.
I’ll just point out that “guessing right” is a rather inaccurate description of a penalty save from a top class goalkeeper. If that were the case, all keepers would be statistically similar at saving penalties: in fact, some are clearly exceptional in this regard (Pepe Reina had saved an incredible 7 out of 9 before Saturday).
The best keepers study their opponent’s history rigorously. More importantly, they look at the eyes of the taker and, more importantly still, the shape of their hips as they prepare to strike the ball. An “open” stance is a clear indication of trying to send the keeper the wrong way. Teddy Sheringham and Steven Gerrard showed exactly how to do this on Saturday - opening your stance at the very last moment. Conversely, the first West Ham penalty taker (and Shevchenko in the CL final) opened far too early and gave themselves away.
I’m also a little bemused by the preference for lucky goals from exhausted/ depleted open play over the steel-nerved accurate technique of a well taken penalty (and at least five of them, at that). That was why Golden and even Silver goals were abolished after their experiment, after all!
The problem isn’t why to use penalty shoot-outs if there’s a tie. The problem is why there are so many tie games. Especially nil-nil ties.
After an hour and a half of good sportmanship–and there’s no fricking score. In other words, nothing has happened. You might have well have taken a nap instead of watching the match.
Gimme a good American football game. The clock stops too often, but at least you have some points on the board at the end of the game.
[/snarky hijack]
I hear ya. The low scoring of soccer lends itself to lots of tie games. Remember the 0:0 title match in the World Cup final played in the U.S.? More goals would definitely help things. They could do something like widen the goals, but that would be taken as a sacrilege I think. So you’ll have to learn to like low-scoring games ending in draws. In fairness, the game that inspired this thread did have six goals in it.
Anyway Penalties suck. Who is being penalized anyway? It would make more sense to me to give the tie game to the side that was awarded the most corners during the game. That would force teams to play more offensively.
Apart from if one of the teams is in the Champions League final. Or if there’s a little tournament over the summer months, like, ooh, the World Cup.
See SentientMeat’s point earlier.
This would be a complete and fundamental change to the game. It goes from “the objective is to score goals” to “the objective is to score goals and force corners”. Plus, you don’t solve the problem entierly - what happens if the corners won are equal, too?
Oh Jesus, corners: can you imagine? In the last 20 minutes of a game, one team plays long towards the corners a la Rugby Union and the ball is collected by the striker (a la timewasting today). The objective then is to play the ball off the opponent’s legs for a corner. If successful, what happens then is that 3 or 4 big physical players look for the short corner to lay back to the corner-taker who again tries a deflection off opponent’s legs, ad infinitum.
Pissing about from a short corner is tedious enough in today’s game where it simply wastes a little time. The consequences of it being important would be unwatchable.
Penalties are a rigorous test of nerve and technique. If you want a sport with more points, watch Rugby Union, Rugby League or American Rugby.
Only about one in ten games finishes 0-0. The 1994 World Cup Final is the only goalless final of the seventeen[sup]*[/sup] that have been played and the only one still tied after extra time.
The old NASL used to settle ties by giving players the ball at about the 35 yeard line and five seconds to score form there on the goalie. The goalie could come out and challenge. At least that is how I remember it.
Obviously SentientMeat who believes that 90 minutes of football is more of a lottery than a penalty shootout can’t be convinced but the point I was making in the OP is how unsatisfying it is. The penalty shootout takes some minor element of the game, that doesn’t even occur in the huge majority of games (such as the Cup Final) and makes it the deciding factor of the whole match.
It’s almost as though after 72 holes in the British Open Tiger Woods and Ernie Els finish 8 under and go decide the winner by playing darts at the pub.
