Just got done watching A Shot at Glory – weird seeing Robert Duvall as a Scot.
Anyway, in one the games, with the “good guys” leading and less than a minute to go, suddenly four minutes are added by side-line officials for no discernable reaon. This upsets the fans, of course, and the coach (Duvall) chaffs at the officials (“Why don’t you just wear a green jersey and make it official?”) until he almost gets tossed. So explain to this 'Merkin – what was the time added for?
DD
The Refs add an apprx. amount of “injury time” near the end of the 90mins to make up for any time that might have been blown dead to injuries or stoppages of play. Four minutes is on the long side, usually it is around 2mins. but it is subjective.
I haven’t seen the movie but that is what seems like is happening.
My longwinded version:
First, you have to understand two things:
In order to account for the various pauses in a game, time is added at the end of each half at the discretion of the referee. As a former ref and lifelong soccer fan, here’s some pauses that are taken into account and my estimates on time added:
This is just a rough guide from my experience; as I said before, it’s really the referee’s decision. So, a scoreless game with few injuries will probably have a minute or so of time added, though sometimes none, and a high-scoring and/or high injury game may have a lot of time added, even ten minutes or more if there’s a really horrendous injury or other problem that holds up the game. Adding 2 minutes at the end of a game is typical.
It used to be that only the referee on the field knew how much time he was adding; everyone else just had to wait for the final whistle. This was causing a lot of cries of biased refereeing, particularly accusations of referees adding a lot of time to ensure a team had more time to make a comeback, and not too long ago (within the last ten or fifteen years?), FIFA started requiring the referee, as the end of regular time approached, to signal to the fourth official on the sideline an estimate of how much time he was adding. People still complain about the amount of time added, though.
So, this is what was happening in that particular scene of Shot at Glory; they weren’t upset at time being added, which is expected, just at how much or how little.
I believe part of the rul-of-thumb assessment by the fourth official is to add 30 seconds for each goal scored, on top of injury time etc. So a three-goal second half, with one injury lasting a couple of minutes, could easily provide a 4-min extra time period, which the fans of the leading team won’t like.
Eh? Much as I am loathe to argue with a former ref ( :dubious: ), surely the referee stops his watch when he feels that a delay warrants it and blows the whistle when his watch says time is up?
You see them all the time indicating to the players that the watch is stopped during a delay and restarting it when play restarts.
I’ve never seen this. But I only care to watch when Liverpool or England are playing.
Nope, you never stop the watch. What the ref should do is note the time when the delay starts and stops so he knows how much time to add later. What you’re seing them indicate is that they’re taking note of the delay.
Of course, the referee blows the whistle when his watch says time is up, but the point is that it’s at the referee’s discretion exactly when that time is.
This FAQ will probably answer all of your questions in this regard. I’ll just add the caveat that signalling the approximate time added to the fourth official is a convention for big games and not a law of the game.
Thank you, all, for the information. The game was 1 - 0 and there was one injury substitution, so from what you are saying, four minutes would seem kind of long to the fans.
It’s an okay, “feel good” sports movie that doesn’t really break any new ground. A lot of the IMDb comments raked Duvall over the coals for his accent, but I wouldn’t know about that one way or another.
DD
Generally, if your team is narrowly winning, then the ammount of added time is an inexplicable invention of the referee whereas, if your team is narrowly losing, the referee has ignored all manner of timewasting and the added time should be at least doubled…
Now I understand the theory of relativity…brilliant.
Within the last five, even. I know as recently as the 1997-1998 season the ref could still blow the whistle whenever he felt like it.
Why not have the official ground clock linked up so that when the referee’s watch stops, it stops too. So you know that when it hits 90 minutes, the game will finish. You can see EXACTLY how much time will be added on.
The problem with adding on time is that if there is a delay in the stoppage time, then that can extend the period further.
We had this a couple of weeks ago. The referee signalled two minutes of extra time, three minutes went up on the board, and he was still playing well into the fourth.
Time goes slower at Ibrox and Old Trafford.