My sport of choice is the NFL. With officiating this stringent, they couldn’t play the game. You can call holding on every play if you want.
Or, conversely, maybe players wouldn’t hold so much if they didn’t get away with it on every play.
Or maybe the coaches would finally instruct their players on “not holding.” If blocking without holding can’t be done, it shouldn’t be a penalty. If it can be done, it should be done.
My sport of choice (to watch, not play) is football (aka soccer). The rule there that does seems ridiculous and unfairly enforced is the “players can’t take their shirts off when celebrating a goal” rule.
That has also led to situations like the OP where a player is sent off for getting a second yellow card, when all they did to get their second “offence” was take their shirt off when celebrating a goal. That forces their team to play the rest of the match with 10 men, and means they miss the next three matches, which in a major international championship, like the world cup, is often their only chance to play in one for the rest of their lives:
To me that seems unfair as unlike the OP it has nothing to with the actual game. Play is stopped while celebration is going on, so no opposing player is confused about which side the celebrating player is on (the reason the rule exists), its purely a procedural issue that shouldn’t effect the game.
That seems like a ridiculously easy rule to adhere to.
Football managers are generally of that opinion (there are some pictures of some truly spectacularly irate managers looking at their player get a yellow card for taking their shirt off).
But to me its kind of discouraging the wrong thing. I mean I want my players to actually care about the game they are playing as much as I do. I am a grown up, I understand they are professionals doing a job, and probably do not. But hell act like it, don’t act like this is just another day in the office and you’ve just filed an accounts-receivable report.
I guess the disconnect is connecting “being happy I scored a goal” and “take my shirt off.” I don’t equate taking my shirt off with celebrations of any kind. Perhaps footballers do.
In American football, there is a rule against taking your helmet off, and occasionally a player will get a penalty for that. Because it’s against the rules, and everyone knows it, it’s pretty rare.
This is one of those things that should be logical and straightforward but… aren’t.
Depending on the goal, the intensity of the emotions surging through a player’s mind can be truly overwhelming, I seem to remember that there were studies about this, but in any case, scoring a goal in the World Cup is probably one of the more emotional things that can happen to anyone, you just have to look at the faces of the players when they realize they actually did it to know this is something that very few things in life can compare to.
They do. This example was pretty famous:
I can’t speak for why soccer players take off their shirts in the heat of the moment (except to note that they are in enough control of their actions that they never take off their pants onfield in their desire to celebrate, or do they?), but I’ll echo the general consensus here regarding the Lloyd situation: this is a rule that I knew as a high school swimmer, he should’ve known it, and the penalty is appropriate.
Here’s one we didn’t know. At meets in my high school league, the home team provided students to act as timers for each lane (this was quite some time ago). The “official” placings were determined by the referee, but the times were determined by the students carrying stopwatches. At one of our home meets, one of my teammates was DQed because the student timing him was yelling at him to go faster. Apparently timers were not supposed to show any favoritism or give any encouragement to the swimmers.
You can bet that our timers were instructed to remain completely silent for the rest of the season.
Of course the rule should have been enforced. Painting Lloyd as a victim, as most of the spectators and the announcers did, is misplaced outrage.
mmm
Holding isn’t the best comparison for this ruling, I think. There are swimming rules where the officials are able to use their discretion.
This seems more like one of those cases where a football player drops the ball a yard before the goal line on a clear touchdown. It’s perfectly clear that they were going in for a touchdown, and they just started their celebration a bit early.
Actually, a good recent example would be when Kadarius Toney lined up slightly offsides and ended up negating a highlight for the ages.
In that context, fair enough, call the lane penalty and disqualify him.
This actually happened a few months ago in a college football game. Oops.
Back in 1980, when I was in high school, I was at a late-season Packers game at Lambeau Field, against the Houston Oilers. The Packers were a bad team, while the Oilers were playoff-bound, and Green Bay was never really in the game.
On what wound up being the final play of the game, with Houston up 16-3, the Packers fumbled the ball; an Oilers defensive player recovered it and ran it in for a touchdown. Except, the play shouldn’t have counted: the Oilers were clearly guilty of a procedural penalty (offsides, IIIRC) on the play. A furious Bart Starr (then the Packers head coach) ran up to the referee, who told him that the officials didn’t bother to throw the flag, because the penalty (and the play) was “inconsequential to the outcome of the game.”
In his postgame press conference, Starr (who was about as genteel a person as you could ever meet) was still furious; the officials had chosen to not bother with a late-game penalty, on a cold, gray day when everyone probably just wanted to go home, but which thus led to another stomp on the throat of a team that had already been beaten. I still remember Starr’s quote in that press conference: “Inconsequential, my ass!” – possibly the first and only recorded instance of Bart Starr swearing in a public setting.
From the standpoint of who won and who lost, the referee wasn’t wrong: it was inconsequential. But, from the standpoint of playing (and officiating) the game properly, and not subjectively, and indicating to the weaker team that the offiicals are still going to treat them the same as the stronger team, it certainly was.
FYI - here is the original Australian team DQ’ed at the World Champs.
Interestingly, the Australian female commentator was aware of it well before anyone else.
Sorry - I can’t queue the above video to the point in time. The press conference starts at 4.40.
The rule about crossing a lane in a swimming event has to have a reason behind it such as interference with another swimmer. Otherwise it’s a pointless rule.
I don’t think embedded video can be queued to a certain time. Only links can.
Olympic sports and other profitable sports are already too corrupt. Adding subjectivity to a call like this opens the door for arm twisting and bribery.
Also, if you say you’ll only do it for the obvious cases, that just moves the edge boundary somewhere else. No matter where you draw the line, people will argue that the line should be redrawn.
Hard rules. Learn them, live by them. Enforcing hard rules is difficult enough. Adding subjectivity makes it worse.