My apolgies – I did say something close to it.
The larger point holds – the 10-9 gmes you want would entail a fundamentally different game than the one fans currently enjoy. It’s a non-starter.
Um… he was saying the goals be made commonplace is making the sport just like basketball, not that you want 100 to 98 be the scoreline.
Which is reasonable. And right now people can get wrongly punished. Reviewing any such potential infraction from many angles, with much time to deliberate, after the fact, seems like the most accurate possible way to do it, and generally vastly better than the current system.
I’m for immediate review of all PK calls, but I can at least see an argument that that slows down the action, yada yada yada. Post-game review of tape for diving doesn’t even have THAT counterargument.
As far as I’m aware, FIFA have never tried an alternative to PKs in a high profile tournament like Euros or the WC. They have never tried slowly reducing players. They have never tried PKs-before-the-game or PKs-before-extra-time. They have never tried “one offensive player gets the ball at the half field line, vs one defender and one goalie, has 30 seconds to score”. I guess PKs themselves are a replacement for if-the-game-is-tied-play-again-2-days-later, which is obviously a logistical disaster in this day and age, but as far as I know they have been totally untouched since they were first implemented. Please correct me if I’m wrong. (Gold and silver goals are BEFORE PKs would take place.)
Why would the other solutions be objectively better than PK’s? PK use a normal type of situation, reward nerve and skill. And it takes out the cheating element. A defender might do a Suarez.
The only other solution I can see is unlimited ET until a goal is scored.
Well, if you like PKs, you like PKs. At some level that’s subjective. But there do seem to be a lot of people, including many who are actively knowledgeable soccer fans, and many less-knowledgeable Americans in this thread, who really hate PKs, who find them totally unsatisfying… Holland and Argentina dueeld for 120 scoreless minutes, so one got to advance to the WC final and one went to the 3rd place game due to… a very high variance test of a single soccer skill with a tiny sample size. Was that really satisfying?
Sure it’s better than a coin toss, but not by much.
PKs remove a great deal of soccer from the equation.
They eliminate defense.
They eliminate ball handling.
They eliminate passing.
They can be exciting. And they do rely on soccer skills…unconstricted shooting and unconstricted goalkeeping. But soccer is a great deal more than that and calls on many more skills.
I like the idea of two on one plus the goalie, forty five seconds to score, but really any of Max the Vool’s suggestions would be preferable to PKs…which to my mind are simply too removed from soccer.
Thank you.
I find it very strange to orient a game so that it is very difficult to score goals, resulting in a 0-0 tie after regulation more often than in any other sport I’ve heard of (even hockey), but then follow it with PKs that are easy to score (70 to 75 percent is the conversion rate, it appears). Why wouldn’t you push the attempts back so their success rate is 50 percent or lower?
When you put it that way, it does noticeably stick out as odd.
“Hey low scores are great, let’s make it really hard to score, defense rocks!”
After 120 goaless minutes…
“Ok lets get rid of almost all defenses and just kick the ball into the goal really closely”
I have genuinely forgotten where we are. Is there anything that anyone wants me to reply to or should I slowly back away?
I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Okay, sure, they’re going to be gassed after 120 minutes. But why not have a full 30 minutes of overtime and if it’s still tied after that go to sudden death? Sure, it’ll probably end because someone gets tired and makes a mistake, but that’s still better than a shootout.
Why not just go with sudden death right away in overtime? I didn’t like sudden death overtime in the NFL due to the advantage it conferred to the team who got the ball first, and I’m glad they have changed that. But in soccer it seems rather unlikely that the first possession is going to result in a goal, so why not just go until someone scores and call it a day.
I don’t know if they’ve ever had sudden-death-unlimited-time, but for a while extra time had “golden goal” which was basically sudden death, and the consensus was that it was a mistake, so they changed it back.
I think the basic idea is that the most exciting part of a game is when one team is down and desperately needs an equalizer. So by making it sudden death, all you’re doing is removing what would be the most fun 5 or 10 minutes of the game.
The other question is whether they should just play overtime forever (like in hockey). I think there’s just a worry that as people get more and more tired, they’ll just start sitting there doing nothing on their exhausted legs rather than risking trying to attack, and the game will just become tedious.
I, personally, would like to see more rapid transitions (the decline in same in basketball is one reason I no longer follow that sport), which, natch, would lead to more goal scoring. The issue is I am not sure how to make it more appealing to players/coaches to try that, without radically changing the game overall. In the WC, I saw some attempts at transitions/long passes back downfield, but not as many as I would have liked-players seem very reluctant to try the bomb pass, and probably with good reason, since the forward has to clearly beat the defenders (but also avoid the goalie coming up and saving the day) for it to have more than a ghost of a chance of providing you with a scoring opportunity. If it fails, the other team will easily take possession.
One suggestion I heard was unlimited ET until a goal is scored, then say 5 minutes to equalise.
If that’s what’s so exciting, then as has been suggested do the PKs first. Credit the PK winner with 1/2 a goal. Now someone will always be down in the game – often by half a goal so they jump from losing to winning by scoring and the other team is down.
That’s a super clever idea. The real problem there is that it looks kind of weird to have a final score that ends with “.5” or “1/2”, which you just don’t see in any other major sport. You could get around this by having regular goals count for 2 and PKs count for 1 (and this would have the side benefit of making casual observers think the game is higher scoring than it is).
In that case they can by all means continue not liking football. We like the game as it is and a goodly number of football fans really don’t care what Americans may or may not think about the sport.
A goodly number of Americans also really don’t care about changing the game; we came to enjoy it as it is.
Then, uh…why did you open this thread? You read the title, right? I would feel like I was potentially being an interloper, out of line, in a more generic soccer thread. But this one has the virtue of truth in labelling, after all.
Yea I did thanks. could i see your Junior Mod badge?