I appreciate soccer more than I used to, but I still find the penalty kick concept absurd. Soccer must be the only sport where ties are decided by playing a completely different game.
Imagine if a baseball game ended in a tie after nine, so they decided it with a home run derby.
Or if a basketball game were tied in reg, so they decided it by shooting free throws.
Or if a golf tournament ended in a tie, to be decided on the practice green by a putting contest.
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Game result
I noticed that one of Morocco’s penalty kickers (Benoun) was a guy who only played the final seconds of the half-hour extra time. Obviously he is just a penalty kick specialist, and he was chosen to go second in the shoot-out. (That isn’t what decided the game. Ironically, he was the only one of their penalty kickers to miss!)
Spain did the same thing with Sarabia. He played only the final two minutes of the extra time, but was the very first shooter in the pen kicks.
I’m sure an Englishman’s analysis of the finer points of baseball (or “rounders” as we call it) would be as equally entertaining as yours are on our national sport.
The thing to remember is that the penalty shootout only occurs at the end of a match, when both teams have been playing for at least 120 minutes (plus injury time) and frankly both spectators and players by that time have usually had enough. Knockout competitions have to be decided there and then. Penalty shootouts have evolved with a culture and unpredictability all of their own. And are diabolically cruel.
The flopping is ridiculous. It will never be as popular in the US so long as these grown men are dramatically acting like they broke their leg before jumping right back up again with a few hits from the magic spray. They recently banned flopping in NCAA. It’s now a technical in basketball for example. I realize they could, in theory, give a yellow card for flopping but they never do. It seems to be ingrained in the sport.
My simple but brilliant alternative to penalty kicks: put two balls on the field. First team to score wins.
Make it six balls. Dodgeball is a great spectator sport.
Even better, but make it an odd number of balls. Best three out of five, or something like that.
College football has, as long as I’ve been regularly watching, simplified the game for overtime: each team gets one possession starting on the opponent’s 25. In the last couple years, it’s been further reduced after the second overtime to alternating two-point conversion attempts until one team scores and the other doesn’t.
If anybody looks at my comments here closely, one of my big obsessions is numerical symmetry. I don’t know if anybody else cares about these things, but here are three (though one is more subjective.)
1.In each of the 8 groups, 1 European team advanced and one non-European team advanced.
2.In the 4 days of group stage games, there were 7 goals scored each day. Also, not quite symmetry, but something, there were 120 goals scored in the 48 group stage games for exactly 2.5 goals per game.
3.There are generally regarded (at least by me) as 8 elite soccer nations: the five big Western European nations (Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England) as well as the Netherlands, and Brazil and Argentina. Of these 8, one did not qualify (Italy), one got knocked out in the group stage (Germany) and one got knocked out in the round of sixteen (Spain.)
Of course, this symmetry will end as two must go out in the quarterfinals with Netherlands playing Argentina and France palying England.
I care… not as much as you, obviously, but I care. Thanks for sharing!
Just as strange, there’s a popular sport where neither the participants nor the spectators get to know what the score is until after it’s over. Quick, who can name it first?
That is true of all the silly Olympic “sports” that are decided by people’s opinions rather than objective facts, but you are probably referring to boxing (unless there’s a KO, of course).
Boxing is what I was after. Five points for Slytherin (presumably).
Well, one of my issues with soccer is that nobody really knows when the game is going to be over except one guy with a clock.
In one of the WC games a team was upset because time was called while they were in the middle of an attack and one of the announcers mad a comment to the effect that, “well, they usually will let them finish the attack before calling time”. WTF?
“Football” or soccer is super exhausting…check out how many miles a player has run on average after 90 minutes, never mind after 120 minutes. Given the limited substitutions, it becomes a serious health issue.
They used to play sudden death in the World Cup, or “Golden Goal,” as they called it. It produced some memorable moments. France won a knock-out game that way when they were the host country, and it created pandemonium on the level of “Do you believe in miracles?” (Like that American hockey team, the French footballers went on to win the finals as well.)
All of the World Cup teams carry something like two-dozen players, but only 11 are on the field. The sport can tweak the rules ever so slightly, and the teams can use substitutions more prudently, to rest the stars. If the Bulls could play 20% of the game without Jordan, I suppose a soccer team can give a guy an occasional break.
Plus the average marathon runner goes four hours with no break of any kind, and they are not pro athletes, so I suppose the pro soccer guys can man up for one or two games every four years.
Except soccer players are typically running faster and dealing with a ball…
Yeah, but remember that the sudden death would be one or two games every four years. Pretty sure they can handle it. (As they did in the past without any complaints.)
Setting all that aside, I’m having trouble figuring out your point here. The Golden Goal format comes instead of the 30 extra minutes, not after them, so on the average, playing sudden death after regulation produces shorter games than the current format, not longer ones. Thus your exhaustion argument actually argues to eliminate the current format and return to the 1998-2002 system.
In previous world cups, none of the Golden Goals ever came past the 116 mark, and the earliest one (Turkey v Senegal in 2002) ended the game at 94. In no case did a game ever go past 120 minutes, which is what they play now.
1.I don’t know this for sure, but I think the reason the Golden Goal was abandoned was to punish the teams for going to overtime. I think it was felt that at some point in a game one or both teams were playing for the regular time draw, so forcing both teams to play an extra 30 minutes was to discourage teams not trying to settle the game in regular time.
2.The old North American Soccer League had a different penalty kick than the spot kick, the breakaway shot, which many observers think is superior, and seems to get kicked around as a replacement every couple of years.
Soccer players also do a lot more cutting, jumping, twisting, shoving, etc.
Oh, also the thinking. You have to think a whole lot in an open team sport like that.
It’d be more interesting if each team got to choose their opponent’s kickers. You’d always choose the other team’s worst guys. It would be an additional level of schoolyard bullying to really make things fun.
Also, hockey started doing the shootouts to decide a tie game, but only in the regular season. For the playoffs they still do a sudden-death, and theoretically infinite, overtime.