As an example of how useless the shin guards are, here is Dominic Calvert-Lewin. You can see the outlines of his shin guards through his socks. Basically chiclets
The Judgment-Free Soccer Questions Thread
- Thread starter InstaFace
- Start date
From what was explained in the Brazilian telecast, the scorer himself can't have handled the ball at all, but a teammate is under the same rules as the defense.
I'm far from convinced that it would be worse to have long kicks downfield where the defenders actually tried their hardest to keep up with the offensive players rather than let them by and hope the refs save them.
I don't get the analogy to american football at all. American football is a game with a line of scrimmage so of course players need to be on one side or the other. But once the play starts offensive players are absolutely entitled to get behind the defense and that leads to many of the most exciting and athletic plays in the sport. And defenses react in different ways--some by putting pressure on the ball to make the long pass harder, some by playing deep to prevent the defense from getting behind them. I'd assume soccer strategy would similarly approach the problem in different ways.
I also think there is an offsetting advantage to controlling possession in the middle of the field. Bombing long kicks to downfield strikers is a pretty low probability play spreading out the defense some by having strikers playing pretty deep (and thus compelling the defenses to keep men back) would also open up the field for a more controlled movement up the field.
There wouldn't be any defenders keeping up with attackers. Everyone would already be bunched up in the area. The attacker wouldn't ever leave the area and defenders would have to stay with them.
An offsides rule was introduced in the very first official agreed upon rules of football in 1863. From the beginning people realized that the sport suffered without it.
https://yoursoccerhome.com/history-of-the-soccer-offside-rule-when-it-was-introduced-and-why/
I would love to see a “ref view” channel for a match - mic’d up, including comms with other officials, go pro camera for perspective, and display graphics showing what their official watch reads. I think it would help a lot of fans understand why certain things have developed as they have. There is a ton of faith placed in the ref to orchestrate a fair and flowing match - some of the decisions that can confuse new fans are concessions to this - wanting to empower the ref.
Not knowing when the game will end reduces time wasting. A tick down clock would result in players taking lots of time with the other team demanding to stop the clock, surrounding the ref, etc. It seems like it would be good but it wouldn't. Leaving it vague gives the ref the power to do fundamental fairness and by and large that's pretty much exactly what they do.
If you watch enough soccer, this just is not a problem. I pretty much always know when the game is going to end, as does everyone who has watched more than a few games. Always within a minute.
1. The extra time gets held up.
2. If it's 4 minutes, for example, then you're going to end the game some time between 4 and 5 minutes unless something unusual happens, like an injury or excessive time wasting. However, the game will pretty much never end with a pending set piece or a dangerous attack. Once you get to 4:30 and the set piece or dangerous play is over, the game is over.
3. If something unusual happens, an additional amount of time will be added to compensate for the unusual thing that happened if needed to give the team that was the victim of the time wasting one more chance. You pretty much always know what this is going to be. Very occasionally, an extra chance is given that seems excessive but pretty much you always know when it's going to end. I guess more common is that the game ends 30 seconds or so before you thought it might -- this is usually because there's nothing much happening and so the amount of time that it would take to mount a new chance is not seen as likely by the ref and so that's that.
To expand on that, the player that handled the ball can't score or immediately create a goal scoring opportunity. The Ghanaian player had the arm in a natural position and he didn't score or actively created a goal scoring opportunity after touching the ball.
https://www.football.london/international-football/handball-rule-world-cup-2022-25428941
I don't know how this is being handled in the World Cup, but in the Campeonato Brasileiro it's very common for the communications between the referee and the VAR to be released for the public.
It degenerates into players staying in zones and there's no movement. It starts with defenders unable to carry the ball up the field because if there's a turnover there's a striker poaching. Midfielders would become exhausted, because they'd be tasked with carrying the ball upfield but also getting all the way back and helping on defense. To stop this, defenders would stay in their third, midfielders in middle third with occasional forays up or back, and attackers would stay up high. The game would lose flow and movement.
In the late 60s, Ajax played AZ '67 in a game without offside, and other rules intended to bolster offense--kick-ins, and corner kicks being taken from the place the ball went over the end line, unless it was in the box. This game featured Johan Cruyff and it was said: "During the match, centre forward Johan Cruyff and winger Piet Keizer were reduced to goal-hanging, mostly in vain. “Most of the time he was of little use,” the reporter for the Het Vrije Volk newspaper said of Cruyff. Which, De Telegraaf newspaper reported, could hardly be blamed on Cruyff, for neither he nor Keizer was involved in play much by their teammates." The game was played with 2 30-minute halves and ended 2-1.
Also, here's a video of 2 German teams trying. The box became much more congested, the game was less structured, and the final score was 1-0.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reY1CWMo57Y
I think I've mentioned it here before, but Soccer 101 from the folks at Total Soccer Show is a pretty great podcast that dives into many of these questions in a simple (to new fans), digestible manner.
Episode 1: The offside rule: how it works, why it exists, and its 100-plus-year history
#37 What do the terms regista, enganche, and raumdeuter mean?
Episode 1: The offside rule: how it works, why it exists, and its 100-plus-year history
Episode 2: #2 What do the numbers mean? Number 6, 8, 10, and all the rest and it's cousin,
#37 What do the terms regista, enganche, and raumdeuter mean?
That article is actually a paraphrase. There is nothing in the laws of the game about immediately creating a goal scoring opportunity after touching the ball.
It's interesting that there is so much out there that paraphrases the rule but doesn't actually quote the laws themselves. The FIFA Qatar regulations state that the IFAB laws of the game in effect at the time of the commencement of the tournament are the laws that govern the competition. Here are the laws: https://www.theifab.com/laws-of-the-game-documents/?language=all&year=2022/23
Rule 12 defines handling and here is the law:
"It is an offense if a player . . . scores in the opponents’ goal:
• directly from their hand/arm, even if accidental, including by the goalkeeper
• immediately after the ball has touched their hand/arm, even if accidental."
So, if you touch the ball with your hand, and it is not otherwise handling (that is if your hand was in a natural position), then the only time it is an offense is if the ball goes into the goal directly from your arm, or if you "immediately" thereafter score a goal.
If the ball touches your arm and it is not otherwise handling, and it immediately creates a great goal scoring chance for your teammate, it's a good goal.
It sets up kind of an interesting play. If the ball touches your hand, drops to your feet, and you kick it hard goalward, the keeper would actually do better to let it go into the goal than to try to save it and create a rebound. But, of course, who can ever be sure?
The Premier League promised they would do this when VAR was first introduced. And every year since. And they continue to renege on the promise. Presumably to avoid embarrassing the VAR officials, as there’s no other logical explanation other than some logistic issues. I think English Rugby let’s the audience - at home and on the broadcast - to listen in to tye deliberations.
Of @InstaFace ’s suggestions Id be in favour of not the three refs but just two. The NHL, of course had just the one ref for most of its existence and there was serious resistance to the two ref introduction. I don’t think anyone would argue going back to it.
I also love the idea of the sin bin/penalty box. The time wasting could be easily handled by the suggestion upthread about the ref adding on discretionary time. As for keepers , just have another player serve the time as they do in hockey.
General time wasting seems relatively easy to solve as the WC this year suggests. I hate the ref clock idea. Why does everything have to be the same as American sports? Half the charm is in its difference.
Diving ? The rules are there to penalize simulation - just use them. And I agree it’s a cultural thing. Faking an injury is just an extension of this.
Ronaldo ? While a I have always disliked him - being a ManU player and all that before his Real Madrid and Juve days
this kind of summed up my eventual hatred. He’s a preening selfish asshole - when he ripped his shirt off after scoring a meaningless PK in the 2014 CL final against Atletico.
View: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2078350-cristiano-ronaldos-shirtless-goal-celebration-was-reportedly-done-for-movie?share=other
Hes the footie equivalent of some preening rockstar who gets off wanking away demonstrating to the world what a great musician he is.
Of course the single biggest problem is the financial inequalities which are only going to get worse. That should be its own thread.
I also love the idea of the sin bin/penalty box. The time wasting could be easily handled by the suggestion upthread about the ref adding on discretionary time. As for keepers , just have another player serve the time as they do in hockey.
General time wasting seems relatively easy to solve as the WC this year suggests. I hate the ref clock idea. Why does everything have to be the same as American sports? Half the charm is in its difference.
Diving ? The rules are there to penalize simulation - just use them. And I agree it’s a cultural thing. Faking an injury is just an extension of this.
Ronaldo ? While a I have always disliked him - being a ManU player and all that before his Real Madrid and Juve days
this kind of summed up my eventual hatred. He’s a preening selfish asshole - when he ripped his shirt off after scoring a meaningless PK in the 2014 CL final against Atletico.
View: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2078350-cristiano-ronaldos-shirtless-goal-celebration-was-reportedly-done-for-movie?share=other
Hes the footie equivalent of some preening rockstar who gets off wanking away demonstrating to the world what a great musician he is.
Of course the single biggest problem is the financial inequalities which are only going to get worse. That should be its own thread.
I think your question is an interesting one and gets us back to the fundamentals of why the offside rule even exists. Ultimately, almost all sports that involve scoring into a goal / reaching an end-zone have decided that for balance between attack and defence and for aesthetic reasons, there are certain limitations that need to be placed on where attackers can be, and not roaming freely too far forward. In almost all these sports, violation of that principle is called offside. This is true in different ways of soccer, rugby, lacrosse, ice hockey, and, yes, American football. (Though interestingly enough, not field hockey, which got rid of its offside rule in the 90s.) You may or may not agree with the aesthetic results, but that's the fundamental underlying reason for the offside rule in all those sports.
Your bolded statement above is a similar example of a point of view that is worth questioning to understand why a rule exists. There's nothing inherent about a line of scrimmage game that says _of course_ players need to be on one side or the other. It's a specific choice made by Walter Camp, influenced by rugby's own conception of what offside is, and based on the very sensible idea that it would make for a less interesting game if the receivers could just be wherever they want at any point in time. So the American football rules specify that at a specific point of action in the game - when the ball is snapped - players have to be in a specific position not too far forward, namely behind the line of scrimmage, or they will be offside. Similarly, in soccer, the rules specify that at a specific point of action - when the ball is passed - players have to be in a specific position not too far forward, namely with at least two defensive players between them and the goal (crude simplification), or they will be offside.
By way of comparison, see Aussie rules football, which has no offside rule and does allow players to be wherever they want when the ball is delivered, but doesn't allow throwing. I can quite easily imagine a line of scrimmage game that combines American and Aussie football rules, allowing for throwing to receivers who are already downfield from the line of scrimmage. It just would be a vastly different game.
I do dislike the VAR-enabled micro-judgements that find players offside by seeming millimetres, and I'm in favour of Arsene Wenger's proposed change to the rule that says no offside so long as a [single] body part which a player can score with is in line with the defender.
An interesting variant on the American Football offside (line of scrimmage) is the Motion rule. This doesn’t exist in Canadian football and I’d argue it makes the game a lot more exiting.
I also like Wenger’s offside suggestion. But it would just move the measurement point. The problem is the use of tech to measure what used to be a simple human endeavour.
Another suggestion of his is to replace throw ins with kick ins - effectively turning every attacking zone ball out of play into a corner. Of course, it would also allow defenders to just hoof it down the field.
The thing I don’t like about the Wenger proposal is the trailing leg. The heel of the back leg of a running offensive player keeping the player on seems like too big of an advantage. But I wouldn’t be opposed to some experimentation — maybe that you are not in offside position so long as some part of your body other than a trailing leg or arm is even with or behind the second last defender or the ball.
I think the main reason why even a fraction of a body part puts you off is for ease of calling the game as much as anything. Offside has to be called by ARs who do their best to line up with the second last defender or ball and then try to see whether there is a piece of a player peeking ahead of the line. Almost like trying to judge a finish in a race. For places the game is played without VAR, changing the rule might be hard on officials.
The other problem with the Wenger proposal is set pieces in the box. Getting to be a full body ahead of the defensive line could really advantage some teams and turn the game into more of a set piece skill contest than it already is.
They did this on tv for the American Alliance of Associational American Awesome Football, or whatever it was called. It was pretty cool. Of course the league failed to meet payroll in week five and was closed down in week six. Not sure if there was a causal relationship.
I can say, w/0 shame, that getting kicked in the shins absolutely sucks and understand shin guards. Sure, they are 11 year old girls, but taking a cleat dropped me like a sack of bricks. Shin pads, as mentioned, are only marginal in their protection. I've seen them cracked in intense games; I'm sure the pros have better ones, but still, glad to have them
In addition to what was already mentioned, even in cases that are really obvious and don't involve a potential VAR review for scoring, they'll still hold the flag until the offside player becomes involved in play. It's not an offense to be in an offside position, only to be in an offside position when the ball is played and then become involved in play.
The other thing I've found on hard contact is, there can be a little delay until the onset of pain, and it can go away almost as fast as it comes on. So when you see someone on the ground in agony and then, a few minutes later, seem to be fine, they weren't necessarily faking the agony.
Why can’t soccer players play 3 games in 8 days without countless references to fatigue? I know there is travel involved but with all due respect to soccer players this isn’t a combat sport, and I have heard arguments that it is exhausting as they are running often times a total of about 6 miles.
45 minutes high intensity run, 20 minute break, 45 minute high intensity run…No game for another week.
I know it’s a more packed schedule during WC but I never see the complaint about hockey players who do 3-4 games per week, baseball who does 6 games per week, tennis who can play 3-4 hour matches every other day for two weeks?
45 minutes high intensity run, 20 minute break, 45 minute high intensity run…No game for another week.
I know it’s a more packed schedule during WC but I never see the complaint about hockey players who do 3-4 games per week, baseball who does 6 games per week, tennis who can play 3-4 hour matches every other day for two weeks?
Hockey players either play only about 1/3 of the game time or a position that has very little intense skating, and baseball just isn’t nearly as athletic as soccer. There’s an argument that tennis, especially the majors you reference (the vast majority of not-major tournaments only go for a week) are as difficult as they are BECAUSE of the insane demands of endurance and stamina needed to win seven rounds in two weeks.
The better comp, again, is American football. Teams very rarely play multiple games in a week, and when they do, they’re rewarded with extra time after the short week’s game. If anything, imagine the quality of play if the last three gameweeks were condensed to a Saturday-Wednesday-Sunday schedule, especially along the lines. It’d border on dangerous.
I do wonder if there’s be enough interest in an AFL thread in the General Sports forum come the spring. The game has quite a few of the things people have asked about (multiple officials, no offsides, and broadcast clocks have recently become better aligned with the game officials’ clock, etc.).
Soccer players cover an average of 6 miles per match but a lot of that is high intensity sprinting and short bursts after a quick change of direction. That kind of activity is a lot more taxing on the muscles than other forms of exercise. These guys are elite athletes whose clubs pay tens of millions to create the very best conditioning, nutrition, recovery regimes for them. And their bodies still feel the effect of playing three matches in eight days. That's just how it is.
In this World Cup, the bigger issue is that many of the players have been doing that three matches in 8 days type schedule for weeks on end with their clubs before the tournament started. The mid-season World Cup led to an unusually packed schedule for most top level European leagues, especially England.
Why are they increasing from 32 teams to 48 teams in next World Cup? I assume it’s money but is there any value into getting more teams qualified.
But 32 seems like the perfect number. How different will the tournament be with 16 groups of 3. I’ll miss the last day of group stage where both matches go off at the same time.
But 32 seems like the perfect number. How different will the tournament be with 16 groups of 3. I’ll miss the last day of group stage where both matches go off at the same time.
. From Wikipedia
Expand to 40 teams (8 groups of 5 teams)—88 matches
Expand to 40 teams (8 groups of 5 teams)—88 matches
- Expand to 40 teams (10 groups of 4 teams)—76 matches
- Expand to 48 teams (opening 32-team playoff round)—80 matches
- Expand to 48 teams (16 groups of 3 teams)—80 matches
Since I'd rather be doing this than the work I got up early to do.... as a one-time-novice-turned-fanatic, here are my answers.
[goal]
X-GK
Good attackers will get into that triangle space (*soft white underbelly) and wreak havoc.
This is even worse, it's a disaster.
That one guy has played any attacker in the SWU area onside.
Think of what an NFL offense could do if the line of scrimmage was formed by the shape of the defensive line, and one dude happened to play 5 yards too far back.
There is a manager in English football, Sam Allardyce, who is like the Wolf from Pulp Fiction. His raison d'etre is to save teams from going down. A side in relegation trouble in January will hire him on a year-and-a-half contract (wink wink) knowing that they will never employ him for the second year- the only reason he's there is to help them scrape out enough results so that three teams finish worse. He does this by enforcing a brutally effective but utterly boring, anti-fun defensive bunker. You can't lose if the opposition doesn't score. The first thing he does is to institute a schoolboy drill where the four defenders (it's usually four) are connected at the waist by a rope. They have to move up and down the pitch, keeping the rope parallel to the goal line, and spaced just the right distance apart to keep the rope taut without pulling each other, which enforces positional discipline - like NFL defenders, it's tempting to stray away from your assignment, and sometimes you have to, but when you do holes open up.
So yeah, attacking is sowing chaos, and defending is trying to stomp the lid of Pandora's box closed.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/nov/21/oumar-niasse-charged-diving-everton-penalty-crystal-palace-football-association
11/21/17
Everton intend to contest the Football Association’s charge against Oumar Niasse after the Senegal striker became the first Premier League player to be accused of “successful deception of a match official” for an action during the 2-2 draw with Crystal Palace on Saturday.
The law was introduced at the start of the season in response to repeated calls to eliminate diving and may lead to Niasse being handed a two-match suspension after an independent panel decided he was guilty of simulation to win a penalty in the first half at Selhurst Park.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/nov/18/crystal-palace-everton-premier-league-match-report
The referee, Anthony Taylor, awarded a spot-kick after deeming Niasse had been fouled by Scott Dann in the fifth minute, with Leighton Baines converting to cancel out Palace’s first-minute opener.
“Incidents which suggest a match official has been deceived by an act of simulation are referred to a panel consisting of one ex-match official, one ex-manager and one ex-player,” read an FA statement. “Each panel member will be asked to review all available video footage independently of one another to determine whether they consider it was an offence of ‘successful deception of a match official’. Only in circumstances where the panel are unanimous would the FA issue a charge.”
As we Everton fans constantly mutter darkly, here is further evidence of bias against us - the only time this was ever enforced was against us, in 2017. After that it was never spoken of again.
Fun fact - we went away for our 10th anniversary and our hotel suite had a claw-footed tub. I watched this game from the tub on a laptop while my wife slept.
But playing a high line carries a risk that the other side can simply blow right past you on the counterattack, which Cameroon did against Serbia yesterday. With a 3-1 lead Serbia still played a high line, pushing for more goals, and they got burned twice.
Teams that play a high line need defenders that can read the game very quickly and get back with enough pace to match the fastest attackers. These guys are not a dime a dozen.
brazil has a good point about the game as it's played in the lower levels. This is the stadium of Marine FC, in the eighth tier of the English footy pyramid - figure the skill level of high school baseball, except played by adults. In the random-draw FA Cup, Marine, which made it further in the Cup than any side of that rank ever had, drew Spurs at home. One of the things that drew worldwide attention:
View: https://twitter.com/AgainstLeague3/status/1153732126686232576?s=20&t=OKzhNirEfWwUKK_bF2xd_w
If you can't see the tweet, this professional (or semi-pro) club, playing in a 2500 seat stadium in a residential neighborhood, has number signs on the stadium fence. These correspond to the house numbers of the neighboring houses, so if the ball gets kicked into a backyard, the players know which doorbell to ring to get the ball back.
(BTW, Spurs treated the game respectfully and played their A-team, at least for part of the game. They won 5-0, but Marine competed respectably. Marine had the first real chance, some dude hit the crossbar from 30 yards out, if that had gone in it would have been the best sportsball moment ever).
Re: micromanagement of the clock, also there's this - the scope of the game and the size of the pitch. If you can't see this tweet, it shows that the entire basketball court fits within the 18 yard box of a footy pitch.
View: https://twitter.com/JohannWindt/status/1564805891278667777?s=20&t=0FEAS7-xEcoqxj9ujG9GcA
An NFL field and a footy pitch are comparable in length but the NFL field is 53 yards wide, and footy pitches are 75-100 yards wide (the size is not uniform, some stadiums, especially the older analogues to Fenway or Wrigley, are narrow). The TV camera makes the NBA court and the footy pitch look the same size but it is far from it.
It's just not practical, at least at lower levels, to start and stop the clock everytime the ball goes out since it's so hard to police that level of granularity on such a large space. So the stoppage time system developed, and it works.
This is the guiding principle. For a thread discussing why the game is a certain way and if certain changes might improve it, I don't want to use this to close off the discussions, which have been really interesting. But after watching primarily footy I'm finding NFL almost unwatchable now. The need to deploy Zapruder-film analysis, protractors, and a panel of Talmudic scholars at regular intervals not only delays the proceedings and leaches the fun out of it, the games are getting even longer. Used to be that NFL games finished in a 3 hour window. The 1:00 game is often not at final whistle until 4:30 now. As they say in Liverpool, I can't be arsed.
My suggestion for improving American football is that the player scoring the TD has to kick the conversion. In combination with moving the XP back, which has been a great rule change, it puts the foot back in football. Think of it. All of a sudden you'd be evaluating RB, TE and WR on an entirely new skillset. You'd also be chancing using your PK for certain plays. 3rd and goal from the 4, down by 6, a minute left, do you line up Justin Tucker in the slot? Also think of the comedy when a 310lb nose tackle falls on a fumble in the end zone for his sole career TD.
You'll hear it said that attackers thrive on chaos but defenders have to keep order. The back line, whether a 3, 4, or 5, has to stay roughly in line as the attackers approach, because if any one defender is significantly ahead of or behind the others, it creates opportunities for attackers to run in behind. The X's are defenders.
[goal]
X-GK
Good attackers will get into that triangle space (*soft white underbelly) and wreak havoc.
This is even worse, it's a disaster.
That one guy has played any attacker in the SWU area onside.
Think of what an NFL offense could do if the line of scrimmage was formed by the shape of the defensive line, and one dude happened to play 5 yards too far back.
There is a manager in English football, Sam Allardyce, who is like the Wolf from Pulp Fiction. His raison d'etre is to save teams from going down. A side in relegation trouble in January will hire him on a year-and-a-half contract (wink wink) knowing that they will never employ him for the second year- the only reason he's there is to help them scrape out enough results so that three teams finish worse. He does this by enforcing a brutally effective but utterly boring, anti-fun defensive bunker. You can't lose if the opposition doesn't score. The first thing he does is to institute a schoolboy drill where the four defenders (it's usually four) are connected at the waist by a rope. They have to move up and down the pitch, keeping the rope parallel to the goal line, and spaced just the right distance apart to keep the rope taut without pulling each other, which enforces positional discipline - like NFL defenders, it's tempting to stray away from your assignment, and sometimes you have to, but when you do holes open up.
So yeah, attacking is sowing chaos, and defending is trying to stomp the lid of Pandora's box closed.
There actually is such a thing, but to bang your drum with you, it's not being enforced.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/nov/21/oumar-niasse-charged-diving-everton-penalty-crystal-palace-football-association
11/21/17
Everton intend to contest the Football Association’s charge against Oumar Niasse after the Senegal striker became the first Premier League player to be accused of “successful deception of a match official” for an action during the 2-2 draw with Crystal Palace on Saturday.
The law was introduced at the start of the season in response to repeated calls to eliminate diving and may lead to Niasse being handed a two-match suspension after an independent panel decided he was guilty of simulation to win a penalty in the first half at Selhurst Park.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/nov/18/crystal-palace-everton-premier-league-match-report
The referee, Anthony Taylor, awarded a spot-kick after deeming Niasse had been fouled by Scott Dann in the fifth minute, with Leighton Baines converting to cancel out Palace’s first-minute opener.
“Incidents which suggest a match official has been deceived by an act of simulation are referred to a panel consisting of one ex-match official, one ex-manager and one ex-player,” read an FA statement. “Each panel member will be asked to review all available video footage independently of one another to determine whether they consider it was an offence of ‘successful deception of a match official’. Only in circumstances where the panel are unanimous would the FA issue a charge.”
As we Everton fans constantly mutter darkly, here is further evidence of bias against us - the only time this was ever enforced was against us, in 2017. After that it was never spoken of again.
Fun fact - we went away for our 10th anniversary and our hotel suite had a claw-footed tub. I watched this game from the tub on a laptop while my wife slept.
Highliting this term as it's thrown around a lot but not explained. A "high line" means that the back line pushes high up the pitch to support the attack. Whatever the formation, it's important to keep it compact, ie minimizing the space between the lines. An aggressive attack requires the back line to push forward, else there's too much space between the back and the midfield. This cedes too much ground in the middle of the park for the other side to a) break up passes between the back and midfield, b) get comfortable on the ball themselves.
But playing a high line carries a risk that the other side can simply blow right past you on the counterattack, which Cameroon did against Serbia yesterday. With a 3-1 lead Serbia still played a high line, pushing for more goals, and they got burned twice.
Teams that play a high line need defenders that can read the game very quickly and get back with enough pace to match the fastest attackers. These guys are not a dime a dozen.
As assistant coach to my daughter's U12 softball team, my hot take is that the best female athletes are aware of the stereotype of girls as weak and are hell bent to prove otherwise. My daughter is a silly kid and she's silly with her teammates in the dugout but when she gets on the basepaths or defends the plate (catcher) she plays with malice, doesn't mind too much if the other kid is slow to get up after a collision, and would sooner eat glass than do anything that could be considered flopping.
The answer to this and to a lot of other questions, imo, has to do with the way the clock is managed and the flow of the game. The footy clock does not stop when the ball goes out of bounds (out of touch is what you will hear, the sidelines are "touch lines"). It doesn't stop when there's a foul. It doesn't stop when a goal is scored. After a foul or when the ball goes out of touch, you don't have to have the ball handed to you by an official, as in basketball. So you don't have this micro-management of the clock starting and stopping during the half. But there are extended delays, usually for injuries, but also for goal celebrations, brawls, extended arguments with the ref, power outage, pitch invasion from the stands, cat on the field, protester ziptying himself to the goalpost, etc. (these last three have happened at Everton games recently) so it's reasonable to give the ref the leeway to recognize and adjust accordingly.
brazil has a good point about the game as it's played in the lower levels. This is the stadium of Marine FC, in the eighth tier of the English footy pyramid - figure the skill level of high school baseball, except played by adults. In the random-draw FA Cup, Marine, which made it further in the Cup than any side of that rank ever had, drew Spurs at home. One of the things that drew worldwide attention:
View: https://twitter.com/AgainstLeague3/status/1153732126686232576?s=20&t=OKzhNirEfWwUKK_bF2xd_w
If you can't see the tweet, this professional (or semi-pro) club, playing in a 2500 seat stadium in a residential neighborhood, has number signs on the stadium fence. These correspond to the house numbers of the neighboring houses, so if the ball gets kicked into a backyard, the players know which doorbell to ring to get the ball back.
(BTW, Spurs treated the game respectfully and played their A-team, at least for part of the game. They won 5-0, but Marine competed respectably. Marine had the first real chance, some dude hit the crossbar from 30 yards out, if that had gone in it would have been the best sportsball moment ever).
Re: micromanagement of the clock, also there's this - the scope of the game and the size of the pitch. If you can't see this tweet, it shows that the entire basketball court fits within the 18 yard box of a footy pitch.
View: https://twitter.com/JohannWindt/status/1564805891278667777?s=20&t=0FEAS7-xEcoqxj9ujG9GcA
An NFL field and a footy pitch are comparable in length but the NFL field is 53 yards wide, and footy pitches are 75-100 yards wide (the size is not uniform, some stadiums, especially the older analogues to Fenway or Wrigley, are narrow). The TV camera makes the NBA court and the footy pitch look the same size but it is far from it.
It's just not practical, at least at lower levels, to start and stop the clock everytime the ball goes out since it's so hard to police that level of granularity on such a large space. So the stoppage time system developed, and it works.
Footy, football, and the two rugby codes (rugby league and rugby union) all evolved from common ancestors. If you squint you can see it. Football is what happens when you pick up the ball and run with it, which was a tempting proposition with a waterlogged leather ball on a muddy field. Even when what is now footy was being standardized in England there was still debate over whether you could pick it up and run with it. Well, what can a defender do in that case? You tackle the guy. What happens then? You all gather around the ball (rugby) or line up on either side of it and go again (football).
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I’m skeptical.
Euro 2020 (21) expanded to 24 teams. The group stage was pretty mundane with some really negative play. With so many paths to advancement, there wasn’t much incentive to take risks. I can’t decide in my head if three team groups will ease or exacerbate this problem. Will it lead to more open play, or will the two stronger teams play a snoozer and turn around and beat up on the third team?
I mean, they could make them bigger and sturdier. When I played in high school the shin guards went down to the ankle basically and were made of fairly stern stuff. Not that you couldn’t get hurt still, but they actually protected your shin bone.
Won’t happen.
These players are after every perceived edge. Adding weight to an extremity has a very real impact on the types of touches players make on the ball. They won’t sacrifice performance for protection against these events.
Footballers are also on the extreme of fashion. I don’t buy that as an excuse, but tiny shin guards and low socks are a fashion for some players (tiny guards and high socks being the other. I don’t see any player sacrificing that for a big, bulky, protective guard.
That’s fine if they value other things over safety. But then they should not complain when they forgo safety measures and get hurt.
Do they complain beyond going down? I don’t see many coming off for knocks to the shin, and if they are hitting the ground in pain from a knock to the shin then it’s probably a foul. Beyond personal risk I’m not sure what the issue is.
So I do think the draw of American football is that it's essentially trench warfare, so each player being on their own side at the beginning of the play but having a lot of freedom to gain territory is pretty crucial (Same with Rugby). Soccer, hockey, basketball, lax--all are much more free flowing so the concept of gaining territory, of their being your side and our side, seems to me less important.
The key to all of these rules is to make a game that's fun to play and watch. Literally half the world is going to watch half of this world cup so soccer clearly doesn't need my advice on how to make a good product. But it is a shame that a lot or marginal calls on dynamic breaking plays get made--something like the Wenger suggestion might help on that front without undermining the central nature of the sport.
What you're missing is that those dynamic plays only exists because of the offside rule, not in spite of. There isn't any dynamic runs at the defense without offsides.
There's not really a safety issue in that players don't really get hurt often by knocks on the shin in the sense of needing to go off the field for treatment, which is part of why the players are willing to make the tradeoff. It's just extremely painful to get hit there. So what you end up with is what you see: players writhing in actual pain (not flopping or complaining!) because they didn't wear thick shin guards, but not really injured and able to get up after the pain goes away. Think of getting hit in the nuts or hitting your funny bone multiplied
Who is complaining about being hurt?
I watched an NFL game on a Thursday night where there were three injuries in five plays. Three commercial breaks because there was an intervening punt and then there were a couple of plays before the quarter break. Maybe 3 minutes of (shitty) football in 18 minutes.
Your position seems to be wear better equipment so you can get up quicker, even if means the game is not as good. If we were talking about the head or compound fractures, I could see the argument, but otherwise I don't even understand the problem. Though that often happens to me with soccer. Lots of non problems that don’t need fixing.
We don't have to debate this here but I think 3-team groups are the worst of all possible format decisions. FIFA wants more games -> more money, and their desire to get more countries into the competition has led them to choose a format that has fewer games and more chaos where games will often be dead rubbers and there is no room for error. Might as well make it a single-elimination bracket at that point.
I don't have a fundamental problem with going to 40 or even 48 teams; "diluting the talent pool" is a silly concern imo. But I do have a big problem with the competition format, and have a bunch of specific improved alternatives that I've seen proposed or thought about for it. In brief:
- Big Groups: 8 groups of 6, group winners bye to R16, group 2nds / 3rds play a crossover playoff. More dead rubbers in 5th games of pool play but also more games for every participating team.
- Double group stage: 16 byes to R2, 32 teams play an R1 round-robin, advancing top-2 from each pool, then the 16 bye teams + 16 1sts/2nds play a second group stage. Qualifiers now have three outcomes: qualify with a bye, qualify to R1, or fail to qualify.
- Swiss Tournament format: initial matchups from seeding, winners play winners, losers play losers, matchups post R2 are not predetermined. After 4 or 5 rounds, top 16 to knockouts. Minimizes un-competitive matches.
- Power Pools: tournament has 4 pools of 4 for the top 16 teams, and 8 pools of 4 for the lower 32. All play 3 pool matches. The power pools qualify their winners straight to R16, power pool 2nds / 3rds (8 total) go to R32, where they are joined by the top 2 from each of the lower pools (16 teams)
I could go through the pros and cons of each, but the bottom line is that FIFA chose the dumbest of all possible formats and it will cost them both money and excitement. They have also announced that the 3-team group format is not final and might shift between now and 2026, and I dearly hope it does.
...and if anyone wants to see my powerpoint on the above, you know where to find me
One difference could be that in football there are discrete plays with breaks built in, so there is no advantage to feigning injury in routine play - there are a few rare clock management scenarios where it might help.
If a Patriot were busting a big run and a Jet could stop it by going down at scant contact and writhing, we'd see more.
I find the long weighted through ball to be the most beautiful part of the game - the vision, the technique, the timing, tha anticipation. Chef’s kiss.
One of the things that kills me about football broadcasts is that they replay each play once or twice from different angles between plays.They’re filling up downtime in the game by showing us a new angle of a 2yd off tackle rush. And the color guy tells Is all about the blocking technique or where the RB went to college or what interviewing the offensive coordinator was like the other day. Half broadcast is rewatching the game.
Right but that is a problem with flopping, not equipment.
Bigger shin pads won’t stop flopping. It might increase our skepticism of injury in some cases I guess.
Exactly, and those runs occurs because attackers are trying to beat the defender's offside trap. If you get rid of the offsides rule, these plays are gone.