Dreaming of an End to Soccer's Nightmare
Monday, March 15, 2010
The 2010 Winter Olympics are over, but the year’s true global sporting event won’t come until June and July in South Africa.
Soccer’s World Cup finals generate debate and passion on every continent, including Antarctica, where the few hardy souls in the research stations during the Southern Hemisphere winter will presumably keep things heated by talking a little soccer, or futbol , among themselves.
Although there is no argument possible over which event is the most universal, the World Cup could still learn something from the Vancouver Games. Or better yet, borrow something from the Vancouver Games.
The issue is tie-breaking, which is soccer’s recurring nightmare, because its big occasions keep being reduced to the tense but wholly unsatisfying spectacle of penalty kicks.
Two of the last four World Cup finals were decided this way, including the most recent one, in Berlin in 2006, where Italy defeated France in a crucible of a game best remembered for Zinédine Zidane’s heat-of-the-moment head butt.
But it is hard not to regret the penalty kicks, too, and wonder how a game of enormous skill and endurance, a game defined by carefully constructed attacks, can be reduced to a relatively static, out-of-context lottery with the most important trophy in world sports at stake.
I have always liked the analogy that Ian Thomsen, my predecessor at the International Herald Tribune, came up with after watching Brazil beat Italy and Roberto Baggio, its poor, pony-tailed star, on penalty kicks in the 1994 World Cup final in the United States. Thomsen called it “the equivalent of taking Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson off the Augusta National after 72 even holes and ordering them to settle The Masters at the Putt-Putt miniature golf course on Route 17 somewhere outside the city.”
An exaggeration? Sure, but a fun one that gets the cursed incongruity of it all just about right. The soccer players train and dream for years. They hustle and sweat through qualifying matches, round-robin matches and knockout stages, and it all comes down to this ?
Sepp Blatter, president since 1998 of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, defended the status quo after the 1994 shootout, essentially equating penalties with democracy (the worst form of tiebreaker except for everything else). But Blatter, who has been known to change his mind or have it changed for him, sounded as if he had truly had enough after the 2006 final.
“Football is a team sport and penalties are not about a team, they are about individuals,” Blatter said. “When it comes to the World Cup final it is passion, and when it goes to extra time it is a drama. But when it comes to penalty kicks it is a tragedy.”
Although tragedy seems a term best reserved for real-life difficulties and Shakespeare, Blatter was obviously fired up, and he said then that FIFA had four years to come up with a better approach. But four years have just about passed, and the approach remains no better. It would come as no surprise if Blatter, who has been known to float ideas and then watch them sink (the biennial World Cup? tighter shorts and lower-cut jerseys for women?), presides over yet another shootout , this one in Johannesburg.
Which brings us back to the Winter Olympics or, more specifically, to the Olympic ice hockey tournament, where each team played the overtime periods in the knockout round with five players instead of the usual six.
The idea, carried over from the National Hockey League, was to create more space for offense, for resolution, and it worked. One of the reasons that Canada’s victory over the United States in the gold-medal game was so terrific was that it ended with a goal — a real goal, scored by Sidney Crosby during the normal give-and-check of hockey instead of some artificial construct.
Hockey has a shootout format, too, and needed it to decide the gold in 1994 when Sweden beat Canada, but there were no shootouts from the quarterfinals onward in Vancouver nor from the quarterfinals onward at the 2006 Games in Turin.
Soccer, for the moment, can only dream, but it is not as if penalty kicks have always been the ultimate tiebreaker. Pioneered in domestic leagues and minor competitions in the 1950s and 1960s, shootouts were not introduced to a major tournament until the 1976 European men’s championships and were not used at the World Cup until 1982.
Penalty kicks do seem an improvement on the previous solution for two teams that could not break a tie: a coin flip. But while soccer’s rule makers have tinkered with extra time — trying sudden-death, or golden-goal, formats at the European Championship and World Cup — they have never attempted to reduce the number of players in extra time.
Creators need space to create, and, in truth, many a modern sport could benefit from removing a player from each team, even in regulation time, considering that most of the dimensions of the world’s fields and courts were established in an era when elite athletes were not as strong and, above all, as fast as those of today.
But requiring soccer teams to play the first, say, 10-minute overtime period with 10 players each and the second period with nine would be a good way to start and, much better yet, finish. If that still does not resolve the conflict, let them play 8-on-8 and then 7-on-7, which would seem the minimum on a full-size field.
If and only if all that fails, then resort to penalty kicks or some less-random arbiter, like games won or goal differential during the tournament.
Allow extra substitutions if there are health concerns about pushing players to their limits, and let the first goal decide the winner to make ties even more unlikely. Those who believe pulling players off violates the spirit of soccer should remember that many players grow up playing short-sided games and continue to do so in training as professionals, just as they play short-sided in official games in the event of expulsions.
What matters is preserving the essence of a game as you force a result. Soccer, however many are on the field, is essentially an ongoing series of contests for control within a larger struggle. Playing 9-on-9 in full flow sounds much more preservationist than asking someone to trot forward and try to kick a stationary ball past a lone goalkeeper and then face the wrath of a nation if he or she somehow cracks and hits the crossbar.
posted @ 7:06 PM,
0 Comments:
Post a Comment