>>The ESPN broadcast of the U.S.-Ghana match drew a 7 share overnight, or 8 million viewers. <<
One weeks worth of illegal aliens watched the game. Whoopee,
There have been red cards handed out for diving. But they don’t do it nearly enough.
I would say jettison the offsides rule completely. Even when it’s being officiated in a way that’s consistent it’s just not a good rule. Basically it outlaws the pass to a breakaway player, and any hockey fan knows passes to the breakaway player are awesome, now you get a player vs goalie duel with help chasing in rapidly for the goalie, very exciting, and often leads to scores.
Making the arena clock “real” would be great, the whole extra time thing is silly.
I also think unlimited substitutions will help. Same structure they have now, 1 player at a time, stoppages only, you don’t want the game to grind to a halt for subs. But with the ability to rest star players you’d get a lot less of the “resting on the field” that happens. More substitutions more often really opened up hockey, because it made the game less about endurance and more about the actual skills of the sport (puck handling, shooting). Right now soccer is a marathon with a ball and goals, unlimited substitutions would make it a ball and goal game with a fair bit of running.
My position is simple: if you're not willing to call the foul in the first minutes of the game, then don't call it in the last minutes either.
There is nothing special about the team that's behind that makes them more deserving of the winning team having to speed up to give them one more attempt to score.
When the referee forces the winning team to speed up play in the last minutes, he's giving the losing team an extra consideration that is not deserved. And it's a consideration that neither team gets in the first minutes of the game.
It almost seems like referee tampering when he takes the side of the losing team when carding the winning team to make them go faster in the end.
-PJ
3. Not a fan of that type of action anywhere but basketball also has something similar. It’s called “the flop.” We always say that the the overly dramatic player is trying for an Emmy Award.
How to make it more interesting. Add a flaming gasoline pit or a ramp in the middle of the field. Have two goalies on each team but they would be on motorcycles and dressed like characters from the “Road Warrior.”
How about they adopt some of the rules from the sport “Pro Thunderball?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15m_i6QPAXE
I actually like the WC as spectacle, although not so much as sports competition. The one thing that really irritates me is the insistence of announcers on using terms from England when in American sports they are different. In the U.S. we guard, not mark. We play on a field, not a pitch. And it’s “zero” or “nothing,” not “nil.”
A smaller field, eight players, no offsides. Then it might be interesting.
I’m trying to keep up with it because mi amigas a mi trabajo are talking about it.
One said all of her family would sit “nobody move until goal. Then so much screaming dog go hide.”
It has kind of smoothed over the Mexican/Texican/Californio/other South American friction at work.
One small thing I’d like to see them do: mic up the refs like rugby union and rugby league do. Rugby refs at the international level are wired up not just so the TV audience can hear them, but their dialogue is broadcast over the stadium PA—and unlike NFL refs, they don’t turn it off and on. It’s on all the time.
}:-)4
Have them change the rules to American football, and play on Monday.
The problem with “soccer” is simple— it can never be a man’s sport. It has a huge homosexual and Euro-lib cult following
Soccer is fast-moving with simply understood rules of playing or observing. It focuses on personal ball-handling skills and team strategy. It doesn't require the surviving players to weigh twenty stone, wear complicated, expensive gear, and be bludgeoned (sometimes to death, often with permanent injuries).
In the American version the only actual playing action is maybe one fifth of the clock time, with a ball that will not roll by itself for any distance, and cannot really be called football when it is mostly only manipulated by hand action or body shielding.
Real football is a pervasive global sport; American football cannot be, and is very boring to to me as a spectator or player.
Just an opinion.,
(In '50s high school I played halfback at 150 to 165 lb, and was selected for end-of-season All-County, from a town too small to raise a football team, and too poor to pay for equipment even if it could. Girls' teams had their own league then with the same field and rules.)