In this month's FourFourTwo, someone wrote in and said that in hockey, if a player goes down and recieves treatment from the physio, they are made to spend two minutes on the touchline. This led to a commentator remarking "They won't want the physio to come on" when one of the players took a smack of a stick on the kneecap, which I'm sure hurts more than most of the incidents that the big tarts in the Premiership roll about the floor for as they would be out of the game for two minutes. I don't know if the rule was brought in to make sure the player recieves proper medical attention or if there was a "simulation" problem in hockey, but this sounds like an excellent rule to bring in to football. After all, if a player is really injured then they should need at least a couple of minutes attention anyway. And the fourth official has bugger all else to do so he could easily be timekeeper in these situations.
yes but football players are worth miles more. Managers and especially directors dont want thier players playing on if they are injured and then making it more serious....physios need to asses them to make sure they wont make a slight niggeling injury into a serious one.
The big problem is removing the player from the pitch. When they tinkered with the rules in the mid-nineties, the idea was that a player would have to leave the pitch to receive treatment, meaning that his team had a numerical disadvantage until he was ready to resume. This, they hoped, would discourage players from feigning injuries... In practise, referees rarely force players to leave the field in order to receive treatment. My guess why it did not work is that if a player is genuinely hurt and by moving him, before the injury is correctly diagnosed, the injury becomes worse, then the league risks a lawsuit from the player's club. So, we now have the farce of a player, nineteen times out of twenty, receiving the full treatment he needs on the pitch and then having to walk off and come back on again. All of which slows the game down. Putting the above to one side, your idea of a mandatory time-out for the injured player still has some merit in that it would discourage players from feigning injury even more. However, say a player is injured through foul play and then has to leave the field for two minutes, surely his team is being put at an unfair disadvantage because of the actions of the other team?
It's a part of the game... Let's face it... would a Holland - Germany match have been just as fun without people like Lothar Mattheus? I don't think so!