That's true I really do hate that term. I feel like kicking the guy in the face who says that with my "fresh legs" Richie PS: what are we doing up so early? My excuse is I just got home and hour ago. I like to post at this time.
I think the new offside rule interpretation that basically eliminates passive offside is a more powerful statement and potentially more dangerous to the game than these other potential changes.
It hasn't 'basically eliminated' passive offside. It has just defined in more detail when a player is deemed to be actively offside and encouraged Ref's to act accordingly. The reality is that offside is still the most commonly whistled infringement in the game. And not all of them are for players in an offside position and actively participating in the move underway.
It isn't one, and that's what I'm saying - in soccer, like in hockey, the only player allowed to speak to the referee should be the captain.
I think the idea has merit. Making the captain the formal channel for all dealings with the ref imposes order that currently can go missing. What is important, however, is that a sense of distance between the ref and the players he is trying to control is not allowed to fester. Players should still be able to yell outrage/banter/query the ref in passing, but when the whistle goes and a word needs to be had, then the ideo of an immediate ref/captain dynamic to that situation has a lot of potential about it, IMO.
Yeah,I don't mind some interaction and really,if you follow the NHL you'll see the refs and players talking back and forth.The "captain-only" rule refers to questions on rule interpretations,etc. The one thing I don't like about rugby when I watch it is the schoolmasterish nature of the referee-player relationship on the pitch."Captain,Call out No.7,......no.7.you're a very bad boy,now go and sin no more,etc."I hope soccer doesn't get like that.
I am confused what does the Captain actually do in games with the official that would be built iinto the LOTG? Give me some examples? I think the Captain is actually there to help his teams players in games and in practices. In games he is like a coach on the field. He might spot gaps and close them up. He might help the defense on the overshift from one side to the other. He can calm down HIS players when they disagree with a call that the official made. Captain is not a licence to argue a call with the official. He has to be a smart guy. He is a leader on the field, and he has to play his own position well. So he is a leader in every way especially by example. Do you think he should argue a bad call for example? What exactly is it he should be doing with the official in games? How important is a captain on the field helping his team win. Can be very important.
The captain should do all of those things, but were he also to be seen and universally accepted as the only 'official' conduit for discussions with the ref (a vital part of the Ref's armory when it comes to maintaining order and control) then we might see less of a mob-mentality when players feel decisions have gone against them.
Now we are talking, but arguing a call no. As I got older I would talk to the official less as a coach and a player. The only time I talked to the official as a coach was small talk. Tell him a joke before the game. I wanted a friend officialting a game my team plays in. Also i would go up to the official and take a roll of cash out of my pocket like I was paying him off when the other coach was looking at us. I thought that was funny and give a coach a big hug that I didn't even know officials did not always think that was funny, but I thought it was funny. Very rare I actually talk to the official after that. If he is letting go really dangerous play I have to say something. Like"game is going to get out of hand" something like that but it has to be a visicious foul to bring that out. Like a 2 footed side tackel in the upper thigh that was hard enough to upend the player. I learned if a coach would say something off to a an officials the players think they can do that as well. So I curbed the temptation.
1. Agree 100% on eliminating the head and chest as exceptions to the back pass law change - it has become a new skill to use that loophole to all sorts of advantages not intended in the original law change. The worst two are: a. sweepers using the flick-on head back to keeper on long balls from opponents b. defenders using the flick-on head back to keeper on throw-ins deep in defending zone 2. Kick-ins would be preferred by me to the "long throw" that has become more and more popular. The laws restricting form on throw-ins were intended to keep this from being an attacking opportunity. Today's larger and stronger athletes have overcome the existing restrictions and, combined with the offside waiver on throw-in, have created a new scoring opportunity on the same scale as a corner kick. It would be an improvement to fairness to allow kicks to be performed rather than allow one team an advantage because they had one of these long-throw specialists. I'm assuming the kick-in would not have the offside waiver. But, if I actually thought it could get support, I would actually rather see no kick-ins and the throw-ins further restricted . The percentage of goals from restarts seems to be steadily increasing and is not a good trend and the neither is the time delay involved setting up these set pieces from touch (the long thrower usually being a back).
If the penalty for kick the ball out of bounds is the same as fouling the player, I think defenders near the sideline will be a more aggressive. Although this change initially looks like a good idea, I think it will lead to more injuries to star players and end up making the game less attractive to fans.
Are "new skills" bad now? Or is this just another case of football's moderrn audience becoming increasingly impatient with what they see as the "less entertaining" defensive arts of the game? Interesting choice of words. 'Worst'? As in 'negative', 'bad' or 'wrong'? Both of these actions are perfectly legitimate parts of defensive play. To remove them would be to neuter the defender as a part of the team beyond all rational cause. Not to mention that returning possession to your keeper in this controlled manner is a brilliant launch-pad for accurate, swift, counter attacking. If the keeper were not able to handle such back passes, he would be forced to boot them upfield. These kicks often end with the opposition, or in touch. A definite undermining of the inate quality of the game, this proposal. Why not? I mean, assuming you're right about that percentage increase in the first place (do you have a link?). Which takes longer to take - a throw-in or a free kick? Which is what a 'kick-in' would essentially be, both in form and function. Plus - is the tendency to bring forward a player from the back to take a throw-in not good? It means one more attacking player is in the centre of the field, ready to receive the ball and do some attacking with it. It takes perhaps three or four seconds longer for this to happen than it does for an attacker to take the throw himself. These discussions always puzzle me slightly. I never get precisely what it is that energises people so much about such apparently trivial things.
Trivial is in the eye of the beholder. When Liverpool loses the FA cup someday because some goon hurled a throw-in 40 yards to 8 attackers whose job was simply to cause chaos and a deflection, it may not be trivial. The other 99% of the match was played with the feet, why should the outcome be determined by a throw-in opportunity that was likely some random deflection of ball out of touch? All of the items we are discussing were once different in the LOTG so someone must have thought them non-trivial. It just seems to me that the overall LOTG is to try and make the game outcome determined by team dribbling, passing and shooting and not throw-ins, keeper clearances or individual stationary ball free-kick "skill". I have no facts supporting restart goals, which is why I used the word "seems", but I would be interested in seeing other opinions of 40+ observers or anyone that does have actual figures.
wouldn't kick-ins just increase the amount of set-piece goals, the very thing you seem to be against? The number of long throw specialists is a lot lower than good free-kick takers. Wouldn't it also lead to players playing for a "kick-in" rather than bothering to beat an opponent with skill? isn't a kick-in an individual stationary ball free-kick skill?
Well, I'm actually anti-kick-in as well (see bottom of my post). But since I'm more anti-long-throw, I'm trying to stay open-minded on all of the potential replacements or modifications. I prefer to further restrict the throw, particularly in the offensive zone - either by requiring closest player to take it or requiring throw to be flat-footed or cross-footed (no run up). But if none of those throw-in modifications succeed and long throwers continue to become more proficient, I suppose some form of kick-in might be more fair in that all teams have that ability and kicking is more of a core skill to the sport.
The play itself, no. The rules which permit such play won't even enter my head. That's football. If the opponent has eight players in our box for a throw-in, I would just be pissed off that we did not intercept the ball and launch a counter-attack whilst they were exposed at the back. Besides - why is a person kicking the ball into the box better than them throwing it? I note your use of the word "goon". It is interesting how often such terminology is used in dicussions of this type by people who advocate rule changes of this nature. There seems to be a form of mild distaste at work, one that equates a long throw, a strong tackle, a back pass or whatever with an artless, physically preponderous type of play and/or player. Whereas, of course, no individual rule in the game is allied to such stereotypes in any way. The throw-in is not the advantageous preserve of one player over another, even if the person actually throwing it is doing so because they can throw a ball a long distance. The team as a whole benefits from such delivery. And you also did not answer my point about the positive nature of having throwins taken by defenders, freeing attackers up to receive the ball and create attacks with it. Just because. Why should anything in football happen in the way that it does. There is nothing empirical I am aware of that says the modern game is more reliant on set-piece or "simplistic" goals than they used to be. All of the attributes you mention are still integral to the playing and the winning of the game. This is where these arguments always fall down. Some people perceive a fault in the game that in actual fact is hard to discern in any concrete form. Yes, I agree.
Semantic arguments can last centuries and divert attention from core issues. Let me try a different approach so you understand my general fundamental position and let others work out specific solutions. When you and I play pick-up soccer, nobody throws the ball in, no one takes goal kicks or corner kicks and even fouls are usually restarted with a back pass. We rarely use goalkeepers and even discourage defenders from assuming that role. When we play in organized competition on marked fields, we have the undesireable, but necessary burden to put the ball back into play and we add the goalkeeper. So it is not coincidence that we add laws and frequently adjust these laws of the core game to prevent these "discontinuities" from altering the spirit of the core game being played. Further restricting the back passes eligible to be handled by the keeper and restricting the length of the throw-in are really minor adjustments to existing laws intended for the purpose described. Nothing seems more odd than stopping a soccer practice where everyone has been in constant motion to stand around while we practice restarts, throw-ins and defending against them. We are beginning to resemble our American football counterparts on the fields next to us, and that cannot be a good trend.
maybe it's different for you, but when I used to play the reason we didn't ever have throw-ins etc was because we didn't have a field of limited size. Under pressure you could dribble away with the ball as far wide as you wanted. Even a degree of playing behind the goal line was acceptable. The problem with taking such an appraoch at a proper match is that there are these things called stadiums that get in the way of such play, however desirable. As much as I'd like to see someone disprove the old adage that "you can't score from row Z" I fear it wouldn't be very practical. You also have to consider the difference between playing something as a game, for the pure fun of it, and playing professionally as a career. If you mess up in a game and somebody scores it's no big deal as there'll probably be another 15 goals in the match anyway. The same is not exactly true for a pro match. For example, I used to play pool a fair bit. I had quite a flamboyant style, playing shots that nobody else would attempt as it looked good when they came off. Sometimes though, I'd play for money - nothing massive - my biggest win was £35, and when I did that I knew I had to cut out the fancy stuff as a lot more was riding on the outcome. football has never been a continuous game with 90 minutes of action. I know someone either at the football league or a newspaper did some research way back in the 1970s and found that in the average game the ball is only in play for 60 minutes. If there is some 'trend' towards the game stopping more, it's a trend that probably started about well over 100 years ago, when they first introduced passing, and hasn't changed at all since. Sure, people may practice set-pieces more than they did 30 years ago, but they also practice defending them more too. And to be honest teams weren't slack at set pieces back then either, with the possible exception of Zaire in the 1974 world cup.
It's this sort of overwrought perspective on the game that, in my opinion, fundamentally undermines the "let's change things" gang. The game is fine. Play on!