To have this five minute check for serious injury and/or concussion, you’d also have to punish a player if they were deemed to cynically/deliberately cause this kind of stoppage. It would probably mean FIFA would have to introduce a five-minute sin-bin to cover that eventuality. The initial idea is great but it could be a mess on (eg. during a game) and off the field (eg. any FIFA vote on this).
Players already deliberately and cynically stop games with bad fouls. How would this be any different? How easy do you think it is to tackle someone hard enough that they’re in a fair bit of pain, forcing them to go off, without getting either a yellow or a red?
There are these coloured cards the referee carries around with them, to enforce this punishment on players who cynically and deliberately cause a stoppage in a game.
Ones yellow, and the others red. Easy to remember. Slice of cheese, slice of tomato. They’ve been around in the game for a little while now.
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Stimulation is cautionable and referees add on time for stoppages.
Often it isn’t all added on, though. Nobody can seriously argue there was only six minutes of time added on last night, for example. On the same token, blatant simulation clearly doesn’t get punished nearly as much as it should.
Then again, Australia could’ve had 30 minutes of time added on and they still wouldn’t have scored.
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Yes. That’s my point.
They are complaining about something which is already entirely handled within LOTG, but remains a problem, and then also argue that their solution cannot have obvious downsides because it is entirely handled within LOTG.
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It’s a lot harder to prove simulation than proving a cynical foul. Technically, a ref can’t turn around to a player writhing in pain and tell him to get up and play on, especially if there was contact. Again though, the argument is that if they’re in that much pain that there’s screams or writhing on the ground, they HAVE to be checked out by a doctor and held back for a minimum period to ensure there’s no further injuries. At the very least, there should be a duty of care. If they’re bullshitting, then that’s on them and will quickly stop
The only difference is that there’s already a fix for cynical fouls, there’s no real fix for people pretending to be in pain to stop the game. You can’t prove whether someone is in pain or not
No it’s not.
The argument is that ten seconds down means five minutes out. Nobody said anything about there needing to be screams or writhing.
I have had many falls, hard contacts, rolled ankles, pointy joints in awkward spots which hurt like hell for more than ten seconds but did not require five minutes of treatment.
You can’t prove whether something is cynical or not.
You can assume it in a “know it when I see it” sense, but that is true of simulation too.
You’re literally taking it to extremes though… no one said that if you’re down for 10 seconds and then back up and running you’re out. It wouldn’t be too hard to leave it up to a ref to decide whether an injury could be deemed serious enough to have a player off. Also no one is saying 5 minutes… 2 minutes just like the MLS would be sufficient to dissuade players. No one has ever said, anytime a player goes down they should be taken off, it’s a way to dissuade over acting as well as ensuring that players that need proper treatment get it off the pitch, without stopping play
- More tackles
- Stronger tackles
- Entering more physical duals to contest or protect the ball
- Using more shoulder, elbow, hip in said duals
- Challenging more high balls
- Using more shoulder, elbow, hip in aerial duels
- Putting the ball in the air more to encourage more duels where players can fall awkwardly
- Preferring players who won’t come out second-best in these duals.
- Prefering goalkeepers more likely to come out and punch high balls, even if it takes out the player in the process
- Millions of other micro-adjustments players and coaches will make at the margins that we can’t even foresee
You have to think beyond first-order effects.
Thousands of coaches will lead tens of thousands of players playing dozens of games a year, each with 90 minutes and hundreds of opportunities for physical player-to-player interactions. In many of these games one team will be under the pump, and have an incentive to benefit of having the other team go down a man. None of them will ever find an opportunity to squeeze out advantage? None of them will ever be able to repeat the advantage, or adjust their tactics or individual decision-making to improve the odds of a situation where they can take advantage within the rules, or find where taking a gamble with the referee has the most favourable odds?
There doesn’t need to be “this one weird trick which Messi doesn’t want you to know”.
If nothing else, compared to the status quo, a world where this rule is in place would make players and coaches whose instincts, physique and natural play style generate more painful challenges play against ten for more of the game than they otherwise would, and therefore generate better results than they otherwise would, and therefore Moneyball their way up the football pyramid more than they otherwise would.
Some better approaches which don’t add perverse incentives which lead to unintended consequences:
- Move to WC22 stoppages more broadly to counter time wasting.
- Allow referees to add punitive extra time (eg 2x) where a delay was deemed due to time wasting.
- Allow VAR to intervene for simulation and other “non-football” cautionable offences.
- Allow match review to assign retrospective cautions for simulation.
- Allow match review to punish “successful” simulations (ie which caused an unjustified refereeing decision of any kind) with suspensions.
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And really this should not be too intrusive, especially if establishing whether the opponent committed a red card offence.
Extremely rarely this actually happens. Perez from Central Coast was one of those.
In literally every single one of those cases, if the player is deemed to have gone in with excessive force to cause injury, they would get either a yellow or a red…
A tackle or challenge that endangers the safety of an opponent or uses
excessive force or brutality must be sanctioned as serious foul play.
I mean in all honestly, the only way to stop the play and get someone taken off would be to injure them successfully enough that they have to be taken off… Fairly easy one for VAR to look at.
No one is saying someone on the ground for 10 seconds needs to be taken off, or be off for 5 mins (I think 2 mins has been floated), but a hard rule for all injuries needs to handed out.
You have to spend as much time off the field as you spend on the ground. Fourth official can monitor it
You guys all know all this stuff has nothing to do with the result last night, right?
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I might need to get my glasses checked in that case. Maybe there’s some weird refraction of specific pixels through the lenses
ahh, didnt read that one
FWIW, I was embellishing with “10 seconds”.
But by simply adding on time in ET, all you’re doing is rewarding the player and that team because they still get the ‘rest’ and break up of play they’re after. If you’ve got players tiring and somebody throws themselves to the ground and is “writhing around in pain” all so those tired players can head to the technical area and suck down a Powerade/Pickle Juice/stuff a handful of lollies in their mouth, that’s causing an unfair advantage.
Of all the Bahranian players who went to the sideline after their career ending injury having thrown themselves to the floor, how many were actually injured. Did all of them walk back to the 4th official, and then sprint back on the field when the ref gave them the nod, having wasted several precious minutes, completely killing any momentum in the game we may have had?
The only player who may have had a cause to writhe around like he’d been shot was the player who copped the high boot from Yengi. And even then, I’m sure he’s forgotten all about it the moment Yengi entered the tunnel.