Please, not more shoot-outs.
Fans love penalties do they?
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Tuesday, 20, Mar 2007 05:59
According to Lord Mawhinney, football fans love penalty shoot-outs.
So, he says, we should scrap draws in favour of a spot-kick competition to decide a winner during every game of the Football League season.
Quite frankly, my response was "why bother?"
Firstly, Lord Mawhinney seems to have misjudged the mood of football fans. Since the suggestion of shoot-outs to decide draws was made, most people I have spoken to have balked at the suggestion.
It is not as if English fans' experience of penalty shoot-outs is that positive - after all, this system has ended the national team's participation in five of the last eight major tournaments. And it was only last year that Fifa president Sepp Blatter was advocating the elimination of the penalty shootout, something he referred to as a "tragedy of football".
As a result, this announcement from the Football League appears to be something of a backward step but it is not the first time a change to the beautiful game has been touted, only for it to be shot down in flames when everyone realised it was not as good in practice as it was on paper.
The last major change saw the introduction of the golden goal rule in 1993, touted by that wise old owl Blatter, only for it to be rescinded again little more than ten years later when fans found it encouraged teams to take about as many risks as a paranoid insurance salesman.
Don't get me wrong, "next goal wins" is a widely-known concept in park football, but then so is "jumpers for goalposts". That doesn't mean it has any place in the professional game.
And speaking of jumpers for goalposts, another big change that was touted as "the saviour of football" was larger goal-frames.
Blatter (again) thought in 1996 that raising the crossbar by 25cm and putting the posts 50cm further apart would mean more goals. True, but then so would having no goalkeepers - it doesn't mean it is a good idea.
And don't even get me started on the farcical offside rule. Active? Passive? Who knows - it is more complicated than the Duckworth-Lewis method these days.
The one rule change that has snuck past the football traditionalists in recent years is the back-pass rule, introduced for the start of the 1992/93 season, although there was quite clearly a problem there that needed fixing.
On several occasions, teams blatantly protected a lead by passing it around among their back-four and if they ran into trouble, the goalkeeper was always there as a security blanket.
Nowadays though, defenders are under far more pressure to clear the ball themselves and are encouraged to play forward not back, which speeds up the game - probably a more important facet than trying to artificially engineer an increase in the number of goals scored.
But back to Lord Mawhinney's shoot-outs.
I personally do not see what the problem is with having draws and I'm pretty sure there are many Stockport County fans who will agree with me there.
The Hatters faced relegation from the Football League if they lost to League Two champions Carlisle and Oxford United won at home to Leyton Orient, so the final whistle that brought to an end their 0-0 draw was met with a pitch invasion fuelled by relief as much as joy.
That was a goalless draw as exciting as any other, if not for the scintillating football then the sheer pressure that hung over Edgeley Park that day. Either way, I'm not sure the fans of either club would have appreciated a penalty shoot-out once their respective league positions had been assured.
And in the interests of fairness under any new proposals, every game that ended in a draw would have to feature penalties, even when the result makes no difference to a team's league position at the end of the season - a situation that almost encourages a farce.
My point is that with the league system as it is, draws can be as exciting or rewarding as a win. If you've ever supported a small team that goes to play a top side and snatches a share of the spoils then you'll know what I mean.
Besides, if the league has no such thing as a draw then what differentiates it from the cups? The league is an accumulation of points from 90-minute matches across an entire season - a marathon not a sprint, to use the old cliché - and it represents a very different type of challenge for a team than the knockout system of winners and losers.
The bottom line is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
The lower leagues remain as exciting as ever and, as any fan of a team in the top half of the Championship this season will testify, the Football League, and the game of football itself, is just fine as it is.
Alistair Potter