I'm beginning to become more and more a supporter of video replays in football though. I'm against ad hoc legislation, but on the other hand I don't think refereeing mistakes have to just be accepted as "part of the game". It would also be a protection for the referees if they are supported by some kind of video systems.
I agree. Goals are scored so seldom in soccer, I can't see any significant slowdown if video replay was adopted for goal line calls. (OTOH, video replay should be kept far FAR away from baseball. Umpires make hundreds of judgment calls each game. Calling these into question would grind an already slow game into an interminable halt. Besides, if you eliminated bad officiating, then you also eliminate opportunities for the managers & umpires to get into heated screaming matches.
)
I was writing on my phone earlier -
I just wanted to pause and marvel at the fact that, 10-15 years ago, this statement would have made no sense at all.
Oh, how things change...
Honestly, though, nothing could have been more exciting than the US-Algeria game and that was 1-0. The one thing I thought about was a bit unorthodox of a suggestion. The game was interesting because both teams needed to win, not tie, so they played for the win. That led to wide open soccer. I wonder what the World Cup would look like if they removed the point for ties. Basically, the only difference between a tie and a loss is that, if you tie, you prevent another team in the group from getting a point. There's still a strategic advantage to not losing, but there's more of an incentive to push ahead and take risks for the win. Overall, it might not help, but it could spice things up a bit.
That's really a criticism I don't understand. Someone does win in the end. A tie is often a much better result for one team than the other. The point is to be on top after 38 games (or however many your league has in a season) - what does it matter to win any individual game if you reach that goal in the end?
I have literally never even thought about it that way until someone mentioned that here on TrekBBS.
Maybe that's part of the overall difference between soccer & some of these other sports we've been talking about. The strategic focus is on the season, not the game at hand. Personally, while it's great to see a team on a championship run, I also want to be entertained and see a satisfying conclusion to the game at hand. Besides, sometimes an individual game can matter more than an entire season. That's how you get some of these great American college football rivalries like ASU vs. UofA or Michigan vs. Ohio State. Hell, they once did a poll amongst Michigan & Ohio St. fans who both said that they'd rather have losing seasons but still beat each other than win all of their other games but still lose to their hated rivals.
(I suppose this is the same reason why I can get really annoyed with TV shows like
Heroes &
Lost. They're so focused on developing the season long arc that they forget to make the individual episodes entertaining in their own right.)
In a way, this philosophy also extends to individual games. Soccer games seem to be a constantly moving mass with little to show for it. It's all building towards a goal that may or may not happen but with few overt signs to mark the progress. OTOH, baseball & American football are all about marking time with small victories. American football teams are trying to seize enemy territory a few yards at a time, frequently stopping to measure the accomplishment. Baseball marks time with pitch counts, balls vs. strikes, outs, players on base who haven't scored yet but are that much closer. To the untrained eye, it's impossible to tell who is winning in a soccer game until someone scores, and the scores are so low that it's often not an indicator of how close the game really was. Compare that to basketball, which I think in many ways has the most in common with soccer (at least compared to baseball or American football). In basketball, players score so frequently that that raw number is usually a pretty good indicator of how players are doing.
