Spain 0-Italy 0; Spain Wins!
Football (soccer in the US) is the most popular sport in the world. Europe, I can say first hand, shuts down when a major football game is being played, or is about1 to be played.
The exuberance of football fans is legendary. Look at any match in Great Brittan: if there is not a riot, then it is not a football match! Even in staid Switzerland, we have noticed a wide variety of national flags from all over Europe festooned from the cars, and only about half are Swiss2.
The post-game celebrations are amazing! The folks from Southern Europe seem to be the most boisterous—Italy, Spain, Portugal. You can see our take on the Portuguese celebrations in Nyon at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/ringmaster23).
No doubt, the game is exciting.
But, …
(You knew there would be a “but.”)
Why are matches decided by a coin toss, er, ahem, I mean, penalty kicks? A single lucky guess by a goalie or one lousy miss-kick by the star and, well, YOU LOSE!
First, penalty kicks are, in and of themselves, stupid. The Stupid Penalty Kick—let’s call it the SPK. Why should a foul result in a huge chunk of the scoring? Imagine that rule in basketball. Oops, you touched him—50 points for the Celtics. My (admittedly amateur) observation is that a penalty kick is successful something like 70% of the time3. Teams play for a penalty—I bet you have already noticed the quality of the acting on the football pitch. It is better than some soap operas (especially the Arabic ones). The SPK does not reflect the normal ebb and flow of a game—a shot like the SPK never comes up in regular play. It is an idiotic attempt to reduce the frequency and severity of fouls4.
Back to the match Sunday night.
When you list the great countries of the world, one must include Italy and Spain. Centuries, no, millennia of history exude from the grape-and-olive-producing soils of these Mediterranean countries. And they speak the same language—sort of. So why (oh why?) did the SPK have to settle this classic competition? Did the Catholic Church flip a coin with the Druids to determine who got to provide the religion? No! They played the religion game and won! Did the governments of these great countries roll dice to decide if they should be charter members of the European Union? No, they played the political game and made the union complete. But yet, they used the SPK to decide the match of the century (well, at least the 7th year of the current century). How does this make sense?
I have now appointed myself as an expert in football (notice how I even refrain from calling it “soccer”—I am nothing if not sensitive.) With this new role, I have come up with the solution, which I am sure UEFA will adopt right away. (Thanks to #3 son for help on this.)
First, let’s look at American Football. They, too, used to decide overtime with a coin toss. Really—they did. They tossed a coin to decide who gets the opening kickoff of the overtime, and the first team to score wins. Guess who won most of the time?
They saw the error of their ways a few years back and radically changed the overtime. It seemed goofy at the time, but I think this has proven to be an excellent change.
In overtime, each team gets the same number of chances, starting at the 35-yard line (that is, 35 yards from the scoring end zone). All the regular rules apply5. Here is the really goofy part: At the end of the pair of turns, the team with the most points wins. Radical, eh? You get a field goal? You lose if the other team gets a touchdown on their turn.
In football (remember, that’s soccer to Americans), they once, long ago, continued play indefinitely until someone scored or everyone on both team died from exhaustion. 5 hour games ensued—not great for TV and, ultimately, not great for the bars, especially the bars of the losing team at 3 AM. So the geniuses in the Global Overlords of Football Fans and Yahoos (GOOFY) decided to put an end to this game of attrition and decide it with the coin toss/SPK.
They should, in my expert opinion, continue regular play in some manner or another. More overtime doesn’t work. How do teams score goals? Breakaways, SPK’s, luck (really the same thing as an SPK) and corner kicks. The NHL does breakaways—dumb idea. So I propose an overtime consisting of corner kicks.
Each team gets a series of corner kicks (4?). Your chance ends when the ball passes midfield. Regular rules of football apply on these little plays.
“But corner kicks only result in a goal like 5% of the time,” you complain. With this rule in place, I bet that teams will spend a lot more time practicing these plays, and they’ll get a lot better at it (maybe eliminating the need for overtime after all).
Not perfect, but a whole lot more fair than the SPK!
If that doesn’t work, then make the goal 20 meters meters wide (up from 7.3 m). And if that doesn’t work, let everyone use their hands in overtime!
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Footnote 1: We drove from Nyon to Genoa, Italy, yesterday. I have never seen so few cars anywhere, at any time, than yesterday from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM. We did not see a single car in our lane inside the Mont Blanc tunnel. Vast stretches of 6-lane highway in Italy were empty. You would think that the football game was happening on Sunday afternoon, but kickoff was at 8:45 PM. I think no one in Italy dared to leave home on Sunday for fear that they might miss one second of the match.
Footnote 2: Somebody told me—I do not know if this is true—that it is the law that one must fly a Swiss flag on your car in addition to another country’s flag, or you fly no flag at all. This may be the law, but it is not perfectly followed.
Footnote 3: Why even bother with the goalie? Make it a “free throw.”
Footnote 4: So why not give a SPK for every foul. Then, like in basketball, you can make a 1-and-1 late in the game if you have too many team fouls! Or 3-to-make-2, like they used to do in the NBA.
Footnote 5: There are two significant mods: (1) no defensive scores are allowed, and (2) the extra point rule is modified as overtime progresses in order to ensure that a winner happens eventually.