Been a while since we did this.
The ninth in an ongoing series, chronicling the muddle-mouthed misadventures of FIFA president Sepp Blatter, in the alluring, seductive presence of an open microphone.
Last week, Ol’ Blatty got caught in the open musing about how lovely it would be if group games in the next World Cup weren’t allowed to end in draws. Force a winner, one way or t’other, and wouldn’t that be luverly?
Sure – if you like bad soccer and cheap, unearned results.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
I want to start by defending the humble, unloved draw. Soccer is the one sport left out there (chess? really?) that considers all-even at fulltime to be a good and honourable result. And so it is.
New Zealand did not defeat Italy at the recent World Cup in South Africa. But they did draw them, and that was enough to implode Italy’s cup defence, gleefully granting the South Seas a bit of revenge for the deplorably unethical way the Italians put paid to Australia in the round of 16 four years ago.
Draws perform two vital functions in the group stage of a World Cup. They create a wide variety of different standings situations across the eight preliminary groups, and they keep the first 48 games to two hours each.
Eliminate them, and all the groups would become eerily similar. And, you would regularly start to see two recurring nightmare situations:
- If one team in the group wins all their games and the other three teams split, a team with three points moves on to round two.
- If one team in the group loses all their games and the other three teams split, a team with six points gets eliminated.
A single draw destroys both these unhappy possibilities. (Yes, draws also create the possibility of a team moving on with just two points, but it’s highly unlikely, and has never yet happened so far as I can tell.)
Also. A huge part of the allure of the World Cup is that you can – if your endurance and appetite are up to it – watch all the games. A sudden, random smattering of three-hour group games would make that all-but-impossible. Yes, you might get more upsets by allowing penalty-kick shootouts, but they would be of the cheaper, more dubious variety – and who needs more of that at the world’s greatest single-sport event?
There’s also a deeper, less flattering reason to shun extra time as much as possible. This doesn’t get discussed a lot, but it’s quite howlingly obvious:
- Extra-time soccer sucks.
Not always, certainly. But it’s an extra, forced half-hour, being played by exhausted players. This isn’t hockey, where the game can end at any moment. It isn’t basketball or baseball, where the overtime is parceled into short, measured segments.
Soccer takes you from stoppage time in the second half – where any drawn game can be settled in a heartbeat – to a grim, breathless half-speed dance where, quite often, both sides are content to put it in park and let luck fall where it may in penalty kicks.
In my last decade of watching soccer, I don’t recall a single time I didn’t feel disappointed when a game went into extra time. It’s a lousy deal for the players, fans, and – should the game go to penalty kicks – the sport of soccer in general.
Sepp, do you really want to trash your television schedule, water down your game, court disaster in the group-stage standings and double or triple the number of cheap, unearned upsets?
Why not preserve the simple elegance of two-hour games, with vastly different dramas evolving over and throughout the different groups? You already have no draws in the final 16 matches. That marks a fine dramatic turning point in each World Cup, when it comes. You go from regular season to playoffs, and extra time suddenly seems appropriate – necessary, even, because there is no room at all in a WC schedule for replays.
I am continually amazed – and disheartened – by the way Sepp Blatter’s mind does or doesn’t work. If he had his way, we’d be down to ten players a side, there would be penalty boxes, and fewer teams in every league so there wouldn’t be fixture backlog so that players wouldn’t drop dead of heart attacks at his totally unnecessary Confederations Cup (even that that isn’t – and never, ever was – why Marc-Vivien Foe died).
I see soccer’s place in the world, and how well and wonderfully this simple, lovely game is doing. I can’t help wondering how much better it all would be … if Joseph Sepp Blatter had never been born.
Onward!