Dudes vs Lads Fri 25th Nov 1900 uk time joint telly watch

IdleRich

IdleRich
Orgasm! Er, I mean, the goal stands... absolute madness but I do feel that the ecstasy was somewhat diluted by that delay.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Anyway, I assume that these are historical foibles of the game, that it was once understood that villages played their games by clearing the grazing sheep from the field by the village hall and stuck some goal posts on it. You were lucky if it wasn't on a 40 degree slope or didn't have a huge tree growing on it, expecting them to be the same size was way too optimistic. But I'm talking about the situation more than a hundred years ago, I know the sport has not always been quick to adopt new technologies but I feel that the tape measure has been a generally accepted tool for some time now, standardising the size of a football pitch has been completely possible for a long time and yet they choose not to. Why? I really don't know to be honest. Maybe one of you lot does.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
I guess I tagged you cos I first heard that phrase from you... and having looked it up, I believe it (correct me if I'm wrong here) to be a sexual thing where a guy's orgasm is delayed by a woman who is manipulating him, and she keeps kinda almost allowing it and then stopping - basically teasing, until finally he does come but even then she stops so he doesn't get the full, joyful release, but rather a kind of disappointing thing that technically counts as an orgasm but which is really a poor man's version of what it could and should be. If that is not right then please feel free to educate me, but, assuming for a second that that is what it is, then it seems to be, in terms of a goal celebration delayed, teased and finally allowed by VAR that is almost too perfect.

whatever floats your boat mate
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
is it true that broadcast companies in the usa are not so keen on showing football cos they can't cram in as much commercials as they can with basketball, baseball or american football?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
whatever floats your boat mate

I can't help it mate... there is just something about it... for me there is just so much more satisfaction and pleasure without all this faffing around and teasing delay that seems to be intrinsic to almost every goal under VAR.
 

sufi

lala
I spent a quintessential few minutes in the cold last night, between places;
Standing in the street outside a TV shop with a small group of randoms to watch the extra time in Tunisia-France

We'd noticed on a cafe TV that Tunisia had scored after 60 minutes, so they were 1 up against France FFS!
It was already almost full time and already one of our group sloped off at 90 minutes - nothing will happen in 8 mins extra time, so he went home

1/2 a dozen of us still standing around outside the telly showroom window in a dark suburban street huddled in front of this big home cinema screen and then France scored at like 97 and a bit minutes, 30 seconds left on the clock wtaf omg the Tunisians were literally in tears in the stadium, the moment of glory ruptured, the overturning of generations of colonial oppression undone, can it really have come to this?
a couple more fatalistic lads wandered away shaking heads philosophically ...

and then they announced VAR! omfg at this point people were actually jumping up and down on that bleak pavement, hoping the shop staff don't decide it's time to close,
brief teasing deliberations occur, action replays from different angles and the France goal was disallowed!!!
So Tunisia win it - there's just a few seconds before the final whistle - Tunisia fans going bananas beyond comprehension, France fans utterly dejected and crushed in their facepaint and daft holiday hats

The match had swung so spectacularly between triumph to calamity in those few closing minutes & tbh i follow Craner - nothing in football to be interested in really, tho the world cup does have its moments

& Tunisia drop out on points anyway 😫
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
is it true that broadcast companies in the usa are not so keen on showing football cos they can't cram in as much commercials as they can with basketball, baseball or american football?

I reckon this relates to what @shakahislop was saying above, we are all very suspicious about the relationship between US sports and TV - especially commercials - when the world Cup was in the US in 94 there were all kinds of rumours floating around about what the US money men wanted to do to our beautiful game; two that stick in my head were the ludicrous idea that they wanted to make the goals bigger so you got higher scoring games, and that they wanted to introduce minibreaks every five minutes or so so they didn't waste all that valuable commercial time with 45 min of uninterrupted sport.

I'm not sure how much credence to give those kinds of story - I'm sure there were advertisers who would have liked more advertising time but that doesn't mean that there was ever a real chance of it happening... and the thing about goals was likely just bollocks. But I refer to Shaka cos he's right - lots of people were very ready to believe that those kinds of things were true and rush straight into getting all angry and indignant about those crass money-driven Yanks trying to drag our sport down to the level of their silly games which all consist of a load of cheerleaders dancing followed by millions of adverts occasionally interrupted by someone briefly throwing or kicking a ball in a vulgar simplified bastardisation of one of our old sports (baseball from rounders/cricket, basketball from netball, nfl from rugby etc) - regardless of whether there was the slightest grain of truth in there anywhere.

It's just the way it worked out that NFL has all those breaks and is perfect for adverts. I do imagine that the structure made it popular with schedulers and being shown more made it more popular and so on.... I just read an excellent book called The Agent (recommended by @luka and also @woops too I believe) and while it was rather light on detecting and investigating for a ostensible crime novel, it did give a fascinating insight into the commercial side of US sports, one thing it said in passing was that they introduced an extra time out into NFL so there was an extra break for adverts - can any of you lot confirm or refute?

I think that a time out is an unscheduled stop (ie not half-time etc) to the game that the team coach can call to freeze play and discuss tactics with his team if things aren't working, is that right? Each side is allowed to do it a few times so they must deploy them wisely or risk getting stuck needing to say something but lacking the opportunity to do so.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
is it true that broadcast companies in the usa are not so keen on showing football cos they can't cram in as much commercials as they can with basketball, baseball or american football?

sounds plausible, although I've never seen anyone admit to it. we do have football on niche sports cable stations and foreign language channels, but not on major broadcast or cable networks.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But - I guess it got a little lost in my enthusiastic splurging above - but, given your stance on timekeeping @Leo I'm interested to know what you think about the fact that the dimensions of a football pitch are not fixed, they merely have to lie within certain - pretty wide I'd say - parameters?

Personally I think that if I were drawing up the rules for a sport then I would fix the size of the playing surface. Historically I understand that they may have varied but nowadays it would not exactly be difficult to make them all the same. And now, not only do they vary, but potentially by quite some distance, and of course a team/club decides how big their own pitch is and theoretically they could scale it to their advantage.

@WashYourHands or anyone really, do you now what the rules are about changing the pitch? I mean, I've never heard of a team switching it each week - one week you're playing a team who've got a really fast centre-forward who always springs the off-side trap, let's make the pitch shorter so he has less space to do that. Then next week you know that the team you're playing has several defensive injuries which means they have no good fullbacks available and must play a youth team player or someone out of position, so maybe you make the pitch wider to give yourself more space to attack with on the flanks. I've never heard that sort of tactic alluded to, but sometimes you hear that someone has narrowed the pitch or something - maybe they put a racing circuit around the pitch say - so I assume it is legal. Do they have to declare it? Could teams be subtly doing that every week and not mentioning it so we don't know? I really have no idea.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
average nfl ball playtime is 11 mins per game. compared to 60-70 of football.

And it lasts three or four hours, it's fucking crazy. I think really it's a different game to the one they advertise and pretend it to be. Not a worse one even, but a different one....

You see an advert for American Football and it's a load of clips with some guy throwing it the length of the field so his mate in his space suit can evade a bunch of evil robots in body armour and then catch it at full stretch diving into the end zone... fireworks exploding, cheerleaders bouncing around like bunny rabbits on meth woooh exciting, and then next clip is maybe a run in which our hero evades a whole fucking army of the robots, he dodges one and jumps the next, somersaults into the end zone - that was crazy I can't believe that they do this stuff literally all the time in this game. Next one, just in case you're in any doubt of the risks involved you see what happens if the evil robots do catch someone, a hapless spaceman in his kiddie dayglo uniform is trying to get away but this time maybe four of them go fucking flying headfirst into him totally cleaning him out in a beautifully balletic destruction that leaves you in little doubt that he's dead, in fact you're probably wondering if the robots are damaged as well - if they were people they'd definitely have brain damage at least.

So, yeah you think "hmmm, this looks interesting, I might check this out" - so you put it in your diary or whatever and you look forward to it, maybe you have to stay up until four am or something cos it's a different time zone on the moon or wherever it is that has grass that colour. Eventually the time has come, you turn on a game and there's a load of people standing around and getting into a line, anticipation is building, something is gonna happen... whistle blows, they throw the ball back 3m, someone falls over or something and then it stops again and they are lining up again and you're going "What? Why did they stop, they haven't even started? What's going on, this isn't what I was promised?". And you give it a few more minutes, you try to like it, you try really hard but after half an hour that seems like a week you turn it off feeling angry and deceived. And if anyone ever mentions the sport you go on a furious rant about how it's the most boring thing that has ever existed and you make certain to never ever accidentally catch even one second of it, nurturing this utter - and really totally unfair - hatred of the whole thing and the whole lying edifice of cheerleaders and rock music that has been built around it.

But my understanding is that the interest is in the tactics, the planning and so on - I guess it's got to be if you watch for four hours and the ball is in play ten minutes. And if you lure people in pretending it's a super fast all action game then they're going to be disappointed. Combine the hits and throws you see on the adverts with those shiny kits that look as though they were designed by children and the newbie is tuning in to watch rollerball, but actually they get chess. The damage is done cos they lied to you - when I was a kid we went (I dunno how or why, maybe we won free tickets or something I dunno, I just cannot imagine Dad would have taken us for just no reason) to see the London Monarchs at Wembley and it was a torment, none of us had any idea that we were going to sit there for four hours with nothing happening on the field while the announcer said "Colgate, the official toothpaste of the London Monarchs" and then "Penguin, the official publisher of the London Monarchs" continuously for every type of product you can imagine.

The thing is, I can imagine I might like the game, it sounds like it should be interesting, but I approached it from the wrong direction at an early age and the damage was done.
 

Leo

Well-known member
But - I guess it got a little lost in my enthusiastic splurging above - but, given your stance on timekeeping @Leo I'm interested to know what you think about the fact that the dimensions of a football pitch are not fixed, they merely have to lie within certain - pretty wide I'd say - parameters?

You can probably guess how I feel.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
well what I like about football as a totally blind person especially radio commentary (although they will soon ruin that i'm sure) is that you get to hear the tactics being planned in realtime. Having played some VI football as a youngster I roughly have a map of a pitch whenever I'm listening to a game.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
You can probably guess how I feel.

I can't really justify it either. I suppose you could say it adds a bit of variety playing on different pitches and so on... but normally you avoid variety so that teams can play each other on - quite literally - a level playing field. I can only think it's a hang over from days of olde that has never been corrected. Like one of those hilarious laws that is still on the statute book (we're often told) about how in certain areas it's totally legal to shoot a Welshman with a bow and arrow if they approach after dark or whatever it is.

We all know that football changed from being the people's game - played by guys who were naturally better than the average man on the street but not super athletes or anything, guys who would walk to the game with their kit bag on their shoulder mingling with the supporters on their way to the stadium and happily drink 10 pints of lager in celebration after they won or to drown sorrows if they lost - to some kind of megabusiness with insane sums of money involved played by preening megastars who fly from the changing room to the pitch in their own private jet and haven't spoken to a normal person since the age of thirteen when their talent was recognised and they were plucked from normal life to be brought up in an academy surrounded by other footballers and machines for practising football.

But what I think is sometimes forgotten is how quickly that happened, with the result that the modernisation of the game and the professionalism that came with that happened unevenly in parts and, I suspect, in some ways, not at all. When I was a kid Luton were in the top division - Division One as it was called at the time before the Premier League and the new era it brought in had even been dreamt of - and one thing they were notable for (let's be honest here, the only thing) was their plastic pitch. They didn't have grass, they played on astroturf, and it wasn't the fifth or sixth generation stuff that we play on now that is a bit like grass, it was basically a big green bit of plastic.

So there was a team in the top division of the sport who had the wrong playing surface and every other team played them twice a year, once at home and once away and there would always be this little caveat in commentary or from pundits after the game "Oh and Liverpool look to have the title within their grasp, but remember they do still have to go to Luton where they often struggle on their surface" - it beggars belief really that a team could just have the wrong pitch, with the ball bouncing all weird, I dunno if it hurt if you fell on it... but everyone just accepted it. I guess it's like if an ice hockey team said "We can't be arsed with ice, when you come to us it's gonna be on a hard wood surface and you gotta wear roller skates" and all the other teams and the league went along with it. They got rid of that in 1991 - thirty years later you've got Ronaldo having left United and he's considering what to do with his last few slow and ineffective years before he has to retire - one option that most would consider quite enticing is the hitherto unheard of Saudi club which is offering him £173m a year - and that hardly even makes the news... game has changed a lot.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also, I keep asking this, but @Leo, @linebaugh, @Clinamenic, @suspended or anyone, what is the American objection to draws? I've often seen Americans say "You have ties in football" as though it is self-evidently bad, and in fact @Clinamenic literally said that in this thread, but why, what is it? If two people ran a race in the same time then no-one was faster... what is it that is philosophically so wrong with that?
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Group stage a draw goes a long way, next stage is explaining penalties in the context of possible draws after 30 mins of extra time split into 2 halves of 15 mins

England and penalties, it’s unavoidable really, out there lurking, any easy win just a prelude to an inevitable death dance
 

Leo

Well-known member
Also, I keep asking this, but @Leo, @linebaugh, @Clinamenic, @suspended or anyone, what is the American objection to draws? I've often seen Americans say "You have ties in football" as though it is self-evidently bad, and in fact @Clinamenic literally said that in this thread, but why, what is it? If two people ran a race in the same time then no-one was faster... what is it that is philosophically so wrong with that?

I don't have strong feelings about ties one way or another, although overtime can be fun. No ties in basketball or baseball, just keep playing until one side wins.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I don't have strong feeling about ties one way or another, although overtime can be fun. No ties in basketball or baseball, just keep playing until one side wins.
Nor do I. But have you never noticed that some of your compatriots seem to have an objection that seems almost axiomatic.

Away goals as a way of deciding the result is a strange one as well really. I don't really think it selects the team that played better - though both teams knew the rules before hand so it's fair in that sense. But interested to know what our American friends think....

European club cups of which the Champions League is now the main example, are obviously competitions between clubs from different countries. There has always been a belief that playing at home gave an advantage - I guess in all sports - with loud and partisan crowds, plus the team is used to playing on their own specially sized pitch - in the league each team plays each other twice over the course of the season, once home and once away to make it fair.

In the CL or whatever, especially in the earlier days when it was the European Cup, home advantage was much more tangible as travel might involve a long flight rather than a coach down the motorway. Player were young men who had maybe never been abroad before, flying to a foreign country whose citizens greeted them en mass at the airport with banners threatening to kill them, then followed them to the hotel - where they had to subsist on weird foreign muck instead of proper food - and made an awful racket all night so they got no sleep before the game.

Going abroad and playing a really good team that you knew nothing about, in an intimidating environment after no sleep and with food that gave you the shits etc really could be hard. And so a lot of teams in these cups used to play extremely defensively in the hope that despite all those problems they could hold out for a draw - and then in two weeks time in the reverse fixture we'll make sure THEY get no sleep and we'll see how THEY like it. And so you got two very boring games with each side playing with ten defenders in the away leg.

So UEFA invented the away goal rule - if the match was level after both games then the team which had scored most away was the winner. That is to say that if

First Leg at A, final score 1 - 1
Second Leg at B, final score 2 - 2
Aggregate score 3 - 3

A win cos they got two goals when they were away whereas B only got one away.

The idea is A were rewarded for playing more adventurously away - and yeah they scored two when they were away, so presumably they attacked better than B when away... but they also conceded more when they were away, so they defended worse when away. It's difficult to say that A were really better than B in any respect - anything they did better away they did worse at home, I really don't that that rule made any sense in terms of selecting the better team... what it definitely did do though is make for some really exciting matches... and also the games changed very suddenly and strangely, like if the first game was nil nil and then in the second game the home scored they would be ahead obviously... but if the away team equalised then they would go from behind to ahead in one goal, something that never happened normally in football.

So the balance of play would change very quickly and, footballers, being generally pretty thick (I think that's a fairly uncontroversial statement - Graeme Le Saux was famously regarded as being both an egg head and gay cos he read The Guardian) seemed to struggle to work out if they had won or lost at times. It was a great rule that made for exciting games - and then last year after almost sixty years they just dropped it. I understand that there was no longer any real need for it, teams were no longer afraid to go abroad, most of their players probably had a spare mansion or two in a few foreign countries - certainly teams didn't feel the need to set up with ten at the back. And yet I think it removes an element of mad excitement from the game and fair or no that feels like a pity...

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin revealed the decision was not unanimous, but admitted there was a preference to change the rule after its "fairness" was questioned.

"However, the question of its abolition has been debated at various UEFA meetings over the last few years. Although there was no unanimity of views, many coaches, fans and other football stakeholders have questioned its fairness and have expressed a preference for the rule to be abolished."

With the move applying to all UEFA men's, women's and youth competitions, Ceferin said the change could lead to more attack-minded ties.

Ceferin added: "The impact of the rule now runs counter to its original purpose as, in fact, it now dissuades home teams - especially in first legs - from attacking, because they fear conceding a goal that would give their opponents a crucial advantage.

"There is also criticism of the unfairness, especially in extra time, of obliging the home team to score twice when the away team has scored.

"It is fair to say that home advantage is nowadays no longer as significant as it once was. Taking into consideration the consistency across Europe in terms of styles of play, and many different factors which have led to a decline in home advantage, the UEFA Executive Committee has taken the correct decision in adopting the view that it is no longer appropriate for an away goal to carry more weight than one scored at home."

Probably all true but there is absolutely no mention of "fun" anywhere in that which I'd like to suggest is maybe they are going wrong in their decision making at times.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
What's VI football? Or is it just a fancy way of saying six-a-side?

No it's where the ball has a belll or a rattle
in it. the game is obviously played slower than visual football, which is why it will never garner any approval. But that's the way it is.

But because most visually impaired football is adapted from futsal, it is 5 a side.
 
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