Is This the Way to End a Game?
For 60 years there has been a World Cup, and for centuries there has been soccer in some form played by millions of adults and children from Africa to Antarctica to Asia. By now, wouldn’t you think somebody would have figured out how these damned matches should end?
As Argentina and West Germany on successive evenings catapulted themselves into Sunday’s championship game of the world’s most hotly contested sporting event by virtue of surviving dramatic, yet somewhat gimmicky, bang-bang penalty-kick shootouts, a controversial question resurfaced:
Is this fair?
Perhaps a more pertinent question, particularly with the next World Cup coming to the United States and its yawning public, would be:
How long should soccer players keep playing soccer?
If a match is tied after two 45-minute halves and remains tied after two 15-minute overtimes, what then? Should they “play on,” as England’s coach favors, until somebody scores or dies trying? Or should everybody just go home, get some sleep and start fresh a few days later, which is what they do in some of the English leagues?
Perhaps the players should just keep on doing exactly what they have been doing at the last couple of World Cups--settle some of the most important matches of their lives with a let’s-get-this-thing-over-with series of penalty kicks, during which five men per side take alternating point-blank potshots at the other side’s goalie.
After England became the second team in two nights to play 120 minutes of even-steven soccer without a verdict, only to be expelled from the Cup in one of these Russian Roulette-like shootouts, the losing coach, Bobby Robson, while graciously accepting the fact that rules are rules, gently suggested a return to the way he preferred soccer to be played.
“You play on,” Robson said. “Another quarter of an hour, however long it takes. Because, eventually, somebody will crack.
“Stamina and fighting spirit and fitness, these are virtues that will all come out in the end.”
Robson is a reasonable man, so it sounds reasonable. Rest assured, however, that no World Cup official with any fund-raising ambitions will be willing to push too hard for such a change for the 1994 tournament, particularly with American television executives already balking at the prospect of bidding for the Cup rights.
Besides, these shootouts make for great theater, perfect for TV. And furthermore, soccer people are trying to accommodate the networks by making the game easier to watch--and easier to insert advertisements--by splitting the halves into four quarters. Who in his right mind wants to promote longer soccer matches?
From strictly a spectator’s standpoint, we adore these shoot-outs. It was real edge-of-the-seat stuff, seeing goalkeepers guessing which way to lean and diving headlong for shots. When the heroic Diego Maradona messed up a chip shot against Yugoslavia in an earlier match, nearly costing his country its chance at another championship, he all but wept. When Maradona’s aim was true against Italy, he hugged everybody in sight and called it one of the highlights of his career.
England’s players cried in their dressing room at Stadio Delle Alpi here Wednesday night after being eliminated by West Germany--or, more accurately, after eliminating themselves. Stuart Pearce’s kick struck the diving German goalie in the legs, a frightful bit of bad luck. Chris Waddle’s subsequent kick, toward a net a few steps in front of him, sailed over the goal and all the way into the grandstand, perhaps 50 yards into the distance. That might not have ever happened to him in his life.
“The shootout, it puts a lot of pressure on the individual player,” Robson said. “I’m not sure that’s right.”
Soccer is a sport in which scarcely anyone gets off a free, clear, swift kick. Suddenly, two hours into the drama, both teams take seats in the grass and send forth designated booters, who must make a lonely walk from midfield to the place where the ball is spotted, knowing full well what one mistake might mean.
When two Italians failed in Tuesday’s shootout, in essence they cost Italy what might very well be its only chance to win the World Cup at home over the next 20 to 40 years. When the two Englishmen failed the next night, so ended the bid of a soccer-mad nation that has won the World Cup only once, in 1966. There will always be an England, but there won’t always be chances such as this.
The coach, Robson, trying to size up the situation pragmatically, said: “Football teaches you to be resilient, and if you can’t be that, you should get out of the game. Our players have tears in their eyes in the dressing room, and I’m trying to keep mine from falling. Back home, there must be 60 million people, crying just like us.
“But, all I know is, that’s the third match in succession we’ve had to play the extra half-hour, and I couldn’t have gotten any more out of these players. We can go back home with honor.”
Would they have given England another half-hour if necessary, then another, then another? Yes, gladly. Since 1982, however, World Cup contests have been decided this way--this strange, suspenseful, thrilling, exasperating, terribly abrupt way--by shootout.
Is it a way to put some more sock in soccer, or is it a cheap way of treating a valuable prize?
Robson knows what it is.
“It’s a good way to win if you knock ‘em in,” he said. “It’s a hard way to lose if you don’t.”
