Judging the Beautiful Game: Can soccer be made more interesting?

THERE ARE ample reasons why football is called “the beautiful game”.  It is played by the fittest and quickest people from all corners of the planet. 

Football, or soccer, is a stage for men and women with impossibly snappy reflexes, whirring in insect-like precision.  Football is bio-mechanical poetry, and it demonstrates the best the human body can achieve. 

What’s more, the football field is just the right size and space, just the right dimension for spectators.  We can sit close enough to see every strain and grimace, every dive and struggle.  A top-class soccer match can be a fishbowl of human drama.

But let us put it to a lounge room trial and judgement.  I want to mention two things, m’Lord.  The highest level has more than socially-permitable numbers of tossers.  And it can actually be boring: you hardly see any goals.

The Case against Football

We can’t do too much about the first thing.  Football has great potential to show off individual skill and brilliance, so it will attract the show boats.

It is a blokes’ catwalk, with teams stacked with the male equivalents of supermodels.  Watch them posturing and posing when goals are scored, or strutting in various degrees of undress when the final whistle blows.  Player avarice approaches the Naomi Campbell high water mark – only their agent could only tell you how much money they get before they arise from bed.

Yet we can do something about the second.  If you want to see how football can be improved, have a look at a similar game, a quieter one, albeit one where the players are armed with curve-topped clubs.

Hockey has been called soccer with sticks.  The field is just about the same, and it is played with eleven in a side.  It has a centre forward and a goal keeper.

Yet it doesn’t have the legions of followers.  The fit young players exercising their impossible reflexes for their country still need day jobs, perhaps working in a paint shop like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

The Case for Hockey

Yet hockey is creating a new future for itself, for it has made a gut-swooping change to their rules.

Hockey has simply abandoned the off side rule.  

Yes, a goal can be scored by a forward who spends the game lurking around the goal post.

Forwards can roam all over the field, waiting for a ball like a seagull for a chip.  Full backs have to cover vast new areas of real estate, looking over their shoulders to see who is behind them.

This rule modification has changed the game, and for the better.

One: it has spread the game out along the length of the field.  The whole field of play now goes from back line to back line.

Previously, the action was compacted within the zone on the field between the two opposing full backs at the rear, just like football.  Any opposition player stepping outside the zone was off-side, and had effectively removed himself from the game.  

Two: the rule change makes the game more unpredictable.  If a player can get the ball up the other end, their team can suddenly score.  Goals against the flow of play become more common.

Three:  more goals can be scored.  Or more precisely, a goal can come at any time, from any set play or unexpected mistake.

A Trial of New Rules, Your Worship?

Can you imagine if soccer went the same way?  Can you imagine the increased excitement, the watchability of the game, if a player like Cristiano Ronaldo constantly roamed around the penalty box, pouncing on any ball lobbed up to him?

Gaps would open up as players marking their opposite numbers follow them to the more remote corners of the field.

Hockey hasn’t finished with picking over its rules and flinging away ones that slow down the game or make it boring.  The game of the curved stick is now experimenting with modifying more rules.

Legendary hockey coach and player Ric Charlesworth is one of a group of people who have developed some new possible rules.  They’ve tried out games with just nine a side, and made the goals a metre wider.  The penalty corner is modified so as so the attacking side is more likely to score.

And the Verdict

Still, even if a new magic formula is developed that makes hockey better viewing than Question Time in Parliament, I’m not predicting it will overtake football in popularity.

There is no case, m’Lord.  Football will always have more advantage.  It is easier to play, and kids can strike up a game anywhere in the world.  Hockey needs some expensive investment in specially-crafted sticks, and the best hockey is played on artificial turf.  

However, we don’t have to suffer an hour and a half of scoreless draws when we watch the best football matches in the world.  Changes can be made to make things ... happen.  Like goals.

And consider this:  if you have concerns about your son becoming a Maradona prima-donna, consider putting a curved stick in this hand.

Disclaimer: the author still plays hockey, and is the goalkeeper for the Buccaneers in the Sunshine Coast Masters hockey competition.

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