I've just come back from El Pub where I watched the final of the European Champion's League. As it turned out, both teams were English - Manchester United and Chelski, but the game was played in Moscow.
What a game! Man U seemed to have the advantage most of the time, and they scored first (Ronaldo), in about the 26th minute. But Chelski pulled back (Lamppost) just before half-time. No more goals in the second half, so it went to extra time. No goals there either, so it went to penalties. And it was 4-4 after the first round of penalties, so it went to sudden-death penalties. I really hate these penalty situations: if a game gets to this stage then it means they are both equally matched and you may as well decide the result by tossing a coin, and save everybody the stress. Or just declare it a draw and saw the cup in half.
So Man U won in the sudden-death bit, and they deserved to, but what a crap way to have to do it.
Spanish Floods
4 days ago
3 comments:
I had a bunch of football hooligans over for the evening, mostly Brits but no one was too excited about either club. The one Blackburn fan in attendance rooted for Man U but most had my attitude: I just wanted to see a good game. I'd say it was a really good game. I was glad to see that Ronaldo wasn't the goat after having such a brilliant season.
I fucking hate penalty kicks. I think they should move the ball back at least three meters to make it less of a sure thing. I said the same thing about just tossing a damn coin if that's how you decide to end a championship match. I kind of liked the shoot-out deal in American soccer which has a little more skill involved. Every time a big game like this is decided on penalties I think tat they will change the rules. It is the very worst thing about the game in my opinion. Second worst: dives. These should be reviewed and flagrant dives should be dealt with by red-carding the player the next game. But what do I know? I'm American.
Firstly, I do not have a foopball gene. However, it occurs to me that making the final destination of the Cup the responsibility of one man is desperately unfair. "OK, Ron. Put the ball in the net in front of all of us, eighty thousand fans and ten million TV viewers or else we go home empty-handed. No pressure."
What's wrong with 'Golden Goal'? I gather that this follows a draw at the end of extra time, and consists of 15 minutes each way until one team gets the ball into the back of the net.
I also don't like penalties. But the golden goal thing doesn't work either - what happens if no-one scores - you follow it up with penalties. In the old days they used to have replays, now that was good, but of course, in those days football was not ruled by the television companies as it is now, so schedules didn't matter. The problem then was that teams could, and did, go to several replays and that, in turn led to fixture congestion.
The honest truth is that there isn't a simple answer. Unfortunately, keef, sharing the cup - they did (for a very short time, I seem to remember, in some competition or other, shared the cup with each time having it for six months, but I can't remember what the competition was - p'raps it was the inter-house football trophy when I was at school. But the problem with that is it is entirely unsatisfactory for the fans - they want their club to win the trophy outright, not share it with someone. I like the idea of moving the penalty spot back a few yards, but I'm not sure how effective it would be - players would quickly learn to specialise in the new penalty kicks. As long as there has to be a winner and there has to be a loser, I fear we are stuck with this particular ending.
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