vnx205
12th July 2021, 06:06 PM
I can't claim to be an enthusiastic fan of the round ball game. I have watched just one live match at what used to be called Bluetongue Stadium and parts of a few matches on TV.
I did select soccer as a school sport when I was a student at Coffs Harbour High School in the first half of the 1960s. However at that time, schoolboy soccer was either ignored or possibly actively suppressed. Soccer was so far down the pecking order that it wasn't even allocated a sports field. We had to play on the beach. That meant that no play was possible about every second week because it was high tide, so we just ran up and down the sand dunes.
However, even with that limited exposure to the game, it seems to me that the penalty shootout must qualify as the most ridiculous and least fair way to decide an international soccer match.
Soccer is supposed to be a team sport, yet the penalty shootout involves only a handful of players from each side; hardly a team effort.
In answer to those who want to defend the penalty shootout, I say that if you think it is such a good way to decide which is the better team, then perhaps we should skip the preceding 80 minutes of play and decide every match with a penalty shootout. That would save a lot of time. Imagine how quickly we could get through a multi-team competition if every match consisted of just the penalty shootout.
BTW I am not a disgruntled Pom whinging that, "We wuz robbed"
I did select soccer as a school sport when I was a student at Coffs Harbour High School in the first half of the 1960s. However at that time, schoolboy soccer was either ignored or possibly actively suppressed. Soccer was so far down the pecking order that it wasn't even allocated a sports field. We had to play on the beach. That meant that no play was possible about every second week because it was high tide, so we just ran up and down the sand dunes.
However, even with that limited exposure to the game, it seems to me that the penalty shootout must qualify as the most ridiculous and least fair way to decide an international soccer match.
Soccer is supposed to be a team sport, yet the penalty shootout involves only a handful of players from each side; hardly a team effort.
In answer to those who want to defend the penalty shootout, I say that if you think it is such a good way to decide which is the better team, then perhaps we should skip the preceding 80 minutes of play and decide every match with a penalty shootout. That would save a lot of time. Imagine how quickly we could get through a multi-team competition if every match consisted of just the penalty shootout.
BTW I am not a disgruntled Pom whinging that, "We wuz robbed"