A modest proposal to save football from cheats
(The luck of the Irish: Outflanked again…)
Those who don’t follow football – or soccer – can go away now, if the title alone didn’t keep them from arriving as far as this already. Those who do love the soi-disant ‘beautiful game’ will need no reminders of the Henry Handball Hoopla during the World Cup entry decider between France and Ireland.
Still, here’s the whole affair in one sentence: Henry cheated and France profited from this – and Ireland was able to put another grudge on their already full shelf of historic grudgewear.
What followed this affair was a renewed discussion about refereeing and the pros and cons of using video evidence during matches. In favour of such measures are those who say that football has become such big business and the players so good at all forms of cheating, that those who love and/or play the game deserve these extra measures (and that the game might even need them in order to survive.)
Those who don’t like the idea argue that looking at video evidence would take too much time, would not be conclusive at all times and would also do harm to the idea (or myth) of footbal being a noble and character building sport.
Today, I thought of something that might please both these groups to quite a large extent and that might actually be quite effective in punishing cheats and ending most cheating entirely. At this moment, football has only two real sanctions (the yellow and red cards) and only one way to divide the winning and losing sides: Goals scored & allowed.
We could add a third element to that: Video evidence.
Not in the way proponents of that measure want to use such evidence now, though – but as an added element that would not effect actual playing time. So, you would play the game in real time, the way it is played now but another set of umpires would watch the game like viewers at home do: On television. They would then be able to give penalty points to those players who cheated without the referee noticing this. These points would then be used (with the actual goals scored) to decide which team will be declared winners.
I will gladly leave it to others to flesh out this system but you could do it in any number of ways. You could, for instance, give one ‘cheat point’ for an offence that didn’t get the yellow card it would have deserved and two points for a red card offence. You could give ‘anti-goals’ for each goal that had been scored through an unobserved foul – and I’m sure you could do the same for other offences, like diving, bad tackling, handling the ball, et cetera, et cetera.
You could announce these decisions after the match, or you could do it in two parts: One set of results during the break and the latter directly after the match. You could even have an extra scoreboard, on which these decisions were announced the moment they were made, so that both the players and the public would know what was going on, almost in real time.
I dare say that the game would see a lot less cheating if players knew that getting caught by the camera would actually have real consequences – that is, would cost them games as surely as ‘goals against’ do now. It would also add something extra to the game: Something to talk about during and after the game, while it would not cause any interruption to the flow of play.
If the FIFA and/or UEFA would be interested to use this system I hereby dub ‘A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Football of Poor People in Ireland from Being Burdened by the Evil French’, they are welcome to do so – after they pay the inventor of this system (me, me, me!) a cool million Euros.
Which is, in itself, a quite modest amount.
(Subtle as always…)
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