One of the big frustrations today (forgetting the result) was the gamesmanship we saw in abundance again. An away team happy to commit a number of professional fouls, waste time at every throw-in, free kick and goal kick and generally show little interest in playing football as we once loved it.
We saw this in nearly every home game last season and win draw or lose its mightily frustrating and not pretty to watch.
Got me thinking to a twitter post detailing some statistics I had book marked after the Portsmouth game.
Goal kicks
Leeds 4 taking 53 seconds = 13 seconds
Pompey 9 taking 300 seconds = 33.50 seconds
Free kicks
Leeds 19 taking 523 seconds = 27.5 seconds
Pompey 21 taking 667 seconds =31.75 seconds
Throw-ins
Leeds 26 taking 305 seconds = 11.75 seconds
Pompey 22 taking 431 seconds = 19.50 seconds
Corners
Leeds 12 taking 354 seconds = 29.50 seconds
Pompey 0
Total match time 101mins 11 secs
Ball in play 47mins 41
Stoppages 122
The folk that run the game do the bare minimum to deal with this problem.
Referees have a law book that could deal with these issues but they are told how to interpret certain rules and time wasting is certainly dealt with softly. The Pompey goalkeeper was not booked despite taking almost three times longer over goal kicks than Meslier.
I recall the Humphries yellow card today. Booked for time wasting and told to retreat back to the correct place. The player didnt retreat, wasted further time and was told again to retreat. He went back a fraction of what he should have, still took more time before taking the throw-in from the wrong place. Strong refereeing by the letter of the law just says give him a second yellow card and send him off - but this never happens. Games can be ruined by "unnecessary" red cards? I believe that is why referees are leniant on the wasting time.
In cricket you can get penalised for slow over rates. Could teams start to be retrospectively fined for slowing down re-starts?
Rugby league introduced a clock for teams having to restart the game from a drop-out. The 6-second in a keepers hands was once a thing - where did it ever go? Reducing goal kicks to 15 seconds or it turns into an opposition corner?
Just some thoughts sitting here still cheesed off with todays game
Ball in play
posted on 15/9/24
What's more worrying for me is that we have scored just seven goals in five games. If you take out the Portsmouth match, that's one goal a game. You don't win games without scoring, and we ain't doing much of that, even though we dominate in every statistical category.
posted on 15/9/24
Excellent research Kebab. 5 stars.
How much longer before the 49ers panic and sack DF?
posted on 15/9/24
All teams do it including us. We’d see less of it if we could get into the habit of scoring first. But you’re spot on kebab. It’s really annoying. They’ve chosen extra injury time as the ‘solution’ but it doesn’t cover the constant slowing down.
In kids futsal they have a couple of seconds to get the ball back in on throw-ins etc.
There’s a bunch of on-pitch things they could do and post match punishments if there was a desire within the game. Probably the simplest is just to instruct refs to get card happy and then teams would self regulate,
Putting a timer on set pieces as you suggest would be another. Or the more radical one you sometimes hear proposed is the NFL style ‘ball in play’ concept - shortening the official ‘match time’ and stopping the clock when the ball is not in play.
posted on 15/9/24
Great post Kebeb. Thanks👍.
posted on 15/9/24
comment by Batty (U4664)
posted 5 hours, 30 minutes ago
Excellent research Kebab. 5 stars.
How much longer before the 49ers panic and sack DF?
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Cannot understand why you think they would, they are depend very much on having football people telling them what's what. Do you think our current owners have the insight to tell the difference between a good coach and a dud. Who is going to telling them whether he is doing a good job or not, Kinnear? I doubt he would. If not him who. So if we are challenging and everything seems to be going fine then he will be kept in post despite his limitations. We have to be failing desperately for him to go.
posted on 16/9/24
brilliant article Kebab, and totally agree.
can be very frustrating, having said that, we do really need to more clinical and win/finish games off... we can;t totally hide behind this.
City do fine, teams set up at Etihad like this.
United have had a history of managing to break teams down.
at some point, if you want to be a top team, you need to get round this.
but totally agree it needs looking at across the board.
obviously, and before some nut job comes on and says Leeds are no City.. well of course we're not, but a club and team like Leeds, will suffer these tactics at ER. and we need to deal with them
posted on 16/9/24
I read on X yesterday that the Burnley keeper had two spells where he had the ball in his hands over 20 seconds. The allowance is 6 evidently.