World Cup: Those rules suck, have some new ones

[womzilla]

I'm surprised by the enthusiasm with which the World Cup has been greeted by the traders in my office. (My desk is smack-dab in the middle of our New York trading floor--fixed-income and convertables to my west, high-touch and low-touch stock traders to my east, in a single room which stretches about 25 feet x 150 feet. There are five large TV screens throughout the floor, and all of them are tuned in when a game is on.) So I ended up caught in the excitement during the overtime finish of the Ghana-Uruguay game, and let me tell you, those rules are simply broken. Uruguay flagrantly cheated itself to victory.

The game was tied at the end of regulation, so the game was extended another 30 minutes of extra time. Neither team managed to score during the first 29 minutes, when the ball went out of bounds off a Uruguay player. Ghana inbounded the ball near the Uruguay goal, and a ferocious back-and-forth which lasted about eight seconds with the ball moving caroming among all of the players in the entire world. The Uruguay goal keeper got pulled forward by the action, and a Ghanese player kicked the ball at approximately three-quarters the speed of light straight into the goal, straight at a Uruguayan defender (Suarez) who was standing behind the goal line. Suarez did what any sane person would do if a deadly object was coming straight at his face: he punched the ball away.

(You can see all of this in slo-mo on this page at the Huffington Post.)

Of course, in world football, punching the ball violates the absolute most important rule of the game. Suarez cheated to stop Ghana from getting the goal and certainly winning the game. (Even in the most Hollywoodized film ever, there's no way Uruguay could have scored a catchup goal in the two or three seconds of time remaining in the game.)

Any good game designer knows that players will take the actions that the game rewards. The current penalty structure for deliberate handling is not sufficient, because the worst that can happen to the team that steals a goal by cheating is that they might lose the goal anyway on a penalty kick. Okay, they also lose the player; Suarez was immediately ejected from the game. But that didn't matter--the game was already over. And Ghana got its penalty kick, but penalty kicks go astray--and this one did. In effect, Suarez broke the most important rule of football and paid no cost; the worst that could have happened was that Ghana would have managed to score the goal that they had already scored, and the best that could happen was that Uruguay would get to win the game on the post-game shootout. (Which they did.)

So it's completely unsurprising that Suarez did what he did.

This strikes me as a situation where massive overkill is the only appropriate penalty. To use the phrasing from the FIFA Laws of the Game, I would propose that if a player "den[ies] the opposing team a goal or an obvious goalscoring opportunity
by deliberately handling the ball", the referee should have the ability to

1. eject the offending player


2. give the offended team a penalty kick


3. and award the goal as if the offense had not occurred.

Yes, this is nuking from orbit. But the current rules are a disgrace to game design.

As a side matter, I was trying to think of situtations in other professional sports where a scoring action could be awarded to a team in response to a offense by the other side. All I could think of for certain was that it's possible in baseball, though difficult, to score on a balk. supergee correctly remembered that in basketball, a call of goaltending awards the offended team a full basket plus possession of the ball, which seems about right. I know that hockey has an incredibly elaborate set of potential penalties available to the referees, including ejecting a player for 20 games (!), but I don't know if a goal can be awarded as a penalty. (Goals in hockey are almost as rare as in world football.) Anything else?

ETA: I was wrong; defensive goaltending in basketball does *not* result in the offense getting points plus possession, just points. Which means that a player has a reason to goaltend if a) he is certain that the basket will score, b) he has any hope that goaltending might not get called, and c) the penalty of an individual or team foul is unimportant (e.g., it's likely to be the last play of the game). This is pretty much exactly the same problem as in the Ghana match yesterday.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I think it's pretty clear from the replay that Suarez blocked the ball right at the line. I don't know the FIFA rules well enough to know how much of the ball has to cross the line to count as a goal, but I have no particular reason to believe the referees were wrong on this.

That a point I meant to make in the main post: there's been a lot of bad, or at least questionable, refereeing in this World Cup. In this case, though, it is the rules themselves which are broken, not any individual call.

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

I think you're right about Suarez--the ball had not crossed completely over the goal line. If it had done so, it would be a goal regardless of Suarez's hands. (The same rule applies for an out-of-bounds ruling, BTW--the ball must be 100% over the line to count as out.)

So yes, the rule was correctly applied in this case, but it's a bad rule. Without Suarez, it's 100% certain that Ghana scores; with Suarez and a PK, it's about 70% likely that Ghana scores. Ghana should not be put at such a disadvantage by a deliberate breaking of the rules.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Note that the fact that Suarez was given an immediate red card indicates that the referees agree that it was a *deliberate* offense. (Handling the ball unintentionally is not an ejection offense.)

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Watching the World Cup and trying to get up on the traditions of association football, it seems clear that the referee has plenary and arbitrary power far in excess of any major American pro/college sport. Nothing can block the ref -- not a clock, not instant replay, not any appeal, not any other official. And the single ref is solely responsible for calls across a large field of play. And because the ref is plenary and arbitrary with a limited view, the play of the game is subject to unpredictable unfairness. This appears to be inherent in association football.

I.e., you expect, in the course of play, to be screwed; to benefit by the other team being screwed; and fairly often, to have victory be the result of being screwed or screwing.

So I do not think that the reffing has been unusual. It is built into the expectations that there will be bad and questionable calls.

You or I or any competent game designer would do things differently (e.g. moving in the direction of American football's multiple refs and call reviewing) -- but that would be changing the character of the game, like deciding that Batman didn't have a sidekick Robin. And it's not clear that the most popular sport in the world would benefit from have its character changed.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that there has been more discussion of bad calls this year in World Cups past, even by fans of teams which have benefitted from them. But that could just be a selection bias on my side. I think no one is happy at bad calls, even when they like the outcome.