Was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday regards the concept of the flair play league. He thought goals should be worth two points if they were scored from outside of the D, sorry!, area. Great, I thought, more so called 'speculative' efforts from outside of the box then. After this I watched the news for a bit- with all this Burmese struggle for democracy, and Middle Eastern instability, I thought it was high time for bit of Dragons' Den, followed by Gordon Ramsey, followed by the end of IACGMOOH. I synthesised a temporary version of reality that was somewhere between all these intolerable horrors. Then I slept.
Right, where were we? That's right. Football. After lots of careful thinking on the subject of moneyca$h in the game and foreign players I have finally reached the decision on which I base my awesome opinion. Caps, quotas, grassroots investments, all well and good, or even less so. But, you know, like, fuckit, why not just sit back and let it all happen, and let them all get rich. Really, fucking, rich. They are footballers, they are the men who run football, they must deserve it.
A bit later on, once I've finished the filing, and pant kicked this apathy into touch, I'll come back and let you know all about other revolutionary ideas that will shape modern football.
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5 comments:
Not entirely fair to my suggestion as it followed on from your own emphasis on goals as determinants of flair.
In that respect, perhaps a goal should be deducted if it was aesthetically unpleasing. This would mean that all of Bolton's goals would count against them (except Anelka's occasional wonderful daisycutters, laser-guided into the corners of the goal, rather than Kevin Davies' skied horrors, laser-guided into the corners of the stadium)
My other point was that games where a big gun score three times in the first half often produce the most incredibly tedious second period, where the other side goes into damage limitation and the winning side begins thinking of the next match (see Jose Mourinho's Chelsea for masterclass in this)
I personally would widen the notion of flair as I enjoy specifically sweeping counter-attacks, moments of trickery, pin-point passes, backheels and so on. Goals are rarely as satisfying.
A major plus point of the Premier League, with regard to flair, compared to the Championship, is that it gives no encouragement at all to teams that choose to play without flair, ie: they will absolutely not win the title and may struggle to avoid relegation.
In conclusion, if anything, it would be the Championship that should implement a Flair Play system, to try to break apart the current terrible means of attaining success in that division (endurance and consistency), means that leave promoted teams increasingly ill-equipped for the top flight.
Good points, all of them...
Only thing is- you cannot score impressive play- otherwse you have to judge and that would reduce football to the status of figure skating. If it is aesthetiucs you want then ballet would be good. Or you could devise like a caiporeah version of football, which is non-competitive. Goals are entertaining- and they usually come a after a period of competitive dominance in one shape or form.
I could not agree more with your thoughts that it would be better in the Championship though.
I have avoid the pratfall/pitfall of advocating the judging of play because, as you say, it becomes figure skating then. (I have always thought that the Winter Olympics has better events than the Summer Olympics, but worse competition, primarily because of the excess of judged events).
However, to back up a level, we already judge when we decide what teams to watch, something that to me is an aesthetic choice, so that I will always watch Man Utd over watching Portsmouth, etc, because time is a finite resource and I want to use my judgment to attempt to secure the most entertainment for the smallest investment of time. Champions League matchdays with simultaneous broadcasts really bring this into focus, when I sit down to consider the merits of AC Milan vs Shaktar Donetsk or Real Madrid vs Werder Bremen and so on.
Can I say one last thing about goals, and I think you should write a post dealing specifically with goals, is that goals both serve to create drama and to destroy it, and that an actual tussle is sadly becoming rare in the Premier League. I don't have the statistics to hand, but, just from my viewing, it's clear that there are few games with the big guns where the lead actually changes hands these days. The last really great match for drama that I watched was probably a Middlesborough victory over Chelsea in the Prem last year.
That's another topic worthy of looking at - games that offer great technique, like watching Arsenal, but don't contain any drama, like the recent 7-0 drubbing Arsenal gave Slavia Prague. In no sense was it a good match, it was a total mismatch in fact, but the media salivated over 'the performance' yet it was a sterile performance on one level and deeply boring to witness, for it contained no drama.
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