Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Orange or off...

Update: Monday 2nd March: The orange card idea has been scrapped. No orange cards but there will trials with 2 extra assistant refs for the goal mouth incidents etc...could be interesting!
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In Italy La Liga weigh up the use of orange cards. Nice idea. Would it work? [Link in Spanish]

"La Liga italiana sopesa aplicar la tarjeta naranja"

FIFA President Blatter thinks being off for 5 or 10 minutes should do the trick. Nice to see football ahead of its time [NOT!...as usual] doing these revolutionary things. The picture of Collina with an orange card is of course 'doctored'. Collina also welcomed the possible introduction of a second ref: in his view, the referees who have already experienced this measure claim that "[they] had more control of what was happening in the area." The final decision will always be with the 'main' referee. (translated from the El Periodico article)

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2 comments:

Paul said...

I think that anything that improves the game whilst not interrupting the flow can be a good thing. One problem though, as demonstrated by both cricket and both codes of rugby, is that when anybody from off the pitch gets involved the game slows down.

Back to the orange card idea, what occurs to me more and more watching football is that too many refs know the laws but don't understand the game. We have gone back to the situation that occurred during the 1998 World Cup where tackles were either fouls and a yellow card or they aren't and therefore a player must be diving.

Span Ows said...

Where's my reply gone? oooer...Maybe my pseudo self moderator deleted it.

All I said was that I'd have a delayed action card. All 4 officials sit and watch the games on video after the game and give post match yellow AND red cards for those offences not seen by the ref etcespecially in cases where the player has obviously cheated...I thought this was great until I realised only about 0.0005% of games are televised! doh!