I must start this by saying that I personally don’t have a problem with penalty shootouts and don’t subscribe to it all just being more about luck than skill.
Those who practice their penalties and are better at them as a team tend to succeed, but I know a lot of people find them a bad way to decide otherwise drawn matches.
I’ve heard so many different options put forward. One that is popular with a lot of people is the idea of playing further extra time and reducing the number of players every few minutes.
But after playing for 120 minutes, players would already be tired and in knockout matches would have to play in a few days’ time. They would be physically devastated and nowhere near their best.
So, there has to be a scenario where the match basically stops and goes into some specific tie-breaker scenario, similar to a penalty shootout. Anything else is just asking way too much of the players.
Having a discussion with my workmates on this topic I had an idea, and those I shared it with have thought it could be quite good. So I thought I’d run it past Roarers.
The idea draws a bit from the penalty method used in ice-hockey, where the attacking player takes the puck further up the rink and is one-on-one with the keeper. In football, with the size of the goals, going one-on-one with the keeper where you know there are no other defenders is too much in the attacker’s favour.
So the change for football is to make it one defender and one keeper against one attacker.
The penalty taker starts with the ball on the halfway line and has to beat a single defender and keeper to score. The moment the defender gets any sort of block in that gets the ball away from the attacker, or if the ball travels backwards, and it’s over. There would also have to be some sort of shot clock to limit the time they had to score, maybe 20 seconds or so.
You basically have to go one-on-one with a defender and get a shot off to try and score. It takes out the luck factor, and just makes it a skilful head-to-head contest.
It wouldn’t necessarily have to take any longer than a penalty shootout, by the time players walk off and the next ones walk up and the referee is satisfied, penalties take just as long.
What do people think? What other ideas do people have that might work to decide games that end level after extra time, that could be acceptable to all those who really hate the penalty shootout?
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