Sports in general need to make it illegal to dive to draw an undeserved penalty (or actually enforce the existing rules)
Or
They need to decrease the penalty for fighting so it doesn’t result in an ejection.
Sports in general need to make it illegal to dive to draw an undeserved penalty (or actually enforce the existing rules)
This is the nub of it - lack of enforcement of existing rules. People are always clamouring for this new rule or that new rule, when in fact there’s already one in place.
Eg football ⚽
At present, if a goalie has the ball in hand then they have 6 seconds to release it, or it’s meant to be an indirect free kick to the opposition inside the goalie’s team’s 18 yard box. Very dangerous situation to defend, so you’d think it’d be a deterrent. However I can count on 2 fingers the number of times I’ve actually seen it enforced.
So now there’s a change to the rules coming - if they have it in hand for 8 seconds, it’s a corner to the other team.
So, it’s a less punishing punishment, and they have 2 extra seconds’ leeway. It makes absolutely no sense.
You think the referee’s job is to have the game be fair and follow the rules. This is wrong. The referee’s job is to make the game entertaining and as dramatic as possible for the fans.
Once you accept that, a lot of these situations make a lot more sense.
It does seem strange, but there’s some possible rationale behind it. If the rule is not currently being enforced, it could be because refs feel the level of the rule breaking is not proportionate with the level of the punishment. Decreasing the punishment, as well as increasing the severity of the rule breaking required to incur it might induce refs to be more inclined to enforce the punishment.
We’ve seen something similar recently in another type of football. A few years ago, the NRL changed the punishment for minor ruck infringements and defensive offsides in their defensive half from a penalty—which requires the ref to stop the game entirely* and gives an immediate opportunity for a goal kick worth 2 points—to a reset of the tackle count. If that would have been the fifth tackle of their possession (and thus the next one is their last), a ruck infringement resets it to the first. It used to be the case that teams would get away unpunished with all but the most egregious of offences. Now it gets used quite a lot, because the minor offences are met with a comparatively minor punishment.
* as a side note, this should be a goal of all rules and enforcement in all football sports apart from maybe gridiron. And in other similar field sports. Keep the game flowing where possible. It’s a huge problem with rugby union at the top level IMO. That sport is supposed to flow quite freely, but the level of refereeing results in extremely frequent stoppages, which makes for very poor viewing. My experience has been that the game works much better at a lower level where refs let things flow more.
It does seem strange, but there’s some possible rationale behind it. If the rule is not currently being enforced, it could be because refs feel the level of the rule breaking is not proportionate with the level of the punishment. Decreasing the punishment, as well as increasing the severity of the rule breaking required to incur it might induce refs to be more inclined to enforce the punishment.
This is the only plausible explanation. The refs don’t want to turn the game on a keeper wasting a couple of seconds. That said, various timekeeping tasks especially, but Association football in general has always had a sort of impressionistic philosophy for officials, tasking them with keeping the game moving and more or less fair, but I don’t think that system has held up super well in the era of high tech and higher stakes, though I do fear they risk losing something magical about it. American football is the absolute inverse, with a dense and legalistic rulebook and false precision that comes of pretending that (among other impossible tasks) the officials really see where the point of a ball lands under a literal ton of human flesh. That said, there is not the same level of resistance to objective standards and enforcement and rule evolution that you can see on the soccer side.
Sports in general need to make it illegal to dive to draw an undeserved penalty (or actually enforce the existing rules)
Or
They need to decrease the penalty for fighting so it doesn’t result in an ejection.
One or the other.
This is the nub of it - lack of enforcement of existing rules. People are always clamouring for this new rule or that new rule, when in fact there’s already one in place.
Eg football ⚽
At present, if a goalie has the ball in hand then they have 6 seconds to release it, or it’s meant to be an indirect free kick to the opposition inside the goalie’s team’s 18 yard box. Very dangerous situation to defend, so you’d think it’d be a deterrent. However I can count on 2 fingers the number of times I’ve actually seen it enforced.
So now there’s a change to the rules coming - if they have it in hand for 8 seconds, it’s a corner to the other team.
So, it’s a less punishing punishment, and they have 2 extra seconds’ leeway. It makes absolutely no sense.
You think the referee’s job is to have the game be fair and follow the rules. This is wrong. The referee’s job is to make the game entertaining and as dramatic as possible for the fans.
Once you accept that, a lot of these situations make a lot more sense.
It does seem strange, but there’s some possible rationale behind it. If the rule is not currently being enforced, it could be because refs feel the level of the rule breaking is not proportionate with the level of the punishment. Decreasing the punishment, as well as increasing the severity of the rule breaking required to incur it might induce refs to be more inclined to enforce the punishment.
We’ve seen something similar recently in another type of football. A few years ago, the NRL changed the punishment for minor ruck infringements and defensive offsides in their defensive half from a penalty—which requires the ref to stop the game entirely* and gives an immediate opportunity for a goal kick worth 2 points—to a reset of the tackle count. If that would have been the fifth tackle of their possession (and thus the next one is their last), a ruck infringement resets it to the first. It used to be the case that teams would get away unpunished with all but the most egregious of offences. Now it gets used quite a lot, because the minor offences are met with a comparatively minor punishment.
* as a side note, this should be a goal of all rules and enforcement in all football sports apart from maybe gridiron. And in other similar field sports. Keep the game flowing where possible. It’s a huge problem with rugby union at the top level IMO. That sport is supposed to flow quite freely, but the level of refereeing results in extremely frequent stoppages, which makes for very poor viewing. My experience has been that the game works much better at a lower level where refs let things flow more.
This is the only plausible explanation. The refs don’t want to turn the game on a keeper wasting a couple of seconds. That said, various timekeeping tasks especially, but Association football in general has always had a sort of impressionistic philosophy for officials, tasking them with keeping the game moving and more or less fair, but I don’t think that system has held up super well in the era of high tech and higher stakes, though I do fear they risk losing something magical about it. American football is the absolute inverse, with a dense and legalistic rulebook and false precision that comes of pretending that (among other impossible tasks) the officials really see where the point of a ball lands under a literal ton of human flesh. That said, there is not the same level of resistance to objective standards and enforcement and rule evolution that you can see on the soccer side.