Northampton_Saint wrote:
In pure psychological terms how could it not? Which of these teams is going to enter a shootout in a more positive frame of mind do you think: The one that's dominated the game and should have won comfortably but had the fates conspire against them to rob them of what should already have been their deserved win, or the team that's been outclassed and had to hang on desperately for dear life for 2 hours fearing the inevitable worst but that has somehow escaped? How could that fail to be of benefit to the worse team, I mean seriously - how? Shootouts may or may not favour the lesser team by a significant margin statistically (and I don't know how on earth anyone could fairly correlate the statistics to do so) but at the very, very least they do no favours at all to the better performing team over the 120 minutes and that even in and of itself is just plain not right nor fair. It's like stopping an F1 race 100 yards from the finishing line and then making all the cars finish that last 100 yards starting lined up side-by-side as a drag race. It has nothing to do with the nature of the sport at all, is utterly unfair and makes a mockery of the entire rest of the event leading up to that point.
The way you talk you'd think that Bayern were leading 5-0 but that had been scrapped and the game gone to penalties instead.
The reason that the game went to pens is because the game ended 1-1. I don't dispute whatsoever that Bayern were the better side and we were very lucky to end the game level, but they should have buried some of their chances and not had this problem.
And don't forget that Bayern only qualified by winning a penalty shoot out in the semi, we beat Barcelona to reach the final, they needed the shoot out.
As much as anything else though, shootouts are destroying football as an entertainment at the highest level.
I hate them as a way to decide WC and CL finals, but it's ridiculous to say they are destroying the entertainment.
How many big finals these days are any kind of a spectacle at all? The fact is that most teams, terrified of the career-ending consequences of adventure counting against them, are content to sit back and take no risks for 120 minutes, safe in the knowledge that they have a 50/50 chance of winning the trophy at the end of it whatever, with the comforting and chairman-defusing excuse that "we only lost on penalties so were unlucky" if they don't. I'm sick and tired of being bored rigid by big finals full of 11 men behind the ball tedium now frankly.
The notion that we weren't taking a risk is ridiculous. I don't think we defended particularly well. It was a huge risk surrendering so much possession and territory and I think it's a miracle it paid off.
But it does seem that you're not really condemning penalty shoot outs, you just don't want the wrong teams winning them. I guess you'd prefer it to go to a public vote like American Idol?
Something should be done to force both teams to at least have to try and win these big games, and lord knows penalties aren't it....
Bayern Munich should have done that by actually scoring. It's not down to the UEFA/FIFA to dictate the methods and tactics of sides.
But it has nothing to do with the game or the sport and is a completely artificial adjunct to it.... If you want to artificially have tension and excitement over and above all then why not just scrap the tedious 2 hours altogether and make the teams play "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" or "The Cube" instead? At a football match I want to watch 2 teams playing a game of football and for the result to be played out and won in footballing terms, preferably in as entertaining and enterprising a manner as possible. If I want to see manufactured "tension" and "excitement" then I'll go watch a movie instead.
The only reason it happens is BECAUSE BOTH TEAMS ARE LEVEL AT THE END OF 90 AND 120 MINUTES. It's not something that was introduced to create tension, it was simply introduced to separate the sides after a stalemate.
