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The Jester’s Quart
July 14, 2006
The Jester’s Quart: A Penalty Kick in the Pants
What a tiresome debate we've
had in the aftermath of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Somehow, an entire tournament
of great soccer has been encapsulated into a few harsh words, a head to the
sternum, and a seemingly endless back-and-forth about it. Obviously you can't
spell Zidane without Zzzzzzz...
The most famous head-butt since the Junkyard Dog hung up his WWF wrestling
tights has obscured the real tragedy, the true outrage of this near-classic
match: the way it ended.
French captain Zidane's wicked, ill-advised head-butt into the chest of Italian
defender Marco Materazzi earned him a red card and an automatic ejection from
what he had indicated would be his final World Cup match. Until his Mike Tyson
moment of sportsmanship in the 110th minute, Zidane (the eerie doppelganger of
Jason Kidd, by the way) had led France within a whisker of breaking the 1-1 tie
on several occasions. Without their unquestioned leader, the team's chances to
win were thrown into doubt.
(Gotta love those crusaders who jumped the gun and labeled the Zidane incident
as a racial attack by Materazzi. Turns out the guy talked smack about the
Frenchy's mother and his sister, which makes it less an international hate crime
and more like a typical day on a New Jersey elementary school playground.)
On the other side of the pitch, the Italians were staggering around, making
short passes and even shorter runs, their energy completely drained. I've seen
quicker reflexes from a zombie in a George Romero film. It was just a matter of
time until they'd make a key mistake, allowing the French to storm through for a
golden offensive opportunity.
The seconds ticked away, and the 120th minute ended with the match deadlocked.
Could the suddenly rudderless French find victory without their field general?
Could the Italians last another overtime without simultaneously collapsing, like
Transylvanians at the end of "The Time Warp?"
With two hours in the books, which team deserved the chance to kiss the ugliest
trophy in international sports?
All of those questions remained unanswered, because the World Cup was decided on
the basis of a skills competition - a cheap gimmick that pathetically punctuated
Sunday's grand game, a match which captivated fans from Berlin to Boston. Italy
won the penalty-kicks shootout, 5-3, proving its players had better blind luck
and speculative ability than their opponents...which means everything at the
craps table, but sure as hell should never determine the winner of the most
popular team sports tournament on Earth.
It's sickening to think that 120 minutes of what's been referred to as "the
ultimate team sport," both for its athletic skill and its lack of selfish
individuality, was decided without a single pass having to be completed or a
single defender playing his position on the pitch. It's insulting to imagine how
this match could have ended - considering the decimated state of both sides in
the second overtime - when you realize the anti-climatic reality of its finale.
It's like M. Night Shyamalan flashing a title card that read "he's a ghost and
they all lived happily ever after..." 15 minutes before the end of "The Sixth
Sense."
Since the first shootout in 1982, there have been 20 World Cup championship
round matches decided on "penalties," including four in this tournament.
Seventeen of them were either tied at one goal apiece or were scoreless entering
the shootout. Before Sunday's final, the two most significant soccer matches to
end with a shootout were the 1994 Final between Brazil and Italy, where the
Azzurri fell 3-2, and the 1999 Women's World Cup Final between the USA and
China, where Brandi Chastain's "Soccer Girls Gone Wild" moment punctuated the
5-4 penalty-kicks victory. Both of the previous finals' shootouts occurred at
the Rose Bowl in Pasadena - an appropriate venue, considering the American
obsession with offense and cookie-cutter synchronicity in our sporting events.
In my book
"Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History," the
overtime shootout was crowned as the single most ill-conceived and retched
invention on a list that included Disco Demolition Night, instant replay abuse
and Hulk Hogan's acting career. I attacked both soccer's penalty-kick and ice
hockey's penalty-shot shootout for many of the same reasons: that they remove
every iota of team play from the game's most critical moment, and that they are
artificial mechanisms put in place to end games prematurely.
The National Hockey League instituted the overtime shootout in its 2005-06
post-lockout regular season after the method had been thoroughly tested in
international play and on minor league levels for years. Commissioner Gary
Bettman's logic was two-fold: the old harangue that fans hate ties, and to
generate the kind of highlights that might trick some of the basketball fans
watching SportsCenter into watching a hockey game for three minutes before they
keep flipping over to the World Series of Darts.
What the shootout ended up doing was distorting the regular-season standings: a
team winning the shootout earned the same number of points (two) as a team
winning 5-on-5 in regulation or 4-on-4 in overtime. The NHL actually did the
impossible: it found a way to further devalue a regular season the majority of
the sports media already reviles as being irrelevant.
Thus, shootout-proficient teams like the New Jersey Devils used the gimmick as a
crutch when they couldn't win a team hockey game. In the Devils' case, their
nine shootout victories elevated them to an Atlantic Division title; the Dallas
Stars won 12 shootouts and won the Pacific Division title, before leaving the
postseason with a first-round whimper. (The way the gimmick warped the standings
was almost as absurd as having a team from Dallas in the "Pacific Division.")
The difference between the NHL and FIFA is that hockey still considers its
championship tournament sacred: I've asked Bettman point-blank if fans will ever
see a shootout in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and he stridently stated that it was
strictly a regular-season invention. (Of course, as the glow puck proved long
ago, hockey's willing to bastardize itself for television; the NHL would end
playoff games with a cock fight if its television partners demanded it.)
FIFA, meanwhile, uses an overtime gimmick to qualify teams for the World Cup,
advance teams through group play, eliminate teams in the championship rounds
and, for the second time in four tournaments, select an overall victor. It
cheapens the entire four-year process to have the trophy handed to an entire
team when it's individuals who actually determine the winner.
Since I placed the shootout at the top of
the 101 worst ideas in sports history, its defenders have vehemently argued
its necessity. It's like when ABC Sports announcer Dave O'Brien lamented during
the France/Italy final that "at some point a match has to end, and a champion
must be determined." What the shootout does is artificially expedite that
process: instead of waiting for one team to win a war of attrition, it lines up
the soldiers in a shooting gallery.
If time, and the well-being of the exhausted players, is the greatest concern,
there are overtime options that can include elements of team play. What about
alternating corner kicks? Go one-for-one for five rounds, like in the shootout,
only this time there are two teams on the field playing offense and defense. One
team's chance ends when the ball is cleared a certain length downfield, or it's
knocked out of play, or into the goalkeeper's hands. (There's a similar
alternative for hockey: each team trades 1-minute, 4-on-3 power plays. It would
be more thrilling, and more like the previous 65 minutes of hockey, than a
shootout will ever be.)
One of the weakest arguments for the shootout is that it's somehow an organic
part of the game - the "but it's just a penalty shot" defense. The PK or PS are
the neutron bomb of penalty calls, and for good reason. They take every ounce of
team defense out of the equation and give the shooter the ultimate advantage for
having his or her scoring chance stolen away illegally - the equivalent of a
defenseless free-throw in basketball. They occur within the context of a play,
and also can be called in overtime. To mandate that the game end with a series
of penalty shots is to ignore why they're so rarely called to begin with.
The other defense I've often received is that the shootout is, above all else,
entertaining. I'm not going to argue its theatrical thrill: I've been in soccer
stadiums and hockey arenas that rocked to their foundations during the fan
frenzy of a shootout. But that's more about finality than any intense drama the
gimmick artificially creates; tell a stadium full of fans that an overtime game
is going to end in under a minute, and see how they react.
What the shootout actually does is drain sports of one of their most addictive
qualities: spontaneity. Every offensive chance in an overtime soccer match feels
do-or-die; no two matches end in exactly the same way, at exactly the same
moment. In a shootout, "when" and "how" are practically afterthoughts - it's
only "who" that remains in question.
How ironic that two of the most cerebral sports in the world find it necessary
to artificially dumb down and homogenize their most vital moments, like a chess
match that begins with every piece off the board except for the two kings.
American football doesn't insult four quarters of team play by having a running
back battle a linebacker at the two-yard line to determine a winner. Major
League Baseball doesn't end its wearisome extra-inning contests with a home run
derby. And while basketball usually ends with an egomaniacal one-on-one battle,
at least there are eight other bodies on the floor playing the game. Soccer and
hockey end their contests with something that looks neither like soccer nor
hockey.
The late Scot Bill Shankly, a soccer manager in the English Football Hall of
Fame, famously borrowed Vince Lombardi's quip that "football is more important
than life and death."
In that sense, penalty kicks are the sports equivalent of euthanasia.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
The Major League Baseball All-Star
Game? Didn't watch it, didn't care. I used to get relied up by
those debates about who did or did not belong on the all-star team, but that
ship has sailed. In fact, allow me to be the first to suggest that any player
added to the all-star team as an injury replacement should not be considered an
all-star at all. On his next baseball card, he should be listed as an
understudy, not a star...
Best Move of the NHL Off-Season:
the Rangers signing Brendan Shanahan from Detroit. A savvy, veteran winger who
can still put up great numbers, but most importantly a guy who's been there
before on a team that for the most part hasn't. The Rag$ have coveted Shanny for
a long time; this is the kind of move that elevates a good team into a
championship contender. I'm guessing Brian Leetch is next, by the way...
Finally...look, I know sportswriters need something to write about, and Lord
knows I've written my fair share of awful prose. But I don't think
I've ever written anything quite as bad as this by Roger Rotter of Foxsports.com.
It's a fantasy football "myths and facts" article that's either for lobotomy
patients or was originally written in 1995. Do people outside of fantasy sports
really think they are the "football version of Dungeon and Dragons?" Does anyone
actually believe that "fantasy football is make-believe football, with players
made of cardboard cutouts that you move around on a board game based on the roll
of a dice."
Sample prose:
"Myth No. 8: A
football draft happens when a gust of wind nearly knocks you off your seat at a
football game, an especially painful fate if you happen to be sitting in frigid
Green Bay in December.
Truth: A fantasy football draft is when
everyone in your league gathers together and picks players for your team before
the NFL season starts on Sept. 7. You can get together and do it in person
(chips and soda are often involved), or you can all get together online and do
it via cyberspace in an online virtual draft room (chips and soda can still be
involved, just not as communally)."
Wow...can I find one of these here "fantasy" games on the internets? And what in tarnation is a cyberspace anyhoo?
Get Greg Wyshynski's new book,
"Glow Pucks & 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History,"
available in stores and online now!
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Published on the web and www.SportsFanMagazine.com since 1997, "The Jester's Quart" is a weekly satirical look at sports, pop culture and why NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is a jackass. Columnist Greg Wyshynski is the Senior Editor for SportsFan Magazine in Washington DC, and the Senior Sports Editor for The Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia. His book "Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History" can be ordered now. Email Wyshynski at jestersquart@hotmail.com.
