Saturday, June 19, 2010

Can I get some goals to go?

The one thing everyone can agree on about the worldcup 2010 is the severe paucity of goals.
The theories doing the rounds are a football thats hard to control and teams being overly defensive since they have but 3 games.
My take on this can be summarized from the goal that was denied to the US in the 85th minute with the score tied 3-2.
The play in question was a setpiece free kick with 3-4 US players in and around the goal.. Now since the replays have been shown a million times , the one thing that stands out is the tight man to man marking by the slovenians. In one glaring example.. there is a Slovenian defender with his arms wrapped completely around Mike Bradley the scrorer of the second goal. Leaving aside for a second the end result, you have to realise that allowing defenders to bear hug attackers is not in anyway going to help produce goals.. For the life of me I can't understand why its even tolerated. Holding someone to prevent them from taking a legitimate shot at the goal is illegal and should be called as such. Once the officials make it clear they wont stand for it thepolayers will fall in line.. and finally we might have a situation where for once the talk about football wont center around the lack of goals.