Some time after Friday’s third G&T, my housemates’ American guest reflected that she really didn’t understand football – or, as she put it, “soccer”. Accustomed to hearing such nonsense from Americans, I failed to inquire about the reasons for her dislike of soccer; if I were to be entirely honest, I probably wouldn’t get it anyways. However, she volunteered an explanation – after I’d stopped talking about football of my own accord: very foolish of her – and her explanation actually took me rather by suprise. A game of football can end in a tie.
It took a while for this to sink in properly with me. I could blame the G&Ts for that, but the novelty of the idea might just as soon be the culprit. Of course a game of football can end in a draw! [Yes, I'll admit it. It also took me a second to figure out what she meant by "a tied game". Tied? What did you tie? This might have been after the fourth G&T.] Football games have been ending in draws since the beginning of time – by my count, the beginning of time where football is concerned is sometime in the mid-eighties, but I hear that football games have been known to end in draws as early as the 1960′s – and they will continue to end in draws. Sometimes two teams are evenly matched and all that jazz. Or sometimes two teams aren’t actually evenly matched, but one of the teams has all the finishing ability of a drunk fifty-year-old [... from what I hear]. And if you’re intent on waiting for someone to score a goal, you can wait until the cows come home – and the players can’t actually run any longer – when it comes to football. 200-minute matches, anyone? Wouldn’t that be fun to watch? But, the visitor countered – though not quite willing to concede the point that no one can keep playing very watchable football for that long, even if they might be able to move about the pitch at an unsteady trot – what about shoot-outs?
Shoot-outs? Shoot-outs? In half of the league games, every week? As a lover of Italian football, I was naturally appalled. Uncharacteristically, words concerning “the aesthetic of the game” might have come out of my mouth. And besides, what’s wrong with a draw? It’s not like the league title will go undecided because of a few draws, is it? Well, the visitor explained patiently, that’s not the point. The point, as far as she was concerned, is that either you win, or you lose. You don’t draw. Why did you just run around that green field for 90 minutes if you were going to draw by the end of it? I fumbled, contemplating the wall and the folded-up Sun [oh, Ronaldo, you stupid boy] and finally said that a draw is a result in its own right. I mentioned how the one point you get from a draw can make all the difference in the world; I explained how exciting it can be to watch two teams give it their all and still be evenly matched; hell, I even dragged out the old cliché about the beauty of the nil-nil [nah, I don't really think so either]. I might also have made a few slightly generalising guesses about American mentality, which may or may not have been very ill-advised. And I was met with a blank stare and a question: “What other sports can end in draws?”
Admittedly, I am no sports expert. I have only the barest grasp of the rules of, say, baseball and frankly, I haven’t got a clue about even the basics of ice hockey. Well, I am told, if other sports are tied by the end of normal playing time, they go to sudden death [... like Golden Goal? said I, not particularly wishing for the reinstatement of that particular practice] or shoot-outs. In any given game. Everyone at the table – football fans all – looked at each other and thought about it very hard, and then admitted that they couldn’t think of a single other sport that ever ended in a draw. And conversation drifted off to other, more fertile domains, such as the garage sale that Spurs appear to be having and the obligatory “Your team couldn’t even beat Arsenal!” comments. To be entirely honest, I doubt that most of the table even remember the conversation – and yet, this morning I woke up and had but one thought. “Chess!”
No, not the musical, delightful though it may be. The game. The metaphor, even. How many games aren’t really, if you’re going to be dragging the metaphors out of the morgue [in the case of chess, you'd probably even be digging it out of the grave], a game of chess? And they draw at chess all the time. I feel strangely vindicated, having thought of this.
[In the interest of full disclosure, I should perhaps let you know that the visitor almost conceded the point. After taking note of the fact that chess isn't an "athletic sport". But I hear tell that many athletic sports are all about where your head's at, anyways.]
July 15, 2008 at 12:19 am |
There used to be loads of American sports that ended in ties, but they’ve undergone rule changes in the last … decade or so? I think college and professional football used to be allowed to end in draws, and so was ice hockey. Not no longer, though.
July 15, 2008 at 12:07 pm |
So it isn’t necessarily entrenched in American mentality that a winner and a loser must be found, even if the rules have been altered relatively recently? Do you know why these changes were made? Was it simply deemed that the sport would benefit from more definitely positive or negative results [though I think that a draw can be a positive result in many cases]?
July 15, 2008 at 3:15 pm |
I’m pretty sure the hockey change came as part of their effort to get more attention on the league — they were having huge attendance and TV viewership problems, so the NHL made a lot of change to make the game more attacking and offensive.
American football I’m not sure. Both college and professional football here are GIANT businesses, so I assume there was probably a financial component, but I can’t point to any confirmation of that.
July 30, 2008 at 7:39 pm |
Great post, and I’m glad to have found your blog (thanks, Roswitha).
I’m an American and a fan of draws in soccer, but I think I can understand the “American” perspective on this. Appreciating the aesthetics of the draw involves appreciating the slog, the long march, the letdown. It means leaving the immediate moment and keeping the context of the whole season in view. The draw may be a just result on many occasions, but it entails a certain lack of resolution: the game raises a conflict and then refuses to settle it. A movie that ended in the movie equivalent of a draw would be very unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser.
And the thing about an extra-time period is that it’s exciting. It raises the stakes and, since someone is going home a winner and someone a loser, it makes every little action important. The bleary mid-season match between two middling teams suddenly feels like a final. I realized something like this during Euro 2008, when everyone (including me) was complaining about penalty shootouts…penalty shootouts are terrible in so many ways, but Christ can they get your pulse racing.
And since getting your pulse racing is part of the point of sports, I can’t make myself feel too judgmental about my fellow Americans’ lack of patience for draws. Actually, I think it’s probably the case that American sports are engineered more to guarantee excitement and European sports more to guarantee fairness—at least in theory—and neither approach really seems wrong to me.
That said, I think a lot of those objections would evaporate if more Americans understood the points system, which means a draw can be a tactical accomplishment, and the ways in which draws can be exciting—for instance, it’s easier for a small team to draw with a big team than to beat them, so having draws allows for more romantic upsets. The next time you hear this complaint from an American, explain the triumph of Birmingham holding Man Utd scoreless before their home fans in the dead of winter, and you might touch a vestigial nerve that will make her see your point.
Sorry for the endless (and actually somewhat drawn) comment.
July 31, 2008 at 8:15 pm |
Martha’s comment that the reason for introducing overtime in American football may be financial is interesting. In Gaelic football and hurling, there is often the suspicion that the GAA (the governing body for both sports) actually encourages draws because of the revenue boost that a replay would bring (bear in mind that the very biggest games can attract 80,000 spectators). It’s almost reached the level of urban myth that a referee will blow for full-time strangely early if the sides are level, or might just play beyond the announced duration of stoppage time in a close game to see if the trailing team can’t square things up. All completely scurrilous, of course…
August 5, 2008 at 2:46 pm |
Brian – thanks for your comment! I do think you raise an interesting and completely valid point, and I’m perfectly willing to accept that I might be a bit limited in failing so utterly to wrap my mind the idea of forcing a win-or-lose result out of a drawn game. While the game does have a narrative structure of its own – and while the draw does feel rather like The Empire Strikes Back must have felt in 1980 in that context – I do think that the serial nature of the football season is just as pervasive. Without quite comparing a football season to the works of Wilkie Collins, I think that the same basic element does play a role – not just in the excitement of one game, but in the mechanisms that enable you to follow just one team for an entire season. Which is not to say that the same thing isn’t at play in sports where you can’t draw a game, but the “make ‘em wait” element seems all the stronger when you can. But I should stop that line of thought before it becomes completely unsupportable by any kind of logic …
Fredorrarci – I admit that I know next to nothing about either hurling [I believe that I once watched half a match or so] or Gaelic football, but that’s a very interesting. Are all games that end in draws replayed, or just the important ones? And are there no tie-breakers? I suppose that it would be a bit problematic if true, but being completely ignorant on the matter I just think it sounds like the last few minutes of a game could be just as exciting as a shoot-out might make it …
August 8, 2008 at 12:23 am |
The GAA have cunningly organised it so that games in the early round of the Championship cannot go to extra-time (they can do later on). If a game ends all-square, it goes to a replay – if this is level, another replay ensues and so on until a winner is found.
In Gaelic games, the League is the unimportant pre-season tournament, whereas the Championship (a knockout competition) is the biggie. Drawn games in the League don’t go to a replay (2 points for a win, 1 for a draw);in the Championship there can theoretically be an infinite number of replays (though not even the GAA have been able to pull that one off yet).