Note To Gareth Southgate

[andy-hughes]

Don't give penalties to young players - you couldn't handle it, neither can they!

[highbury57]

Or use the golden goal. Decisive and determinate.

[bobbinwales]

Golden goal didnt really work though as teams took no chances and usually just played out the time. Mind you extra times usualy like that

[Ken4155]

Do you mean a "Golden Goal" Danny? Hasn't that been tried?
Highbury, so the coaches decide to bring off their least effective players each 7 minutes of extra time. Then what happens if no goals are scored, even when both sides are down to 7 players (for the last 2 mins).

[highbury57]

What’s the objection to gradually reducing the number of players on each team?

[highbury57]

Unlikely that on a full size pitch with only 8 a side that you won’t get a goal. I have played- years ago!-and it always worked in training practices.

[Ken4155]

Always the case that when we are knocked out of tournaments on penalties, some question the fairness of this particular method.

[highbury57]

So if there’s questioning try something else. Be radical!

[Ken4155]

Unlikely, maybe, but there is no guarantee a goal will be scored and you end up having to decide the tie somehow. Why are penalty shoot-outs deemed to be unsatisfactory?

[dannyk13]

Bob, cut extra time to seven minutes each half and if no goal is scored then play another period until a goal is scored.

[highbury57]

Because it is artificially extracting one element of the game to make it exciting for television and to increase the drama. Why not take corners and try to score directly without any other players present? Because it isn’t exciting enough. It’s still an element of the game and corners are more common than penalties.

[anneasquith]

IF England had won on penalties last night, would you be having this conversation ( post)?

[dannyk13]

The other alternative is to go back to re-plays.

[Canary42]

/// Why are penalty shoot-outs deemed to be unsatisfactory? ///

'Cos we lost.

[dannyk13]

Highbury, not a bad idea.They have penalty corners in hockey.

[Ken4155]

Or we could just teach our players how to take penalties? Get some of the country's finest exponents of the art, and get them to spend time with the team, one day a week leading up to any tournaments, doing nothing but taking penalties.

[dannyk13]

Ken it does not matter how many times you practice penalties.It all depends on taking one penalty under extreme pressure.

[jno]

I have no affiliation to England but I've always thought penalties an unsatisfactory way to measure one team against another. Mainly I think because it reduces a team sport to one of individuals, more like cricket than football.

Not that cricket manages these things any better, England's cricket world cup victory will always have an asterisk next to it in my book.

*won on boundary countback

[Ken4155]

It is still the fairest method of settling a tied game, Danny. In my most humble of opinions, of course. And we would all agree on that had we won.

[Ellipsis]

The problem is built in to football. It's too easy for the result between two well-matched sides to be a draw.

It's much rarer in other sports (e.g. rugby) to find a draw, and in many sports (e.g. tennis) it's impossible.

[Khandro]

Danny //Do away with the penalty shoot out and replace it with playing extra time until a goal is scored.//

That sounds gruesome, and could turn into something like those
dance marathons, which was an an American phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s, were human endurance contests in which couples danced almost non-stop for hundreds of hours, competing for prize money. :0)

But more to the point; the sheer incomprehensibility of, at perhaps the most important moment in English football history. to put on a 19 year old rookie who had never taken a penalty shoot-out in his life before, against arguably the best goalkeeper in the world. :0(