Six of the Worst: football’s failed experiments
People are always talking about changing the rules of football, aren’t they? Barely a single day goes by without someone or other opining that the brilliant idea that they’ve had will finallyb democratise and liberate football once and for all, and almost all the time they’re terrible ideas. The good news is that the history of football is littered with bad ideas that have come to be introduced into the game and here, from February 2014, are six of the very worst.
The way that the game is played might have changed, but the rules of football have proved to be remarkably resilient to change over the years. Although there have certainly been significant changes to the game over the course of the last three or four decades or so—the introduction of the backpass rule, for example, or changes to the offside rule to favour attacking players—these tweaks have seldom fundamentally altered the experience of watching a match. But no-one working in football guarantees their future livelihood from everything staying the same in perpetuity, so from time to time some well-meaning soul or other will suggest a refinement to the laws or administrative rules of the game with the intention of refining it for a modern audience.
Much of the time these changes end up in the bin, but every once in a while one a league administrator will have a brainwave which causes him to think that that he might just have thought of something that will completely revolutionise the game or impress some FIFA mandarin or other to such an extent that they convince some poor souls to give it a run out for a few weeks, or sometimes even longer. With this in mind – and bearing in mind that these people still walk amongst us – here are six rule changes that were introduced, considered, and, either after a short amount of time or some years, quietly put back in the drawer marked “failed experiments.”
The Goalkeeper Can Handle The Ball Anywhere In His Own Half Of The Pitch: Here’s a thought. Had any of us been born in the middle of the nineteenth century, the game that we would have known for the majority of our lifetimes would have been very different – almost, but not quite, unrecognisable – from that which we know today. Over the course of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, association football was codifed to make it quite distinctive from most other ball games played in this country at the time, and one of the most distinctive of these differences was one that is perfectly self-evident to any of us that watch the game today – football is, as its name suggests, a game primarily played with the feet.
It was in 1870 that the FA introduced new rules to distinguish goalkeepers from the other players on their team. Rule 8 read that, “The goalkeeper may, within his own half of the field of play, use his hands, but shall not carry the ball.” It took a while, but some goalkeepers soon learned how to work around this rule in order to benefit their teams, and the most notable of these was Leigh Richmond Roose, who played in goal for Stoke City, Everton, Sunderland, Celtic, Huddersfield Town, Aston Villa and Arsenal between 1901 and 1912.
Roose was in his own right an accomplished goalkeeper—he made twenty-four appearances in goal for Wales—but he also gamed the rule about handling the ball in his own half to its maximum efficiency, bouncing the ball up to the half-way line before launching an attack from there. Roose’s tactic was so effective that several clubs complained to the Football Association on the grounds that he was ruining the game as a spectacle, and in the summer of 1912 the laws of the game were changed so that goalkeepers could only handle the ball inside ther own penalty areas.
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