Substitution question...

[Jimbeam3678]

can't believe no one has mentioned the obvious thing , it helps break the game up, calms the crowd done etc, if the winning team is under the cosh it give them time to sort there ship out as it where

 

[Lord_Kokain]

can't believe no one has mentioned the obvious thing , it helps break the game up, calms the crowd done etc, if the winning team is under the cosh it give them time to sort there ship out as it where

True, you beat me to it!

Its fairly well known factor in basketball where if a team is gets to be dominating and the other requests a short break, there are decent chances that the dominating one would lose momentum after it. Subs in football arent as significant but they have similar implications.

 

[HangTime]

I remember when sky first started televising games and showing all their various stats. At that time the ball was usually in play for somewhere around 60 minutes. Always struck me then that the best way to stamp out timewasting and arguments over how much stoppage time to play would be to just play for 60 minutes and have a timekeeper who stopped the clock whenever the ball leaves play.

I used to think along similar lines, however the problem with that approach is that the TV stations probably wouldn't be too happy, as it'd make the length of matches even harder to predict. Currently including HT a football match typically lasts around 110-115mins or thereabouts. I reckon in some niggly matches with physical teams, a fussy ref and a lot of longballs/offside traps, 60min of playtime could end up lasting 2hrs+ including HT.

It could also annoy the purists, and would mess up the continuity of stats. Football has been a game of 90mins for a long time, I mean you'd look at a game, see someone scored in the 32nd minute and think it was in the first half. It could cause problems for gambling in terms "first goal after x mins" setups, and you'd also need to change the infrastructure in terms of implementing timers for the match officials which would obviously need to be linked in to the TV stations, stadium clock etc.

In principle I think 2 30min 'in play' halves would be fine, but it it's not something which could be implemented overnight and there would be a lot of things to take into consideration.