Adam Hurrey's Top 10 Aborted Footballing Experiments (Part One)

Adam Hurrey's Top 10 Aborted Footballing Experiments (Part One)
11:43, 14 Jun 2017

If you don’t try, you’ll never know. Football has remained admirably open to new ideas throughout the ages - video referees are its latest tentative brainchild - but some imaginative developments have worked better than others. Most have been reduced to curious footnotes in modern football history - here's the first installment of 10 football experiments that never quite caught on... counting down from 10 to five.

10) The 10-yard rule (2000-2005)

In a bid to clamp down on unsavoury scenes of dissent such as Manchester United’s infamous haranguing of Andy D’Urso in 2000, the FA agreed to introduce a rule that would allow a free-kick to be advanced 10 yards forward if the defending team continued to remonstrate.

Anecdotal evidence from referees involved in previous trials suggested that the new rule would have a positive effect, primarily as a deterrent. One official reported that players ran away like scalded cats by the prospect of giving the other team a better free-kick position, and the directive was deemed a success in an FA review at the end of the 2000/01 season. Other referees, though, reported some creative attempts to exploit the new directive.

“Players are clever and they quickly realised that at times the new rule could be turned to their advantage,” said Jeff Winter, who recalled awarding a free-kick right in David Beckham territory. “A Sunderland player deliberately broke from the wall before the free-kick was taken, knowing that the referee would move it forward to the edge of the area [the rule stipulated that the edge of the area was the limit of any advancement] and Beckham would have less space to get the ball up over the wall and down again. He didn’t score.”

By 2005, however, FIFA had presumably had enough of trying to implement the rule worldwide and scrapped it entirely, much to the consternation of beleaguered English officials like Roy Keane’s best mate D’Urso.

9) Kick-ins (Diadora League, 1994/95)

Tinkering with the laws of the game was understandably commonplace in football's formative years around the end of the nineteenth century but, 100 years later, there seemed little scope for improving the technical nuts and bolts. Nonetheless, Sepp Blatter announced that throw-ins would be replaced by kick-ins for the 1994/95 season, with the Belgian and Hungarian second divisions joining the Diadora League (the seventh and eighth tiers of the English pyramid) as its guinea pigs. Blatter seemed confident that the tweak would be a permanent one:

“I am sure that in two years the kick-in will replace the throw-in in the laws of the game and then we will have an even faster game than we have now.”

However, the end result was a little more basic. Long-ball tactics flourished, with each kick-in seen as an opportunity to launch an aerial incursion into the opponent’s penalty area (without an offside flag to worry about) and the experiment was firmly shut down at the end of the season.

Fifteen years later, though, the purist’s purist Arsene Wenger sought to re-open the can of worms. “The rule I would change would be maybe to play throw-ins by foot,” he pondered. “Why not? I think it would make the game quicker. For example at Stoke, for Rory Delap it is like kicking the ball. It is a little bit of an unfair advantage. He is using a strength that is usually not a strength in football.”

8) Referees on the mic (1989)

Referee David Elleray, for the purposes of a 1989 documentary, was fitted with a microphone for a game between Millwall and Arsenal at The Den. Oddly (and thankfully, for entertainment value) nobody told the Arsenal players about the experiment, which led to things like David Rocastle being told to “clear off!”, Elleray’s “don’t want you, go away” to Lee Dixon and, best of all, a helium-voiced Tony Adams calling the Harrow schoolmaster a “f****ing cheat”.

Rugby union has made the miked-up referee a standard feature but even with Sky Sports’ desire for omnipresence it remains an unrepeated football experiment. Footballers will still have the relative privacy of talking behind their hands to each other for a while yet.

7) Golden goals (1993-2004)

The strange resistance to cruel penalty shoot-outs as a way of separating hitherto inseparable opponents led to the introduction of the golden goal in 1993. The intentions were clear it was a way to encourage the natural result of a knockout game without resorting to the lottery of spot-kicks. The very first tournament to be won by this method was the prestigious Auto Windscreens Shield in 1995, with Birmingham the victors over a confused-looking Carlisle:

More high-profile golden goals featured in the finals of Euro ‘96 when Germany’s Oliver Bierhoff saw off the Czechs and at Euro 2000, when David Trezeguet produced the only Golden Goal ever worthy of the name.

What FIFA didn’t quite envisage was the sheer terror brought about by the prospect of conceding a sudden-death goal. Teams often went into their shells in extra time, in a mutually-agreeable stalemate before penalties stepped in to sort it all out. The silver goal, a variation on the theme which gave the win to anyone who led at half-time in extra time, signalled the death knell for this well-intended but ultimately flawed rule, and it was scrapped altogether in 2004.

6) Cameroons kits (2002-2004)

Football has endured brown kits, tangerine-and-graphite kits, even kits with tassles on the front, but Cameroon (in the eyes of FIFA, at least) took it too far.

The ill-fated sleeveless Cameroon kit by Puma
The ill-fated sleeveless Cameroon kit by Puma

Their first brush with the authorities came in 2002, when they went sleeveless in a pre-World Cup friendly against England in Japan. FIFA ordered them to cover up their upper arms for the tournament, and they reluctantly agreed.

Two years later, they were at it again. Whilst not contravening the letter of the law, their revolutionary one-piece landed them a hefty fine and, brilliantly, a six-point deduction in their upcoming 2006 World Cup qualifying group:

FIFA eventually gave back the deducted points, but Cameroon have sensibly toed the sartorial line ever since.

Look out for numbers five to one will be featured on The Sportsman soon.

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