A Penalty Kick in the Pants

What a tiresome debate we've had in the aftermath of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Somehow, an entire tournament of great soccer has been encapsulated into a few harsh words, a head to the sternum, and a seemingly endless back-and-forth about it. Obviously, you can't spell Zinedine Zidane without zzzzzzz...

The most famous head-butt since the Junkyard Dog hung up his WWF wrestling tights has obscured the real tragedy, the true outrage of this near-classic match: the way it ended.

French captain Zidane's wicked, ill-advised head-butt into the chest of Italian defender Marco Materazzi earned him a red card and an automatic ejection from what he had indicated would be his final World Cup match. Until his Mike Tyson moment of sportsmanship in the 110th minute, Zidane (the eerie doppelganger of Jason Kidd, by the way) had led France within a whisker of breaking the 1-1 tie on several occasions. Without their unquestioned leader, the team's chances to win were thrown into doubt.

(Gotta love those crusaders who jumped the gun and labeled the Zidane incident as a racial attack by Materazzi. Turns out the guy talked smack about the Frenchy's mother and his sister, which makes it less an international hate crime and more like a typical day on a New Jersey elementary school playground.)

On the other side of the pitch, the Italians were staggering around, making short passes and even shorter runs, their energy completely drained. I've seen quicker reflexes from a zombie in a George Romero film. It was just a matter of time until they'd make a key mistake, allowing the French to storm through for a golden offensive opportunity.

The seconds ticked away, and the 120th minute ended with the match deadlocked. Could the suddenly rudderless French find victory without their field general? Could the Italians last another overtime without simultaneously collapsing, like Transylvanians at the end of "The Time Warp?"

With two hours in the books, which team deserved the chance to kiss the ugliest trophy in international sports?

All of those questions remained unanswered, because the World Cup was decided on the basis of a skills competition — a cheap gimmick that pathetically punctuated Sunday's grand game, a match which captivated fans from Berlin to Boston. Italy won the penalty-kicks shootout, 5-3, proving its players had better blind luck and speculative ability than their opponents ... which means everything at the craps table, but sure as hell should never determine the winner of the most popular team sports tournament on Earth.

It's sickening to think that 120 minutes of what's been referred to as "the ultimate team sport," both for its athletic skill and its lack of selfish individuality, was decided without a single pass having to be completed or a single defender playing his position on the pitch. It's insulting to imagine how this match could have ended — considering the decimated state of both sides in the second overtime — when you realize the anti-climatic reality of its finale. It's like M. Night Shyamalan flashing a title card that read "he's a ghost and they all lived happily ever after..." 15 minutes before the end of "The Sixth Sense."

Since the first shootout in 1982, there have been 20 World Cup championship round matches decided on "penalties," including four in this tournament. Seventeen of them were either tied at one goal apiece or were scoreless entering the shootout.

Before Sunday's final, the two most significant soccer matches to end with a shootout were the 1994 Final between Brazil and Italy, where the Azzurri fell 3-2, and the 1999 Women's World Cup Final between the USA and China, where Brandi Chastain's "Soccer Girls Gone Wild" moment punctuated the 5-4 penalty-kicks victory. Both of the previous finals' shootouts occurred at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena - an appropriate venue, considering the American obsession with offense and cookie-cutter synchronicity in our sporting events.

In my book "Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History," the overtime shootout was crowned as the single most ill-conceived and retched invention on a list that included Disco Demolition Night, instant replay abuse and Hulk Hogan's acting career. I attacked both soccer's penalty-kick and ice hockey's penalty-shot shootout for many of the same reasons: that they remove every iota of team play from the game's most critical moment, and that they are artificial mechanisms put in place to end games prematurely.

The National Hockey League instituted the overtime shootout in its 2005-06 post-lockout regular season after the method had been thoroughly tested in international play and on minor league levels for years. Commissioner Gary Bettman's logic was two-fold: the old harangue that fans hate ties, and to generate the kind of highlights that might trick some of the basketball fans watching SportsCenter into watching a hockey game for three minutes before they keep flipping over to the World Series of Darts.

What the shootout ended up doing was distorting the regular-season standings: a team winning the shootout earned the same number of points (two) as a team winning 5-on-5 in regulation or 4-on-4 in overtime. The NHL actually did the impossible: it found a way to further devalue a regular season the majority of the sports media already reviles as being irrelevant.

Thus, shootout-proficient teams like the New Jersey Devils used the gimmick as a crutch when they couldn't win a team hockey game. In the Devils' case, their nine shootout victories elevated them to an Atlantic Division title; the Dallas Stars won 12 shootouts and won the Pacific Division title, before leaving the postseason with a first-round whimper. (The way the gimmick warped the standings was almost as absurd as having a team from Dallas in the "Pacific Division.")

The difference between the NHL and FIFA is that hockey still considers its championship tournament sacred: I've asked Bettman point-blank if fans will ever see a shootout in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and he stridently stated that it was strictly a regular-season invention. (Of course, as the glow puck proved long ago, hockey's willing to bastardize itself for television — the NHL would end playoff games with a cock fight if its television partners demanded it.)

FIFA, meanwhile, uses an overtime gimmick to qualify teams for the World Cup, advance teams through group play, eliminate teams in the championship rounds and, for the second time in four tournaments, select an overall victor. It cheapens the entire four-year process to have the trophy handed to an entire team when it's individuals who actually determine the winner.

Since I placed the shootout at the top of the 101 worst ideas in sports history, its defenders have vehemently argued its necessity. It's like when ABC Sports announcer Dave O'Brien lamented during the France/Italy final that "at some point a match has to end, and a champion must be determined." What the shootout does is artificially expedite that process: instead of waiting for one team to win a war of attrition, it lines up the soldiers in a shooting gallery.

If time, and the well-being of the exhausted players, is the greatest concern, there are overtime options that can include elements of team play. What about alternating corner kicks? Go one-for-one for five rounds, like in the shootout, only this time there are two teams on the field playing offense and defense. One team's chance ends when the ball is cleared a certain length downfield, or it's knocked out of play, or into the goalkeeper's hands. (There's a similar alternative for hockey: each team trades 1-minute, 4-on-3 power plays. It would be more thrilling, and more like the previous 65 minutes of hockey, than a shootout will ever be.)

One of the weakest arguments for the shootout is that it's somehow an organic part of the game — the "but it's just a penalty shot" defense. The PK or PS are the neutron bomb of penalty calls, and for good reason. They take every ounce of team defense out of the equation and give the shooter the ultimate advantage for having his or her scoring chance stolen away illegally — the equivalent of a defenseless free-throw in basketball. They occur within the context of a play, and also can be called in overtime. To mandate that the game end with a series of penalty shots is to ignore why they're so rarely called to begin with.

The other defense I've often received is that the shootout is, above all else, entertaining. I'm not going to argue its theatrical thrill: I've been in soccer stadiums and hockey arenas that rocked to their foundations during the fan frenzy of a shootout. But that's more about finality than any intense drama the gimmick artificially creates; tell a stadium full of fans that an overtime game is going to end in under a minute, and see how they react.

What the shootout actually does is drain sports of one of their most addictive qualities: spontaneity. Every offensive chance in an overtime soccer match feels do-or-die — no two matches end in exactly the same way, at exactly the same moment. In a shootout, "when" and "how" are practically afterthoughts — it's only "who" that remains in question.

How ironic that two of the most cerebral sports in the world find it necessary to artificially dumb down and homogenize their most vital moments, like a chess match that begins with every piece off the board except for the two kings. American football doesn't insult four quarters of team play by having a running back battle a linebacker at the two-yard line to determine a winner. Major League Baseball doesn't end its wearisome extra-inning contests with a home run derby. And while basketball usually ends with an egomaniacal one-on-one battle, at least there are eight other bodies on the floor playing the game. Soccer and hockey end their contests with something that looks neither like soccer nor hockey.

The late Scot Bill Shankly, a soccer manager in the English Football Hall of Fame, famously borrowed Vince Lombardi's quip that "football is more important than life and death."

In that sense, penalty kicks are the sports equivalent of euthanasia.

Random Thoughts

The Major League Baseball All-Star Game? Didn't watch it, didn't care. I used to get relied up by those debates about who did or did not belong on the all-star team, but that ship has sailed. In fact, allow me to be the first to suggest that any player added to the all-star team as an injury replacement should not be considered an all-star at all. On his next baseball card, he should be listed as an understudy, not a star...

Best Move of the NHL Offseason: the Rangers signing Brendan Shanahan from Detroit. A savvy, veteran winger who can still put up great numbers, but most importantly a guy who's been there before on a team that for the most part hasn't. The Rag$ have coveted Shanny for a long time — this is the kind of move that elevates a good team into a championship contender. I'm guessing Brian Leetch is next, by the way...

Finally...look, I know sportswriters need something to write about, and Lord knows I've written my fair share of awful prose. But I don't think I've ever written anything quite as bad as this by Roger Rotter of FOXSports.com. It's a fantasy football "myths and facts" article that's either for lobotomy patients or was originally written in 1995. Do people outside of fantasy sports really think they are the "football version of Dungeon and Dragons?" Does anyone actually believe that "fantasy football is make-believe football, with players made of cardboard cutouts that you move around on a board game based on the roll of a dice?"

Sample prose:

"Myth No. 8: A football draft happens when a gust of wind nearly knocks you off your seat at a football game, an especially painful fate if you happen to be sitting in frigid Green Bay in December.


Truth: A fantasy football draft is when everyone in your league gathers together and picks players for your team before the NFL season starts on Sept. 7. You can get together and do it in person (chips and soda are often involved), or you can all get together online and do it via cyberspace in an online virtual draft room (chips and soda can still be involved, just not as communally)."

Wow ... can I find one of these here "fantasy" games on the internets? And what in tarnation is a cyberspace, anyhoo?

Greg Wyshynski is the Features Editor for SportsFan Magazine in Washington, DC, and the Senior Sports Editor for The Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia. His book is "Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History." His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].