Time gentlemen please!

By Rabble Rouser
January 8 2003

Floozies, Boozers, Fezboys and Loozers! It's World Cup year again. Doesn't time fly? Speaking of time and flying, I reckon it's high time (no pun intended) that off-field timekeeping is introduced into Zurich Premiership and European Competition. And I'll tell you why....

I was watching the bog snorkelling match between Sarries and Leeds the other week and when the Tykes had a player in the bin, all of a sudden a lot of their remaining fourteen went down like flies.

I wasn't quite sad enough to start the chronograph to record precisely how much of the ten minutes' game time the Leeds player had to serve reduced, but the game was stopped at least twice and for about a minute and a half each time.

Now, I'm not calling the Tykes players cheats, far from it. For all I know the injuries could have been genuine enough and I will give them the benefit of the doubt. My concern is that even though injury time is added at the end of each half by the referee, the game clock continues to run while players are being seen to by their medical staff.

This isn't fair to the team who should have the benefit of a full ten minutes of advantage over their transgressant opponents.

How can it be rectified? Simple. Take the responsibility of timekeeping away from the on-field officials and give it to someone in the stand, like they do in rugby leauge and many other sports.

If, for whatever reason, there is a break in play when a sin-bin punishment is being served, the referee will still call time off. The difference will be that the GAME clock will be stopped, rather than any down time being added to the end.

The end result is that we all know that when the final hooter goes, that's the end of the game and we've had a full 80 minutes of football.

Futhermore, we'll all sleep safely in our beds at night knowing that sin-bin dwellers will have spent a full ten minutes of game time warming the bench, rather than four minutes of game time and six minutes of treating the walking wounded.

It makes perfect sense for all. And I'll wager that we'll see a lot fewer players going down with knocks when their team is a man short.

It isn't rocket science and it's been used in RL for donkeys years. It's high time rugby union moved into the TWENTIETH century and followed suit.