922: Being Just Versus Refusing Reality

 On one hand one may wonder how can that difference in earning by gender in soccer be justified by the quality of playing the game. On the other hand, it seems that most, if not all, well known tennis tournaments have the same winning prize money for men and women. If I were having the authority there, I would have made better justice my first priority. For example, I would not let how much it could be taken as suggesting men being better than women in that sport (even though the comparison is only top to top) make me hesitant to make that prize based on actual performance. That is because being just and fair is what I feel the calling for. Other than that, I am not the creator of the world and do not consider it may responsibility to replace reality with something else. I think that many people may not be applying sufficient attention to that line. Although, also to be just, I have always had the feeling that requirements are often unnecessarily reduced on women's versions of sport games and that takes away from women the capability of presenting themselves through the best medium possible for  comparing their performances with men's, and having only three sets for women versus five for men in tennis often occurs to me as one of those things.    

921: Commentating on Women's Soccer Here

I again want to ask, even assuming there is a reason for confusion here, how hard could it be to watch how commentating is done in any of the so many countries were soccer is popular and do like that? So why is the commentating on women's soccer here is unbearable like this? The first priority in commentating is what is going on on the field at the moment, not pushing that to the background and replacing it with other far from the field talk about the game and players.  There is a difference between hearing commentating on the game and watching the game in a public place while you hear two people having conversation related to the game behind you. This difference include even deeper analysis to what is going on on the field if it comes at the cost of lengthy abandonment or distraction from being with the actions in the field at their direct level. And even in the very few occasions, elsewhere, were a commentator allows itself to stray away a little bit from the field, that commentator may immediately interrupt itself with any increase in the significance in playing the game. Here you may even see a player near the penalty area and one step from passing the ball to where there is a scoring potential while the commentator continues its out of the field story as if the audience came in the first place to listen to the talk of that commentator and the game itself is the secondary supportive thing.             

Penalty in Soccer

 Watching how two penalty awards spoiled the most recent game in the current NWSL competition makes me argue against this law in the game again. This all or nothing foul system for violations inside the penalty area does not make sense but people are sticking to it as if they are under a contract to do so. A person who commits any intentional foul can also be excluded from the remaining of the game. After all soccer is not supposed to have any intense physical contact among the players. But that is not practiced. So why is it okay to mess the game with the current penalty law? 

Like I suggested before, the law for violations in the penalty area can require multiple goals by shooting from the penalty mark in order to count as one goal in the score of the game, and the determination for the number of kicks can be left to the referee under some general guidelines and limits. Alternatively, the current penalty law can be applied for only the five minutes, or some other short period, at the end, while for the rest of the time the law would depend on adding up errors in that area until the total level of violations there deserves the penalty kick award. The solution can also include a combination of those two suggestions. 

I of course did not miss how, before those signs we currently see near the end of a game declaring the amount of  additional time, leaving that to the determination of the referee was also treated like a law from the sky. And what about those video reviews which sometimes require even the referee to pause the game and attend to them personally? And imagine how much one in the past could have been ridiculed for suggesting going back in the game if an error was determined after reviewing the video while the game is still being played. So how long this penalty law will continue to mess soccer until it becomes accepted that it is essential to have a better law and probably even more essential than those changes just mentioned?

By the way, the talk about selection for women national soccer team reminds me to point out how, although they might have had good individual skills, the playing of the team in that last world cup, was, frankly speaking, horrible in being unharmonized and more like street soccer and unlike how women soccer clubs I am currently watching here seams to play as team . I do not know how one can avoid blaming the coach for that. The beauty of team playing was the first thing I noticed in women's soccer in that world cup but that was often missed with the US team. My favorite team to win that world cup was England's team (although not a fan of how tight some of their players were wearing their shirts).