h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>In ice hockey, late in the game the goalie sometimes is replaced by an extra offensive player in an attempt to get a last minute goal. Does this happen in, uhh, soccer/football? Or if no substitution, can the goalie just take off down the field as an offensive player?<<

The teams can only substitute a limited number of players. I am not sure about the total number, but I think it is something like three players, max, each game. As far as I know, no team has ever taken out their goalie. While it might technically be possible, you just would not do it. What you do see every now and then is the goalie running up to other half of the field, trying to score, especially in free kick situations. In some teams, the goalie is the regular penalty shooter.

If your goalie is sent off due to a red card or injury and you have already used up all substitutions, one of the regular field players can and will be made goalie for the remainder of the game.

Y.

Rugby as a sport is Rugby Football.

If you see RUFC after a team name, that stands for Rugby Union Football Club.

So they're perfectly entitled to call another game football in my mind - we do!

glad for you, but sorry to hear san jose lost the quakes. when will that town grow up?

Amateur soccer is an interesting, exciting game, but the standard in professional soccer has been raised so high that it is virtually impossible to score. Many games end in a nil-all (zero-zero) draw, and many games are decided by a single goal. This make professional football a very boring game to watch, and the results don't accurately reflect the skill of the teams involved.

Got to disagree with you there Gnomon, and I've see many very exciting 0-0 draws.

Arsenal 0 Chelsea 2
Middlesbrough 3 Spurs 3
Aston Villa 0 Man Utd 2
Everton 0 Bolton 4
West Ham 2 Newcastle 4
Fulham 2 Blackburn 1
Wigan 3 Charlton 0
Portsmouth 1 West Brom 0
Man City 4 Birmingham 1

Are last weekends English Premiership results

AC Milan 4 Messina 0
Cagliari 2 Ascoli 1
Chievo 2 Udinese 0
Empoli 1 Fiorentina 1
Palermo 0 Livorno 2
Reggina 0 Inter Milan 4
Sampdoria 1 Roma 1
Siena 2 Parma 2

Last weekends Italian Serie A results

And these are last weekend's Spanish La Liga results.

CD Alaves 0 Valencia 1
Espanyol 2 Real Zaragoza 2
Mallorca 2 Atletico Madrid 2
Racing Santander 1 Malaga 1
Real Madrid 1 Osasuna 1
Sevilla 3 Real Sociedad 2
Villarreal 2 Getafe 1

Only two 1-0 results in all 3 leagues (probably acknowledged as the top 3 leagues in Europe) and no 0-0's at all (althought that's lucky I would admit). It seems scoring is alive and well

there was a post about the germans always winning at the end of the game.
A quick google shows that it appears to be a quote by Lineker...even though i thought i heard a dutch football player say this...


Nevertheless. We are going to win in Germany...We, the dutch are still angry about 1974 when a german striker made a "schwalbe" in the Final! We lost and never got over it! I'm from 1985...and still know it was a fake dive that caused us to lose!


(as always, there is no personal grudge against any german in particular, not even by the most fanatic duchman...there are jokes about schwalbes, 1974 and bicycles and that's it! Germans and Germany are fine people!)

The Hand Ball..

.. this is football. The hand can only touch the ball if it is being retrieved for a free kick, penalty or you are the Goal Keeper..




















... unless you are Maradonna, in which case it becomes the Hand of God..

Goalkeepers can indeed take off down the pitch and join the attack (is it referred to as 'attack' or is it still 'offense' in US football?).

One of the most famous examples was a dramatic last-minute goal scored by a goalkeeper against my own team - the story's well worth a read:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,6903,1229716,00.html

By the way - the underlying reason why most British people call football 'football' and dislike it being referred to as 'soccer' is a class-based one.

When the debate took place in the 19th century about whether football players were allowed to pick the ball up and run with it, the sport split into two factions. Those who didn't - and came to play by the rules laid down by the Football Assocation, under the official name of 'Association Football', and those who did, favouring the rules where one could handle the ball as played at the public school in Rugby, which came to be known as 'Rugby Football'.

Rugby was the sport of the ruling classes, football was the working man's game. The slang abbreviations for the two codes of football come from the English Public Schools (boarding schools where the upper classes generally send their children to be educated) - 'rugby football' and 'association football' came to be referred to as 'rugger' and 'soccer'.

If I meet an Englishman who refers to football as 'soccer', I assume he's a posh rugby-playing t**t and not worthy of my attention in future.

I can't get that link to work

A quick google for:
jimmy glass carlisle plymouth

should sort you out

Thank you

Everybody dies.

No wait, that's opera, isn't it?

Quite a story about the goal scoring goalie, thanks. The gist:

"On the final day of the 1998-99 season Carlisle United needed to beat Plymouth at home or lose the Football League place they had held for 71 years. Five minutes into stoppage time the score was 1-1. Carlisle's goalkeeper, on loan from Swindon, was Jimmy Glass. Carlisle won a corner. Glass ran the length of Brunton Park to score the winner with one second to spare."

A couple of questions:

"Stoppage Time"? Like overtime when the game ends tied?

"Carlisle won a corner" meaning necessarily at the end of the field opposite the Carlisle goalie? So the goalie took off before the corner kick?

*unlurks and rushes into the conversation like a Carlisle goalie*

"Stoppage Time" - a variable length of time (usually 1-4 minutes) added by the referee at the end of each half to account for time spent treating on-pitch injuries, time-wasting by a team defending a lead etc. Always too long for the leading team and never long enough for the losing team.

"Carlisle won a corner" meaning necessarily at the end of the field opposite the Carlisle goalie? So the goalie took off before the corner kick?"

Yep - the goalie ran the entire length of the pitch to score from the corner kick.

I'm not sure if there's an American equivalent - stoppage time is also known as injury time. A football match is supposed to last for 90 minutes, but it's usual for the referee to add on some time at the end if the game has had to be stopped for injured players to receive treatment, or if either of the teams have been conspicuously timewasting.

So what happened at Carlisle is that the 90 minutes were up, they were playing the couple of extra minutes added on for injuries and stoppages, and that's when the goalkeeper scored.

Common practice these days is for the referee to inform the fourth official how much injury time he intends to add, who then displays the number of extra minutes to be played to the crowd using an illuminated signboard.

"If I meet an Englishman who refers to football as 'soccer', I assume he's a posh rugby-playing t**t and not worthy of my attention in future."

Oi!

Sorry Kerr, I'm discriminating on the basis of bitter experience at school, college and university. Welsh, Scottish and Irish fans and players of Oddball are generally fine by me, and I positively warm to most Rugby Leagueists. But when England won the Rugby Union World Cup, my thought while watching it was "they won" rather than "we won" because I just don't feel that the English Rugby Union-playing nation represents me in any way - it's just a blind spot I've developed over the years.

Of course, I have encountered some football fans over the years who are also positively odious, and a few English Rugby Union fans who've been charm personified.

And anyway, you're a girl. I've seen photos.

"By the way - the underlying reason why most British people call football 'football' and dislike it being referred to as 'soccer' is a class-based one. When the debate took place in the 19th century about whether football players were allowed to pick the ball up and run with it, the sport split into two factions. ..."

It turns out we Americans were just following the British Empire here, or at least the Canadian part of it. From Wikipedia:

"The first match generally said to have occurred under English FA (soccer) rules in the USA was a game between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. This is also often considered to be the first US game of college football, in the sense of a game between colleges (although the eventual form of American football would come from rugby, not soccer). Modern American football grew out of a match between McGill University of Montreal, and Harvard University in 1874. At the time, Harvard students are reported to have played the "Boston Game" — a running code — rather than the FA-based kicking games favored by US universities. This made it easy for Harvard to adapt to the rugby-based game played by McGill and the two teams alternated between their respective sets of rules. Within a few years, however, Harvard had both adopted McGill's rugby rules and had persuaded other US university teams to do the same."

So the Canadians made us do it!