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

After watching the Portugal/France World Cup semi-final (perhaps the most frustrating game of the tournament), I have a serious suggestion.

Shouldn't there be some kind of defensive equivalent of the offside rule, to stop teams getting an early goal (in this case an extremely soft penalty) and then effectively playing with a goalie and ten defenders for the rest of the match? Or, if not, is it perhaps time to scrap the offside rule?

The way things stand at the moment, the rules of football seem to be angled towards keeping the number of goals scored to a minimum, which is surely a bad thing. We now have the two most negative teams in the semi-finals playing in the final, where's the incentive to watch that?

I suggest you give up on watching footie, Percy "thrills', and try netball if you like high scores....

BTW Congratulations France. Looking forward to the final on sunday against Italy, who played so magnificantly yesterday!

Yay France won! Don't actually know who to support in the final, having friends from both countries

With regard to the original question... Don't they have something like a "make a move" rule in basketball? If I am not mistaken, a team has to make an offensive move after some 30 seconds or so...

But I would not like this sort of thing in football. I would prefer LESS rules rather than more. Who needs this off-side rule? I mean, yes, it is part of the tradition and was meant to achieve something or other. But imagine the fun of it if there were nothing to stop a team from posting one offensive player permanently in front of the other team's goal. THAT would make for some interesting games, I guess.

Yay for France, though. Now, the "small final" on Saturday will be Germany (my home) vs. Portugal. I used to be quite fond of the Portuguese teams in the past but not this time, somehow. So Germany will beat Portugal and France will beat Italy, who was responsible for kicking out Germany. It is some kind of justice

Y.