Ye olde East Stand

[Wingly]

The beautiful game. The World Game. Soccer. Football. It's got a lot of names, and now I'm opening up our very own pub to discuss this glorious game.



Welcome to
Ye olde East Stand



The ingrediants of football:
1 pitch (with goal and chalk lines)
22 players
1 referee
2 Assistant referees
1 Fourth official
2 angry managers
Thousands upon thousands of supporters, screaming and chanting
1 ball

Winning, loosing, drawing:
On each side of the pitch stands the goal. You need to put the ball in the oppositions goal more times than they put it in yours. If you win, you get three points, if you draw both teams get one each, and if you loose, you should go home embarrased, you tit.

Exeptions to this is cups, where if you draw, you go to extra time, and if it's still level you go to penalty kick-out until someone wins.

The Offside Rule:

Many people have problems with understanding how it works. If you're caught offside the opposite team gets a free kick. In this example we'll use x for the attacking player. And o for the last defender of the opposite team.

      x
      o

If someone pass you (x) the ball from behind you in this posistion you're not offside.

   x
    o

If the same happens here, you're offside. And remember, if you're on your own half of the pitch there's no offside, and that you can also come from an offside position. If you then get the ball, you're still offside.

The cards:
Yellow: You get a yellow for wasting too much time (holding out for a preferred result), unsporting behaviour, like kicking the ball as far away as you can get it when there's a freekick. You also get it for mindless, but not horrible tackles.

Two yellows = red card (see Red)

Red: If you get one of these, you can get a early shower, and a lot of anger from the manager. You're sent off. You can't play. The team can't put someone else on. They're left with one less player on the pitch. This card you can get from getting a second yellow card, and also from horrible tackles where you can cause injury, and actually might be trying to cause one.

Leagues:
I'm going to talk mostly about the English Premier League (and lower divisions), as it's what I'm most used to, and know most about. But I will mention the big difference between Major League Soccer, and all other countries (as far as my knowledge goes).

In the MLS there's no promotions or relegations. If your team is utter shite, you don't go to a lower division, with a team in the division below, unlike other leagues.

For instance. If you finish bottom three in the Premier League, the next season you're in the Coca-Cola Championship. The top two of the CCC goes up directly, while the next four teams have a play-off to find out who goes up. The same concept continues all through the twenty four tiers of the English football pyramid.

Discussion:
Now here comes the fun bit about the thread. You can discuss. You can tell other people who you support, and how you came to support them. You can speculate in who gets fired next of the managers, talk about the world cup, post stories about footballers doing crazy stuff, silly pictures and youtubes.

But please, I'd like to keep the Terry/Mutu/Bridge/Gudjohnson/Mystery Man/French chick-talk to a minimum.

[Mig]

Nice explanation of the offside rule there.

I'm curious to hear the opinions on John Terry's England captaincy. I really quite strongly dislike Chelsea, and after what JT did there should've been no question about his immediate standing down.. he should 'do a Tiger Woods' as I've seen several papers putting it. To be honest, Wayne Rooney would make a far better national captain anyway, though Stevie G and Lamps are also good canditates.. despite my dislike for the latter.

Four main hopes for this year - Spain to win the world cup (finally) sits firmly top, then Real Madrid to reclaim our Liga top spot. I'm rooting for Wolves to stay in the Premier League and for Arsenal to finally dust out their trophy cabinet with either a Premier League or Champions League win. But the nature of football is such that it is very likely neither will actually happen.

Just to add something else, the BBC's Sports Quotes of the Week page sometimes has a few golden quotes. Anything said by Mick McCarthy is usually funnier than how you might imagine the Lord's flatulence to sound.

[Wingly]

I think Rooney would make a good captain, he might not be the most clever guy around, but he knows what he's doing on a football pitch. But I think it will probably be Gerrard. But then again. Who knows?

And none of those will happen, except maybe the Wolves-thing. Real Madrid is stupid rich, and buys players left and right, and that's why they won't win. There's too many primadonnas that hasn't played together for very long, so I think they're in danger of not playing as a team. And thank goodness this is football. We can predict and figure stuff out as much as we like, and it's never going to end up like it. I'd also like Arsenal to win the league. They're a lot of fun to watch play football, and with Manchester United and Chelsea as the main condenders I'd rather have Arsenal.

And Mick McCarthy is the Lord's flatulence.

[Mig]

Haha, he's an average manager but his, umm.. unique approach is refreshing at least.

Certainly, Real's chances this season aren't amazing thanks to the whole clash of the egos thing. But if they manage to learn play together in the same way the previous Galacticos did over the coming seasons, they'll be more than a match for Barca.

And Spain WILL win the world cup.

[Wingly]

Yeah, he's unique. But he's only trying to make himself into a person to remember. Like Alex Ferguson always looks drunk, and Arsene Wenger's french teenagers. And Phil Brown's orange skin color.

Yeah, if the players get to play together a couple of seasons, and they cut back the spending, not always needing the "next big thing", they'll be unbeatable. Except for the cups and those crazy good lower league teams. :p

Well, they're more likely to win than Norway. We're not even in it.

[Wingly]

Dear everyone that thinks Hull is going down.

No, we ain't

Love,
Hull.

Friggin brilliant game. Superb goals, great points. 14th spot now. I'm starting to feel optimistic.

[BZero]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/foot...ca/8502851.stm

WHAT?! They just fired the entire national team?

XD

Just imagine if that happened in, say, England. Like when they weren't able to qualify for the Euro 2008 championship, for example, the president of the FA (which apparently is Prince William) calls up each and every player and tells them they're fired. This is basically what actually happened in Benin. Why can't things like this happen in countries that... you know, people care about? =(

I sometimes wish this would happen in Norway, but then, who would we replace everyone with?

[Wingly]

I'd play striker, you're a winger. Now we just need the rest of the team.

And also. That probably wasn't a good idea. "Oh dear. We didn't do too well. Let's fire our best players, and bring on the "OH GOOD GOD, EXCREMENTS ARE HITTING THE FAN!"-team".

We also should get ourselves to Norway - Portogal, as super striker Carew makes Ronaldo hang his head in shame.

[BZero]

And now, a recent photograph from a match of that strange variation of handball they like to play in America:

[BZero]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._while_playing

1908 - Frank Levick - 26 - Sheffield United - Death caused by blocking a shot. The ball struck him below the waist, forcing his testicles to become lodged in his abdomen. This caused internal bleeding of the bowel and a subsequent cardiac arrest.[6]

!!!!!!!!!!! O_O

[Wingly]

Pfft. Nothing beats Bert Trautmann, Manchester City-goalkeeper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Trautmann

In the FA Cup final of 1956, he got hit in the neck by a player in a challenge. No substitutions possible, so he got up, played for the last 15 minutes of the match, making crucial saves along the way to give Man City the cup.

He went to bed that night, and the pain wasn't gone when he woke up. He went to a doctor who said it was nothing serious. But a x-ray and a second opinion later, turns out he had a broken neck.

An X-ray revealed he had dislocated five vertebrae in his neck, the second of which was cracked in two.[36][37] The third vertebra had wedged against the second, preventing further damage which could have cost Trautmann his life.[37]

[BZero]

Yeah, not much can beat that in terms of badassery, but at least he didn't die from testicles in the abdomen. >_<

Also:

5 February 1936 - Jimmy Thorpe - 22 - Sunderland - A diabetic, the goalkeeper collapsed into a coma from which he never recovered, attributed to the rough treatment he received on the pitch in a game against Chelsea. His death lead to the rule that players were no longer able to kick the ball out of the goalkeeper's arms.[13]

So before this, players could just kick the ball right out the hands of the goalkeeper and get away with it?

1999 - Ferenc Biro - 15 - Nirajul Miercurea-Nir. - Died after a crossbar fell on his head during a warmup.[22]

Wait, what? How did this happen? The goal just randomly collapsed during warmup, while he happened to be standing right under the crossbar? I assume he was a goalkeeper, but still; how unlucky can you be?

Anyway, I just read through that whole list. A lot of deaths in the 2000s compared to earlier decades.

[Wingly]

Old Nigerian players

Apparently a player that retired two years ago, in his mid-thirties was really mid-fifties. And Jay-Jay Okocha was really 45, not 35 when he played for Hull.

I wonder how old Olofinjana really is, and he's played for Norwegian club Brann too.

[Tallulah]

I meant to point this out to you all. Quite exciting, even though I will probably be at work.

I used to live half a mile away from the stadium in question.

[Wingly]

Closest England will ever be to that trophy.