Time-outs, tennis version
Yesterday I posted about an interesting but never-happen proposal to institute “time-ins” in football. So far the main response has been that baseball is even slower and less action-packed than football. Well, of course it is. So what?
Coincidentally, this morning’s Washington Post carried this story about what’s being seen as the increasing misuse of time-outs in tennis, a trend that, because I don’t follow tennis closely, had escaped my notice.
I do recall that tennis was once considered a continuous-action sport. No dilly-dallying between points or games. Then television happened, and as it does to every other sport (at least the ones I watch), it slowed things way down to enable commercials to be run. That changes a sport. Makes it harder to gain and maintain momentum. Deprives better-conditioned athletes of some of their advantage. And so on. The strategic use of “injury” time-outs has the same effect, and insults the sport. I’m comforted that this is viewed as a problem in tennis, even if the football folks haven’t yet caught on to how much excitement all that standing around drains out of what’s supposed to be an action-packed, thrill-a-second, sixty-minute contest when it drags on for hours and hours.
Comments
Footbal (soccer for you at US) did not change at all!
And it is the most popular sport around the globe!
Posted by: Manoel Galdino | August 21, 2009 11:25 AM
Manoel:
I can’t speak very knowledgeably about soccer, but from my casual observation of some games, the time-keeping aspect of it must drive lots of fans of American football crazy. In the American game, everything is timed down to the second, and huge scoreboards keep everyone appraised of exactly how much time remains in the game. Unless I’ve missed something, in soccer, only the referee seems to know how much time remains, especially because of injury time, etc.
Posted by: Lee Sigelman | August 21, 2009 11:55 AM
In general, soccer norms allow for a certain fluidity in the rules that is very alien to American sports fans. A match takes 90-100 minutes, plus 15 minutes at the half. Sometimes a tackle is a foul, sometimes a yellow card, sometimes a red, and decisions are often context-dependent. The exact same bad tackle will lead to very different outcomes depending on how far along the game is, how the particular players involved have behaved, and how many cards have been handed out so far. But there are no stoppages long enough for a commercial break except for at the half and you don’t have to commit the better part of a day to watching a match because you know it will take about 2 hours, tops. This is in stark contrast to Baseball and American Football, which have been ruined by tv, especially when you go to watch in person and spend half the day watching the players mill around for tv time-outs.
Posted by: Dan | August 21, 2009 12:19 PM
Lee, you might be interested to know that the timekeeping aspect of soccer was even more opaque before the US hosted the World Cup in 1994.
Before that, the referee really was the only who knew what time it was. Now, the “stoppage time” added on to the half is posted, so we all know to within a few seconds when play will end.
This was only one of a handful of changes made to the game - permanently - in the interest of making it more attractive to the American TV audience of that tournament. Others included 3 points in the standings for a win, not two, the super-bendy ball that has given Beckham a career, and the shirts of various colors, not black, worn by the referee.
Posted by: Joel | August 23, 2009 02:51 PM
One of the problems with watching Masterpiece Mysteries is no commercials, requiring bladder control and abstinence from imbibing, as Agatha and Hercule present their never ending clues.
Posted by: Shag from Brookline | August 24, 2009 06:42 AM