Things In Football That Grind Your Gears

Hopefully, the "abject-failure-to-implement-the-6-second-rule" replacement will fix this!

The new 8-second rule for goalkeepers, implemented by IFAB, means that if a goalkeeper holds the ball for more than 8 seconds, a corner kick will be awarded to the opposing team.

I think we can predict that the refs will have forgotten by September.

Surely home fans have to start counting - would be fun.

I also want fans to stand up where a ball goes out of play, and then execute a really slow "standing-up-only" Mexican wave as the player with ball in hand walks past them and tries to take the throw in about 10 metres up the line. Surely refs and "linesmen" would notice.

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By the time they get to implementing something useful like this they'll likely be using colours that we don't know about because they haven't been invented yet

The old rule was more trouble than it's worth for the referee. An indirect freekick inside the box is a bit of an organisational nightmare for officials, especially if less than 10 yards from goal. It also takes a fcuking age for it to actually happen.

I think they will be much more likely to implement the new '8 second delay = corner kick' rule. A corner-kick is a more normal occurrence.

edit. random minor grind.
Gratuitous mis-use of 'too little, too late'. "Rovers led 2-0 at half time with City getting one back in the 77th minute, but it was too little, too late".
Yes, it was 'Too Little', but clearly it wasn't 'Too Late'.

New one I've been noticing during preseason is Sky Sports and the like referring to all these new signings as "making their debut" or "scoring on their debut".

Your debut is your first competitive match, preseason doesn't count!!

I think thats something that began with Stoke.

The nearest player would grab onto the ball ASAP to stop the opposition kicking it away and then drop it when Delap was near.

Utterly pointless nowadays with all the extra balls on the sideline but I think its just a "style" holdover from then.

I'm sure FIFA were trialling that in small tournaments a few years ago but it's gone very quiet since. The studies showed that the ball was in play for about 60mins per match on average (fans again being ripped off paying for 90mins). Result would be shorter halfs with clock stoppages.

I would be very curious to see how trials of that would go. I still think some time wasting would happen from a team in the lead trying to slow the game down to break their opponents attacking momentum, even if they are not running time off the clock.

Enforced minutes silences…..

The "inbuilt" footballing double standard.

Always referenced by ex-players, to show that the footballing world is not exactly equal.

Most recent case - the Irish and English media reaction to Bissouma, and his time-keeping, at Spurs.

Both on Newstalk and on 5 Live, ex pros said stuff along the lines of

"You can't have a player turning up late. Its bad for the team, and totally 100% unacceptable".

Five minutes later "Its not like his performances are allowing him the latitude you'd need in a situation like this."

So you can't do it, at all, at all, well, unless you're really talented!

Most not all of the ex footballers who are hired as expert pundits across Sky, TNT, BBC, TalkSport etc and are lorded as geniuses by there broadcasters but really haven’t a clue what they are taking about which leads to the average fans believing everything they say.

Yeah Sheraer last night in MotD talking about how Villa made 10m profit over the last 6 transfer windows and PSR is blocking them from progressing but he didn’t mention anything about them paying 91% of all there income on player wages which is what PSR is actually taking into account. Now fans will scream PSR is ruining football without being given the actual truth about PSR from the so called expert pundit.

The knee slide celebration. Appears to be used by 95% of scorers nowadays.

All the hand slapping done between keepers/defenders and defenders/defenders each time they do anything like clear a simple ball, block a shoot, make a save etc.

There's nothing better than a well executed knee slide. There's nothing funnier than a badly executed one!

The term Bomb Squad for players clubs are trying to get rid of. It was used in rugby as a way of describing your subs bench as heavy hitters to come on late and finish off your opponent. As in when South Africa load their bench with more bigger men then some of their smaller players. So Bomb Squad is seen as a positive not a negative.

And the use of the word Toxic to describe a dressing room. People using that term honestly havent a clue about the Toxicity of some actual people out there. Its used to describe very bad people in ones personal life. As in toxic relationships with family members ,that type of thing, not that player A and player B have fallen out with the manager.