In the 76th minute of Manchester United’s win over Liverpool Lisandro Martínez boots it clear and collapses with cramp. As he lies motionless in his six-yard box like an extra from 1917, Michael Oliver stops the game. Fifty-three seconds later play restarts.
In the 87th minute cramp has coincidentally taken hold in Martínez’s taller partner – this time in both legs of Raphaël Varane, the poor chap. He straightens them like a Playmobil figure as he gently falls over. Roberto Firmino kindly offers his hand. Varane refuses – there’s a tiny moment of him being dragged a few inches along the floor on his backside like a dog with worms. By the time David de Gea takes the goal-kick, United are 45 seconds closer to victory.
When Mohamed Salah scores a few minutes before Varane is struck down, we have a classic of the refusing to give the ball back genre. Bruno Fernandes holds on – my ball, get your own. Salah goes for the grab. Fernandes is somehow blinded in one eye. About a minute later United kick off.
United’s triple substitution takes about a minute as they exit one by one. It’s all classic time-wasting. A minimum of five minutes stoppage time is suggested. It’s the perfect amount. Both not enough and too much. Five minutes feels like the shortest acceptable for a game where one side have been running down the clock for a while. But realistically it could well have been considerably more.
All teams do it, and it plays perfectly into our tribalism. When you’re winning you barely notice it; when you’re losing, the rage boils inside when a goalkeeper places the ball, paces out their runup for a goal-kick and then slowly walks back to readdress it and move it a centimetre.
There’s an amazing clip doing the rounds from the South African league in 2020, where Mamelodi Sundowns – leading 2-1 – have a corner in the 82nd minute. One player stands over it, takes ages and gets booked for time-wasting. He then walks off for a teammate to do exactly the same. As he is booked he steps aside for a third player to take it. He is also booked – and more than two minutes after the corner is awarded – the original taker goes back and whips it in. It is great entertainment. The commentators are in hysterics.
And this is before we consider goal celebrations, late melees, players feigning injury and Kasper Schmeichel refusing to give the ball to a desperate centre-forward who has grabbed one back.
Time-wasting works – referees don’t add enough on. During the 2018 World Cup, the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight analysed 32 matches. In those games, and including using Fifa’s guidance on stoppages (eg 30 seconds for a substitution etc) it found the average time that should have been added was 13 minutes and 10 seconds – roughly twice as much than was added at the end of the halves: just under seven minutes.
One fix for this is simple. Stop the clock. After Barcelona’s goalless draw at home to Rayo Vallecano on the opening day of the season, Xavi Hernández became the latest manager to call for it. “For me it’s a ridiculous situation and I’m not singling out Rayo here,” he said. “But I think we are the only sport where we never play the regulation time. Don’t we want fair play? Well, that would put an end to cheating.”
Mark Clattenburg suggested the same in the Daily Mail in May. “I think there’s a solution to all of this and that’s 60-minute matches with a stop clock – an idea which Pierluigi Collina, Fifa and Ifab are currently looking at. It works in basketball and it could work in football, too.”
Read More: Time-wasting in football needs tackling but drama at the death must live on |