Referees ensure time is not lost through celebrations, VAR at World Cup
Lengthy stoppage time is a noteworthy phenomenon at the Soccer World Cup in Qatar.
This new trend has seen many games stretching to the 100th minute, with Monday’s clash between England and Iran lasting 117 minutes and 16 seconds.
The game was halted for some time when Iran goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand suffered concussion inside the first 15 minutes.
Saudi Arabia’s shock win over one of the tournament’s favourites, Argentina, on Tuesday clocked seven minutes of firsthalf injury time, plus 14 minutes that was added at the end of the second stanza. All in all more than 100 minutes have been added in stoppage time barely 10 matches into the tournament.
This outcome has been met with mixed reaction, with some hailing it as a good strategy to clamp down on time-wasting, while others think it is leading to unnecessarily long games.
Retired Fifa referee Jerome Damons of SA has backed this approach, believing it will be implemented worldwide after the global showpiece.
“I support this new approach because there’s too much time lost in the game,” Damons, who is also a Fifa VAR instructor, told Sowetan.
“People pay a lot of money to watch football, so they need to get value for their money.
“This is something we will adapt at all the competitions after the World Cup; there are plans in place for that to happen,”
According to the BBC, Fifa referees committee chair Pierluigi Collina said this approach was aimed at trying to recover the time lost during the course of the match, with VAR checks, injuries and celebrations usually the main time consumers in football.
“Think about it: if you have three goals in a half, you’ll probably lose four or five minutes in total to celebrations and the restart.
“We recommended our referees to be very accurate in calculating the time to be added at the end of each half to compensate for time lost due to a specific kind of incident.
“What we want to avoid is to have a match with 42, 43, 44, 45 minutes of active play. This is not acceptable,” Collina told the BBC.