'More stoppage time gives fans value for money'
'Too much time wasted on VAR, injuries and goal celebrations'
Lengthy stoppage time is a noteworthy phenomenon at the ongoing Fifa 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 an incredible 117 minutes and 16 seconds. The game had been halted for some time when Iran goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand suffered concussion inside the first 15 minutes of the proceedings.
Saudi Arabia's shock win over one of the tournament's favourites, Argentina, on Tuesday would clock seven minutes of first half injury time, plus 14 minutes that was added at the end of the second stanza. All in all, over 100 minutes have been added in stoppage time barely 10 matches into the tournament.
The phenomenon 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 advocates for this approach, disclosing the approach will be implemented across the globe post the global showpiece.
"I support this new approach because there's too much time lost in the game... 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,'' Damons, who is also a Fifa VAR instructor, told Sowetan yesterday.
According to BBC, chair of Fifa's referees committee Pierluigi Collina, this approach is aimed at trying to recover the time that is 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 said as quoted by BBC.