Tennis football and football tennis
Watching a bit of Wimbledon, with some matches lasting forever and others finishing almost immediately, made me think about the difference between tennis and football.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to design a variant of tennis that was more like football, and vice versa? To be specific:
Football tennis: Basically tennis, but a match lasts 90 minutes. During those 90 minutes, as many games (the 15-30-40 things) as can be fitted in are played. If a game ends with no points to the opponent, the player gets a point. In this way, a match should end up with a score more like football (such as 5–2), and it would be possible to get one or two points just before the finish to change the expected result.
Tennis football: Basically football, but a match is divided into sets. To make it easier to score a goal, the goalkeepers are eliminated. To win a set, a team has to get at least six goals, and two more than the other team. The first team to win two sets wins the match. In this way, a match is never decided until the very last moment, but it might theoretically last forever if the teams are evenly matched.
Would these new games be more popular that the original ones, I wonder?
European champions
Today Denmark won the European Championship in handball, beating Croatia 24-20 in the final.
This is big news in Denmark, not quite as big as when we won the European Championship in football, but almost. It’s totally dominating all Danish newspapers on the internet at the moment.
Handball is one of the “big four” ballgames that all Danish kids have to learn well at school: football, handball, volleyball and basketball. I never liked it – it was too hard and fast for me at the time, but I still find it fascinating that it’s completely unknown here, given that it’s well-known in most of continental Europe.
Punishment
I don’t normally blog about football, but the bizarre way the match between Denmark and Sweden ended is intriguing.
As far as I understand, Denmark is to be punished because a Danish fan ran onto the pitch and tried to attack the referee.
If the punishment is due to the match having being arranged by Denmark, I think it’s more or less fair. On the other hand, if it’s due to the fan being Danish, I think it’s a slippery slope. For instance, if I wanted Denmark to win the next match against Sweden, I could pay a Swede to attack the referee, and Sweden would get penalised. Also, given that many spectators might have placed huge bets on specific results, it will not always be obvious to outsiders what result they might want to achieve by attacking the officials, and penalising the wrong team would be difficult.
As I see it, the offending spectator and the hosts should be penalised (and obviously, if a player attacks the referee, their team should be punished). Otherwise, rich fans will start hiring attackers, and everyone will suffer.
Opdatering (11/6): Det ser ud til, Michael Laudrup har tænkt de samme tanker (eller bare har læst denne blog): “Der er lande, hvor det kan ske, at en klub vil sende en fan ind på banen og til angreb på dommeren, som så giver dem en sejr på 3-0, forudser den tidligere Brøndby-træner i et interview med den spanske sportsavis AS.”