A hockey fan's guide to the World Cup: Offsides

all good questions i would like to know the answers to as well.

1. Yellow cards don’t give you anything. No one has to leave the field. However, getting a red card (or two yellows, which equals a red) means that player is ejected and cannot be replaced. Thus, you occasionally see teams playing an hour or more down a man. The severity of this is mitigated by the size of the soccer field, the number of players, and the fact that goals are rarer than in hockey.

As for the apparently displeasing aesthetic of seeing the cards given out…I see where you’re coming from, but there’s not much else refs can do. You’ve got to show everyone else that a card’s being given, and not all games take place in stadiums (so even if you put a mic on the ref, there’d be no PA system to make it useful). I guess you could scrap the whole discipline system and start over, but soccer is extremely tradition-bound.

2. The only thing resembling a faceoff is called a drop ball and occurs when the ref stops play without there being a foul, goal, or ball out of play. Mostly, this only happens if someone is injured and the ref elects to stop play (if the ref doesn’t stop play, the guy is stuck there injured until the ball goes out). Play is re-started in the following ways:

- After a goal has been scored, the team that conceded gets to kick off from the middle of the center circle. The circle marks off where opposing players can’t be until after the ball is touched.
- If the ball goes out of bounds on either sideline, the team that did not kick it out gets a throw-in. Why a throw-in? Way back in the 1800s, there were varying sets of rules to soccer that allowed you to throw the ball. This is a holdover from that. Also, if you allowed kick-ins, the game would devolve into constantly having most of both teams battling for the ball in the box.
- If the ball goes over either endline, the result depends on who put it out. If it’s the defensive team puts the ball over their endline, a corner kick is given. If it’s the offensive team (like on a missed shot), a goal kick results.

3. A free kick is given on any foul outside of the 18 yard box. A penalty kick is given for fouls inside the 18 yard box. On a penalty kick, the only players allowed inside the 18 yard box are the goalie (side note: “goalkeeper” in soccer, not “goaltender” as in hockey) and one attacking player who gets to take the penalty kick. On both free kicks and penalty kicks, the first player to touch the ball cannot touch the ball again until someone else from either team makes contact. This prevents people from dribbling with these opportunities and forces you to do something more than that. It’s more of a “spirit of the game” thing.

4. Free kicks and penalty kicks can be given for tripping, holding, shirt-pulling, obstruction (in this case, obstruction usually involves using only the arm to block someone’s progress), hand ball, and anything deemed reckless (e.g. elbows that could or do hit the face of an opponent, intentionally ducking a jumping opponent so you take his legs out from under him, or exposing the cleats in a way that might cause a severe injury).

5. There is no shootout-style penalty shot. There have been, in the old NASL and the early days of MLS, but these were seen as untraditional. They also seemed to carry a higher risk of injury, due to the fact that soccer goalies come further out of their net to narrow the angles for shooters.

6. Pronger is not the biggest douche, but he’s certainly up there. It was fun seeing him lose as a Flyer, since I’ve hated them as long as I can remember.