UNTOLD ARSENAL » 2009 » February » 23

Flint McCullough has a better grasp of Slovakian than I, so I am taking his word for it that the Gunners.sk site is advocating no points for a draw.   But it got me thinking – could this be the answer to the crisis that football finds itself in?

I’m going to suggest a modification of this – No points for the Goalless Draw.   The reason for that idea is that any match that went to 1-0 would have the side that was 1-0 going for a 11 man defence to hold on while the losing team would know they have to score twice to get anything, so that would lead to some really horrible final 10 minutes at 1-0.

So I would say 3 points for a win, 1 for a score draw, and none for a goalless draw or a defeat.

Of course the likes of the EPL take no notice of the likes of me – even though this blog has now got 60,000 individual readers a month, with is rather large in the blog world.

But I am going to have a word with my colleagues in my company’s PR department to see if we can’t utilise their connections with the press to put the idea forward.  If the press do like it, they’ll undoubtedly claim it as their own, but who cares?  The introduction of the idea would help save football.

So, a million thanks to everyone who wrote in response to Sunday’s piece – including the gentleman who got so angry because his first post didn’t come up.   I checked the web site as soon as I got his post (you can see his angry reaction in the letters section if you are interested), but there was nothing wrong.

However in case you ever find there’s a problem, here’s how things go.

All web sites can go down suddenly because of a fault with the servers.  If I notice this has happened I call our IT department, and they work on it – although normally they spot the problem first.  If you are posting when it all goes down, then yes, your post is lost (unless you write it first in Word and then do a cut and paste job.)

The first two posts from anyone are held for me to approve personally.  After that, they are approved automatically.  I don’t censor any posts at all apart from those that call me a racist which I personally find offensive.  This tends to happen mostly when I criticise the existence of the Africa Nations Cup in January every other year – and those who write in forget that I criticise all international tournaments.  I also cut out posts that are clearly adverts for other (generally irrelevant) sites.

Anyway, back to the mainstream.  No points for a 0-0 draw.  I rather like that.  Thanks Flint and to the guys in Slovakia who came up with the “no points” thought.  http://gunners.sk/ if you can read Slovakian.

(c) Tony Attwood 2009