How the NASL Penalty Speaks the Game
People are talking about the NASL Penalty, but they're not talking through the NASL Penalty.
As it goes every few years, the NASL penalty is making the rounds once again.
(I assure you, I was not the only person in that thread who suggested this. Just trust me on this one)
But what so many people seem to miss is the poetic capabilities to read the game that the NASL penalties possess. Yes, they’re nostalgic. Yes, they’re friggin’ awesome. But they are also so much more than those things.
What are the failures of the penalty as we know it today? Not the standard, “you committed a foul in such a way that almost assuredly cost us a goal” penalty. Those deserve gimme potshots at the goal. Specifically the series of penalties used to decide some sort of knockout game, after regulation and extra time is finished and the game is still tied. Pretty easy: it reduces the outcome of a game to an exercise with extremely high variance in combination with little bearing on how soccer is actually played. Yes, there is skill to taking a penalty, and even more to learning how to stop one, reading opponents, and the like. But when does a player, in the course of a game, ever get a free shot at goal from 12 yards without any defenders challenging them? When does a goalkeeper need to stop such a shot? Almost never, except, of course, in the case of a penalty. The penalty shootout is an entity unto itself that has nothing to do with the regulation game or the players playing it.
The NASL penalty shootout is a more elegant solution than the standard penalty shootout because it both retains the drama and decisive winner of the penalty shootout as we know it, while creating a mock scenario that actually happens within regulation. It, to some extent, is more closely a mirror of how good a team is at playing soccer. Or at least how good a team is at dribbling, which, as we all know, is the only important part of soccer.
Moving quickly along without justifying that last statement whatsoever, I think there is some merit to the idea that hockey-style shootout in soccer is no longer an entity unto itself, but an extension of the game itself. Yes, in both styles of shootouts there is “all to play for,” and a measure of “training ground exercise.” That’s unavoidable, unless your solution is to just let them keep playing extra time until someone finally scores, turning the game into a fitness contest like a barbarian. But the NASL penalties incorporate so many different parts of the game that a standard penalty shootout simply lacks. Dribbling. Shooting on the run, from myriad different angles. Actual defense and goalkeeping. Dribbling. Spatial and temporal awareness. Embarrassing the opposing goalkeeper as much as possible. Dribbling.
There might not be a perfect solution to finding an ultimate winner in a soccer match. It’s always going to be some sort of disembodied ghoulish version of the game played beforehand. But in a way, the NASL penalty speaks the game itself, what each team has proven to be good at and how that translates to a must-win situation, where there is no clock to run out. At the end of the day, someone must advance from this situation.
And instead of the penalty shootout where the only option for sauce is to chip the ball, I think that the people most likely to be featured in a Joga Bonito video deserve to win the game. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Trivia: Association
This should be an easy one for you American soccer geeks out there. I’m going to list off a bunch of words, and you’re going to see who I’m referring to in as little words as possible. If you want, you can write down guesses each word you get to and adjust your choice as you go along.
-MLS
-Mustache
-NASL
-Goalkeeper
-New York
-Playgirl Magazine
Yesterday’s Answer: as far as I can tell, the full Chivas USA roster on their last game as a club has accrued 336 senior international appearances to date, split between Carlos Bocanegra and Marky Delgado (USA), Oswaldo Minda and Felix Borja (Ecuador), Marvin Chavez (Honduras), Andrew Jean-Baptiste (Haiti), Akira Kaji (Japan), Tony Lochhead (New Zealand), and Cubo Torres (Mexico). That’s… a lot of experience on a very bad team!