IFAB voted to change the 6 second rule for GK today.

https://www.theifab.com/news/the-ifab-tackles-goalkeeper-time-wasting


"The IFAB has unanimously decided to amend Law 12.2 (Indirect free kick). The amendment means that if a goalkeeper holds the ball for longer than eight seconds (with the referee using a visual five-second countdown), the referee will award a corner kick to the opposing team (rather than the current indirect free kick for more than six seconds)."

They have been trialing it in a couple of leagues. I guess it worked well enough to go live.

There was discussion on a corner kick or a throw in as the award. It's a pretty big difference. For some teams a corner is a decent scoring chance.

And they didn't say (yet) or give guidance on when to start counting. Is it when Jordan Pickford makes the save or when he gets up after laying on the ground after making a save?

Ghost of Andrew Eaton said:

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Another rule that will not enforced strictly.

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exactly

It's going to be a **** show.

When do you start counting? A count of 3 in your head before the visual 5 will turn into who knows how long. And don't get me started on how fast or slow the 5 will be. Dissent will be massive. Then imagine the GK not giving up the ball to delay the corner.

Now factor in that some teams (Arsenal) are really good at scoring in a corner and some teams (ManU) are really bad at defending it.

**** show doesn't even begin to describe this.

Can it really be a **** show if it is never enforced?

(If they want the ref to do a visual countdown, they should just start at 8 and countdown the full 8 seconds.)

TXAggie2011 said:

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Can it really be a **** show if it is never enforced?

(If they want the ref to do a visual countdown, they should just start at 8 and countdown the full 8 seconds.)

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The problem is it's visual. The moment that arm starts counting its no different than the 10 second call in basketball. When you hit 5 you are stuck. Everyone at the match knows you hit 5. If you don't blow it you get massive dissent from the team that wants the ball. If you blow it you get massive dissent from the team that had the ball. Because you turned a GK holding the ball into a scoring play. Which oh by the way was why nobody called it. That IFK in the area was a scoring play so everyone ignored it.

With luck this will be like the back pass. Once that Law came in, nobody did back passes anymore. Maybe just maybe no GK will ever act like Jordan Pickford or Emi Martinez.

Oh who am I kidding. It's going to be a mess. Forget the professional match. It's the thousands of Saturday and Sunday club and rec games each week with a 15 year old Referee getting blasted by some 26 year old coach with an English accent where the real mess will be.

I hate this. There is already a Law that said what to do. So since nobody wants it enforced and it's mostly ignored they change it to something that can't be ignored. And put the poor schmo in the yellow target on the hook for it.

To be fair, I think a corner is probably far less likely to score than an IFK in the area.

Of course, I could count the number of these I've actually seen on one hand so maybe it just seems more dangerous to me because it's rare and chaotic.

If nothing else though, it's something that teams just don't practice and many players don't even know what to do… every time I've seen one, it's a total ****show and takes like 3-5x times longer to setup than direct FKs. Honestly, I feel like refs will gladly trade 10 secs of GK time-wasting than waste 4 minutes herding cats into an IFK.

So perhaps enforcement will increase because this now becomes more straightforward, albeit not perfect.

I wonder how my fellow Arsenal fans will react when this is only enforced on us.

How bout they shrink the area that the keeper can use his hands - the penalty box is stupidly large

I would love to see a rule change where if the keeper intentionally plays the ball with his feet then he can not pick it up. Drives me nuts in club games where they dribble around and then pick it up to waste time.

I'm not sure shrinking the box helps with this problem.

I like Jim's idea and in conjunction with that, I'd love to put a line on the field - not sure how far out… but somewhere between 24-30 yards. For lack of a better term, I'll call this "the Zone." Then make it simple. A keeper can hold the ball as long as they want if there are still opponents inside the Zone. But they have to drop it before the last opponent leaves. If no opponents are in the Zone at all when a shot is made, they must just block the ball and never possess it with their hands after the save (unless opponents enter the Zone after the shot).

And now that we have a Zone, we can also talk about some fun changes to offside, but that's a different topic so I'll stop here.