A&H

Liverpool v Atletico Madrid

I think away goals needs to be removed as a tiebreaker, full stop.

The reason why away goals was instituted in the first place - to reward teams for the hassles of travel - have really gone away in this age of charter flights and nice hotels. Plus, the first leg of a two-legged playoff is often really boring because the first-leg home team is defending more to avoid giving up the away goal and facing a big hill to climb.

I understand FIFA wants to avoid playing extra time after 180 minutes of play, but the logic of away goals has passed. A goal is a goal, whether it's in the first minute of leg 1, the 90th minute of leg 2, or extra time.
 
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The teams know the rules and have the opportunity to tactically account for them over the 180 or 210 minutes
Play for a 0-0 at home and the opponents will choke in the second leg in front of a nervous crowd. Simple
Penalties are a last resort
 
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I think away goals will stay because it gets winners out of (most) score draws across the two legs.

Away goals in extra time...? Well, with far too much football being played, I think extra time could be removed from the LotG and all draws over one or two legs go straight to penalties. This is already the case in the tournaments and grassroots playoffs I do (due to time constraints at grounds) and in big cup competitions. ET is wonderful at times though - nothing like seeing elite athletes reduced to whimpering wrecks... but the TV people probably don't like it at all... kerching
 
The reason why away goals was instituted in the first place - to reward teams for the hassles of travel -

Is that the reason it was adopted? I thought the reason it was adopted was to give the visiting team an incentive to play attacking soccer and not just bunker in the hope it can do better at home. Home field advantage still exists.

But I'm sympathetic to the idea that once you get to ET, a goal should be a goal. (LOTG could leave that up to ROC.)
 
I think away goals needs to be removed as a tiebreaker, full stop.

The reason why away goals was instituted in the first place - to reward teams for the hassles of travel - have really gone away in this age of charter flights and nice hotels. Plus, the first leg of a two-legged playoff is often really boring because the first-leg home team is defending more to avoid giving up the away goal and facing a big hill to climb.

I understand FIFA wants to avoid playing extra time after 180 minutes of play, but the logic of away goals has passed. A goal is a goal, whether it's in the first minute of leg 1, the 90th minute of leg 2, or extra time.
I love away goals. Always entertaining when one team must score a goal; and, if they get that goal, the other team must score. It adds something extra to the game.
 
Is that the reason it was adopted? I thought the reason it was adopted was to give the visiting team an incentive to play attacking soccer and not just bunker in the hope it can do better at home. Home field advantage still exists.

But I'm sympathetic to the idea that once you get to ET, a goal should be a goal. (LOTG could leave that up to ROC.)
What's 'ROC'? Rules of competition? Is so, the laws do leave it to the competition rules. UEFA could change it if they wanted.
 
I think you can make this discussion a lot simpler if you accept that despite them winning in the end, the clear Atletico plan (score 1 at home, sit on that lead for a further ~160 minutes) really didn't work well.

Oblak had to make 9 saves, some of them seriously world class and quite a few of those saves were deflected back into the danger area where only pure chance stopped them falling to a Liverpool player. On the other side, Liverpool took 34 shots, 4 of which fell to Robertson - you can't set up a team to concede 34 chances and expect this Liverpool side to "only" score 2 of them, that's a terrible tactic.

Home advantage actually really did work for Liverpool in this match, only a combination of unusually poor finishing, great goalkeeping from the away team, truly terrible goalkeeping from the home team AND a healthy slice of away luck stopped this being a comfortable 4 or 5-0 win for the home team.

Football has a very general problem that a very unappealing parking the bus approach is an overpowered tactic that will often be adopted by any team who sees themselves as less good than their opponents. Anything that attempts to make parking the bus less useful makes the game of football more interesting to watch in general, so I do appreciate that the away goal rule tried to make teams come out of their shell a bit more. That doesn't necessarily make it fair, but it does make it more interesting.
 
Is that the reason it was adopted? I thought the reason it was adopted was to give the visiting team an incentive to play attacking soccer and not just bunker in the hope it can do better at home. Home field advantage still exists.

But I'm sympathetic to the idea that once you get to ET, a goal should be a goal. (LOTG could leave that up to ROC.)
OK, I could be wrong on this because it's only what I remember, but I always thought the main justification for the away goals rule when it was first implemented (by UEFA in 1965) was simply to provide a tie-break method and avoid additional replays - penalty shoot-outs not being part of the law until 1970. I seem to recall it was further mentioned that since statistically, the home team always has an advantage, it was felt it could also be a way to compensate for that.
 
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