Quote:
Originally Posted by royalblue
what's wrong with that? You want do discourage fouling in the box
You're right. That's one of two reasons for calling fouls in the box (and of course there is a gray area in between that many fouls fall into).
Two types of foul:
(1)The attacking team was denied their scoring chance by an illegal act. So you award the penalty, and you've made the attacking team (more or less*) whole again. *It isn't entirely perfect justice....the odds on the penalty being scored won't be exactly the same as the odds of the team scoring absent the foul--usually they're much better off with the penalty, but that's your deterrence woven in and we're generally cool with it.
(2) The defending team did something illegal, and it happened to be in the box, but the attacking team wasn't threatening to score or didn't have their odds of scoring reduced in any way. The fullback was careless dribbling and the ball hit his hand. Or the defender bulls into a guy who had just kicked the ball past them both and it was heading out of play.
The question is: do we still want this 2nd category called to the letter of the current law? If so it is clearly a matter of deterrence rather than corrective justice.
My personal opinion is that players are already pretty jumpy about committing fouls in the box. I'm not sure we need to award the opponent 0.8 goals (guessing that's roughly the conversion percentage) for the kinds of fouls I mentioned. I'm not sure it provides any extra deterrence that we don't get already, and it rewards the opposition for doing very little.....which means it also encourages diving. I'd be open to replacing the penalty in the latter situation with a free kick anywhere outside the box that the attackers want to place it.