Dio wrote:Rev. Stuart Campbell wrote:And yeah, football isn't always fair. But are we saying injustice is a good thing now, something to be not only tolerated but actively sought? Weird.
Rev. Stuart Campbell wrote:That's a really biased and selective view of "justice". In fact, it's the opposite - it's a description of law, not justice. They're not the same thing.
So you'd prefer the games be judged after the match by a panel rather than by the number of times a team scored? Or is there some other method you'd rather use?
If the answer is no, then I go back to the original point: Spurs did deserve to win the game because
they were the only team that scored.
Football's about goals. It's not about playing the beautiful game, or keeping the ball for 95% of the time. It's about the ball going in the back of the net. It's never 'justice' if the ball went in the back of the net and didn't count.
I say this as a fan of a team that two years ago played fantastic football and still lost sometimes. You know what? I cared less about losing then, because I enjoyed the matches. The odd bit of 'injustice' (defined as us being beaten by the opposition when we played better) would have irked me, but in the end, I knew we'd end up where we deserved. The league works that way.
But I hated it when we lost to 'injustice' (defined as being beaten by misapplication of the rules).
So I think I prefer the latter definition of injustice myself.
See, what you've done there is you've confused "law" and "justice" again in exactly the same way, but using more words. Let's take an extreme example. Let's say Team A plays Team B in the cup final. Team A never ventures out of their own half, 10 men hehind the ball at all times. They pull shirts, spit at Team A's players to wind them up, go in with elbows when the ref isn't looking (sure, they might get retrospectively banned for a couple of games on video evidence, but they'll have the cup by then so who gives a fuck?), racially abuse Team A's black players in provocation, fall down clutching their face and rolling around in agony for three minutes every time one of Team A's players looks at them, commit shocking fouls that look innocuous but are designed to break limbs, and waste as much time as possible. On two separate occasions, a Team B defender handballs a goalbound shot off the line, unseen by officials in the body-packed penalty area. Team A has 22 shots at goal, but by a combination of luck and cheating, none of them go in.
By the 89th minute, Team A are down to nine players, because they've been kicked so black and blue they've used up all their subs and had to take a couple of players off injured. Team B take advantage of their extra numbers to break away up the park, and their striker gets into the box. Team A's centre-half makes a perfect sliding tackle, but Team B's striker goes down theatrically and gets the penalty, then slots it away because Team A's keeper can hardly move after taking some hefty digs in the ribs earlier at corners, in the melee where the officials couldn't spot it.
Team B has put the ball in the net. Team A hasn't. By the
law of the game, they've won fair and square, because stuff the ref doesn't see is just the rub of the green. But is it
justice that they've won? Don't be absurd.
