The penalty kick assigned to Cagliari against Juventus , on the first day of Serie A, through the use of the Video assistant referee (Var) officially opened the way to an epochal turning point in Italian football. With both feet, the most popular sport in Italy has made a decisive and convinced leap towards the future and the modern era.
Not without some perplexities or empty turns (after all “Rome was not built in a day”) also on the other Serie A fields we have seen the referees resort to “slow motion” to remove doubts about situations of not immediate understanding.
Technology will make everyone agree and we will soon be able to say goodbye to rowdy bar fights (which have now moved on to:“We say the Var or the Var
“ With a lot of Accademia della Crusca forced to intervene and give strength to the masculine pronoun of the term).
Sport, therefore, changes and accepts contaminations and evolutions to keep up with the times and the increasingly pressing and dominant logic of interests, spectacle, economic and social turns. Not only football, we have said, but also basketball and volleyball are close to significant evolutions. Let’s see them together.
Football – slow motion, 5 substitutions and different penalty lottery
If in the upper floors of Italian football we have seen the introduction of the Var, significant changes will also take place in the lower leagues. At the beginning of August, the Federal Council of the FIGChad approved the proposal of the National Amateur League to increase the substitutions from three to five .
An opportunity to give the clubs the possibility of fielding more young people who will see less and less the bench during the season , but rather will have the opportunity to grow and get “their bones”. A revolution that immediately involved also Serie C (now former Lega Pro): in practice, already from the 2017-2018 season, while maintaining the three windows for changes during a match , the coach will be able to send five fresh players onto the field.
Certainly it is a historic change if we think of the 1960s and the first proposals to introduce a player to make room for an injured player, but what about thean idea already tested in England to alter the order of penalty kicks In fact, as we have already seen during the last Community Shield won by Arsenal against Chelsea, the 11-meter lottery has undergone a change: no longer the classic ABAB order with alternation of the two teams, but the novelty is ABBA as it happens similarly in the tennis tie-break.
Here you can understand better:
Basketball – change of infraction of steps
Even if officially there is no talk of making basketball, outside the confines of the NBA, more spectacular and evident that basketball looks to the United States as a model to follow. In fact, some time ago there was thechange of the size of the field with enlargement of the area and increase of the distance of the three-point line.
But Fiba , the international federation that manages basketball (except the NBA), on August 17, announced another important news that will come into effect next October : in fact, the rule concerning the infringement will change. of steps .
In the NBA (but soon also on all parquet floors in the world) the regulation is more permissive: in fact, the foot that is on the ground when the ball is received is not considered the first of the two allowed steps, but a similar “zero step “. This means that the player who collects the ball during the run or dribble will be allowed to take two steps before getting rid of it with a pass or a shot. This makes the action much smoother giving players more freedom.
Attention, however, to the criticisms – allowed – of the purists : foot infringements, in America, are not always whistled and players often take more steps without dribbling and not being sanctioned by the referee. One thing is certain: it will be discussed for a long time and we will see some confusion in the first months.
Volleyball – change of sets and serve
Football, basketball … and now volleyball. Even the Fivb, the International Volleyball Federation, wants to keep up with other popular sports and, again in August, announced its intention to overturn some basic rules and to use the U-23 World Cup in Egypt as a tester to evaluate whether to promote or reject the change.
The first, significant, impact concerns the scores : no longer five sets of 25 points, but seven of 15 points . The team that wins the four sets first wins. In case of victory with at least two sets of difference , the winning team will be awarded three points , while in case of victory for 4-3 the points will be two. The team that loses with this score will go home withone point .
Furthermore, let us forget the powerful stones in the joke with the players stepping on the bottom line: in order not to commit a foul, in fact, it is necessary to fall back before the line that delimits the field.
The interruption time between one set and another also varies: no longer three minutes, but only two . The change of court will take place every two sets , while it currently takes place at the end of each partial.
