Benji, BD, > If Michael Owen went down like a sack of spuds and awarded HIMSELF a > penalty, the uproar would be considerably greater than when he cons the > referee. The blame transfers to the chap with responsibilty for the call. > But you assume that Michael Owen would give a damn about the uproar. I suspect that instead he'd sit their smugly clinging to his golden boot trophy and laugh all the way to Barclays to bank is 5 million squid sponsorship cheque from Nike.
The analogy to football or other sports is a bad one. If you pull my shirt/foul/punch/kick me in football and the referee doesn't see it you gain a huge advantage of having knocked me to the floor, knocked me off the ball etc. But in ultimate, whether the game has observers or not, the same behaviour doesn't gain you much advantage, I call foul, play stops I get up and we start play again, you gain little, if any, advantage. The only areas in which players can gain a large advantage in ultimate is for the defence to call (most often on a score) a shitty travel on a good throw, call a crap pick when they get roasted or make dangerous/fouling bids to try to knock the disc lose. Similarly the offence can call crappy fouls on discs they dropped or got clean D'd again mostly obviously for a score. Any set of good observers will be able to eliminate the shitty calls. If the calls are close and more 50-50 then it is more than likely that the play was the result of good hard running/laying out than a deliberate attempt to cheat. > I'm not saying that observers would overnight make us contest more calls; > people in UK ultimate don't generally play that way. The problem is those > people who join the sport - I would argue that observers would lead to a > slow but inevitable decline in the spirit of the game over a period of > time. But the only example we have, that of the UPA, doesn't support that argument. Observers where introduced to the UPA college series because teams where consistently cheating via the methods described above, they where getting away with it and affecting the results of games because of it. The UPA introduced observers to reduce the ability of those cheating teams to influence the game, to make the game flow more and make it more accessible to spectators and tv audiences. Poor spirit/cheats created the observers not the other way around. Go and find a copy of the UPA 2003 open final DVD where they use observers. I have a copy and I don't think I saw a single example of players trying to cheat behind the observers back. There are several calls, some made in the heat of the moment are wrong, some even with slow motion are very hard to judge. Some calls are settled by the players some are sent back by the observers and some are overruled by the observers. The game flows very quickly (except for the howling gale that decreases the quality of the game) there are many big plays, few shit calls and few long stoppages of play. All in all it is very entertaining and exciting to watch and was presumably great fun to play in. How can the role that observers played in that be a bad thing for ultimate? JP __________________________________________________ BritDisc mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pootle.near.me.uk/mailman/listinfo/britdisc Staying informed - http://www.ukultimate.com/informed.asp
