When Footballers waste time is ... annoying. It's ... embarrassing. It makes them look petty, which in turn makes the game look petty, and by proxy us too. It can be funny if done with a bit of wit or verve, or with engaging stupidity, but usually it's just pillocks hiding the ball behind their back, faking injury, while firing their best butter-wouldn't-melt face at the referee.
Two options, then. The first is to insist that referees keep time accurately. We've paid for 45 minutes of football, and by heck we're going to get them. This would be fine, except footballers as we know they now are finely-tuned athletes built to exercising for just over one hour in a just under two-hour period. Accurately keeping time would increase the work they'd have to do by almost 50%. Which would certainly mean more injuries, might lead to a drop in quality (or at least in pace) and attacking (or at least pro-active) football, and could, taken to its logical conclusion, lead to footballers taking some of those dastardly performance-enhancing substances that they definitely don't take any of at the moment, on average we actually only see between 58 to 64 minutes of playing football out of the 90 minutes in any game.
Another idea is to take this accuracy but retain the amount of football actually played. Two halves of thirty minutes, the clock only ticking when it's in play.
At a stroke, the dispiriting and irritating business of time-wasting is gone. Lie on the ball all you like, son, time's marching on but the clock isn't. Admittedly, it would be something of a shame to miss out on incidents as hilarious as Longs yellow card, but think of the compensatory good it would do all our blood pressures.
It would also remove the grand farce of added injury stoppage overtime, which is less an actual attempt to measure how much time has been lost from a half, and more a kind of vague award based on whether or not there has been lots of sitting down, or only a bit. Four minutes of added injury stoppage overtime? It should have been at least six minutes of added injury stoppage overtime!
The disadvantages? Well...
I don't think I'm being particularly dense when I say that I genuinely can't think of one, beyond the argument that a game of football lasts ninety minutes, in two forty-five minute halves, because a game of football lasts ninety minutes, in two forty-five minute halves, which isn't really an argument at all, more a kind of verbal shrug, like saying the sky is blue because the sky is blue. Not very satisfying.
A game of football lasts ninety minutes, in two forty-five minute halves, because somebody, somewhere, decided that that would be so. (If you know who and when, incidentally, please say so in the comments -- I haven't been able to find out.)
The idea of adding time on for stoppages came later: 1891, according to Wikipedia, after Aston Villa's goalkeeper, having conceded a penalty with a 1-0 lead and two minutes to go, hoofed the ball out of the ground and beyond finding. (The online encyclopaedia sadly doesn't record how many outraged opinion pieces that incident inspired.)
Presumably they did so after considerable thought, with a view to ensuring the best experience for both players and spectators. But there's nothing inherently superior or righteous about 90 minutes in itself, as can be seen by the fact that we don't get 90 minutes, and possibly never have. All 90 minutes represents, as things stand, is a convenient amount of time over which to stretch a smaller amount of football. If we can find a way of achieving something similar but better, don't we owe that to ourselves? As Plato once said, tradition is just another word for the collective habit .That could have been Plato, or it could have early-2000s progressive metal band Miocene. I forget.
Naturally, It wouldn't provide a panacea for all football's stoppage-related ills. Hoofing the ball away, or lying on, could still be used by determined berks to sap momentum from the game. But it would certainly remove the primary motivation, as well as robbing outraged managers of one of their more irritating post-game excuses. In fact, the only negative aspect of the whole business - apart from the terrible loss to tradition - would be the sudden emergence of berks doing countdowns as the end of a game drew near
