Winning by not playing to win – The Property Chronicle
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Winning by not playing to win The rules of a competition can tempt teams to 'throw' a match

The Professor

Most times teams do their utmost to win matches but on occasions the rules and organisation of a competition can tempt them to do otherwise. Take the 1994 Shell Caribbean Soccer tournament in which teams were divided into groups of three where each team played one another with the group leader moving on to the later stages of the tournament.

In group one Barbados had lost 0-1 to Puerto Rico who subsequently lost 0-2 to Grenada. Hence Granada went into the last group match with a superior goal difference meaning that Barbados needed to win by at least two goals to progress to the final stages. So far so good: this was normal procedure. But some things were different in the Caribbean this time. First the organisers had decided that all games had to have a winner, so games that were tied at 90 minutes had to go to sudden death extra time in which the first goal scored gave victory. Second, and most unusually, the extra-time goal would count double meaning that the winner would be awarded a two-goal victory.






The Professor

About Wray Vamplew

Wray Vamplew

Wray Vamplew is Emeritus Professor of Sports History at the University of Stirling and Global Professorial Fellow in the Academy of Sport, University of Edinburgh. Currently he is writing Games People Played, a global history of sport for Reaktion Press and is General Editor for Bloomsbury’s six-volume Cultural History of Sport. He can be contacted at wray.vamplew@ed.ac.uk

Articles by Wray Vamplew

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