14B.5.1 Game Duration
Comments about this discussion:
Started
Currently, the playing time is given by a relative play time. The time is only stopped at the request of the referee.
However, in ice hockey and floor ball (see also below), the playing time is effective and the time is always stopped.
I think changing the rules to an effective play time would make the game fairer for very narrow play or even tied games as every second is played. Furthermore, an effective play time would also lead to less rush at the end of a game as no time is lost when e.g. the ball is missing or something has to be discussed. Currently, some referees would probably take a time out in such a situation but in other games the time would continue running. This makes the last minutes of a game very unpredictable and turbulent and hectic.
Such a change would lead to longer games (for the same play time on paper). However, for a tournament of a specific total length, the effective play time would be identical. And the play time on paper would probably have to be reduced for many games.
In floor ball, the play time is usually effective (international games). However, the game can be played with a relative play time except for the last 3 minutes of a game (which are always effective). I think choosing a way in between relative and effective play time might also be an idea for unicycle hockey.
What are your opinions?
Comment
While writing down my below thoughts, I did start to think, perhaps this could be used in only the two matches for Gold/Silver/Bronze at tournaments? I feel that most of my issues outlined below would not become a problem if implementing this for only key matches.
With that in mind, the issues I see for using this throughout tournaments, are listed below. I am quite open minded about whether or not this could work and happy to discuss further if people disagree with the potential issues I have outlined.
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In theory I like the idea of this for consistency at end of game, in practice I think this rule would create large scale problems across the board for hosting and I am almost certain that few countries would play this rule within their own league for logistical reasons.
My forseen issues are
Many competitions, including UNICON, do not have high level volunteers running the timers as it is not seen as an enjoyable job. While of course they should always be paying attention, the likelihood of low level volunteers messing up the time stoppage through the days of competition is quite high in my opinion. Because our referees are usually keen hockey players, I feel it is easier to improve the referees consistency in stopping time at appropriate moments than sourcing skilled dedicated time keepers to perform a more demanding job at competitions.
I have been to many ice hockey matches and the unknown total time a match takes when using stop clock rules means that it is only really implemented in Australia in the highest league. Lower leagues all use running time rules. At the highest league games are almost always a single standalone match and not back to back matches. Even with a single standalone match, the stop clock rules requires the rink to reserve a large period of time for the match in case the match runs longer, which reduces their availability for later bookings. Our tournaments are round robins so we would be reducing time from our own subsequent matches and would compound the extra time across the tournament.
Every match would require a base of X many minutes plus an extra Y amount of minutes provided to the schedule in case of a lot of stoppages. For all matches, the base X minutes would need to be shorter than we currently give, to account for instances where Y stoppage minutes were large. If you finish a tournament with very few games with a large Y then you may find that you finished your tournament much quicker than the time you had the court for. For tournaments like UNICON where we are fighting to get as much time to play hockey as possible, would we prefer to maximise our time playing, or do we think that inconsistencies in stoppages in the end game are drastically affecting our matches and would warrant changing the timing? If we have large periods of left over court time at the end of touranments because of time that was reserved for stoppages, I think people would think we were wasting valuable play time.
My next issue is that I feel tournament planning and execution would be much more difficult, which is one of the reasons why I believe only the Swiss would use this in their league. At least initially, the prediction of match lengths would be fairly difficult for organisers to predict. It would be greatly affected by a number of factors that would increase pressure on organisers when hosting tournaments.
In 2017 Euro Champs we had dasherboards around the court that were around 30cm high, this tournament had huge numbers of stoppages.
In IUC in Switzerland in 2019 the hall was fully enclosed and seating was in the air above the field so there were very few stoppages.
Organisers would need to take all of these factors into account with a high level of skill or risk running over time/reducing the total play time for competitors through overestimating Y minutes. I believe some factors may not be apparent until after the tournament has already started, such as skill level of teams or poor choice of walls.
Comment
Thanks for raising these points.
I'm not sure I agree with your first point. I see that volunteers could miss to stop the time. However, this is also the case with the current rules and might be even more so the case as they have less to do (they only rarely have to stop the time). With an effective play time, the time keeper is almost forced to always have a finger on the time start / stop button.
I didn't know that the time is not stopped in ice hockey at lower leagues. This is interesting and worth to keep in mind.
I agree that making a good game schedule would be harder and it would for sure need some experience to know how many extra minutes (Y in your text) are necessary for a specific play time (X). And yes, this would for sure depend on the specific infrastructure of the gym / court. However, I think with some experience from national tournaments, this should be a doable task. I'm quite sure we here in Switzerland would play with this new rule and would be happy to share our experiences.
Maybe introducing the effective play time only for the last few (I suggest 3) minutes of a game might be a good way in between. With this, the risk of running over time could be minimised and the planning simplified, while having at least some advantages of the effective play time.
I could also imagine introducing the effective play time only for matches where a decision is needed (e.g. semi-finals and finals) and keeping the relative play time for round robins. If we do so, I would also only change to effective play time for the last 3 minutes of the game.
Comment
There's a question how this would play with the waste of time foul given that you're now wasting tournament time and not game time. I don't think we have a lot of talking back at refs now, presumably since the clock is ticking, but if the clock isn't ticking it might become a problem. As it is now there's an incentive on everyone to restart the game quickly and we might lose that. The main thing place where we can be slow to restart the game is where the ball goes out of bounds and a new ball is used but that seems like something organisers can solve by having replacement balls ready.
The problem of the volunteers not being quick enough to stop the time could be solved by either having the time keepers be players similar to how refs are selected or electronically with an electronic wistle presumably (which is then one more thing for the organisers to figure out).
I think it's fine to limit this to games in the eliminiation stage or parts of those games but there might be a risk that it changes strategy for a team that's behind. Any game stoppage is a chance for players to reposition themselves on the field and catch some air. We already have rules against delaying the game so we would want to find out how they apply here to prevent abuse. There are teams where their most important game is during the round robin and who might have benefitted from this rule being part of their games in that round, something that can lead to endless discussion and "what ifs".
Ultimately I think it's best to just keep it as now (perhaps with a few adjustments) since we generally optimise for play time and with this change we would need more time scheduled between games taking playtime away from everybody. If there are teams that delay the game or games that have a lot of breaks there might be other ways to address those things.
Comment
I do not really agree with your first point. If a team leads a game by a close margin, they might not have an incentive to restart the game with the current rules (however, I see that they might be penalised for this). Furthermore, with the current rules, player could be penalised for talking back at referees.
The strategy might change for both teams as they both can reposition themselves. So I don't see any advantage or disadvantage for any of the two teams. Or maybe I don't understand what you're trying to say.
With a perfect schedule, play time for each team would be exactly the same, as the time it takes longer to play a specific game is spend on really playing it and not waiting until the referee has placed the ball (which is currently the case).
I would even go as far to say that with the effective play time, you cannot delay the game anymore and this rule is no longer necessary. So in my opinion this is a very effective way to prevent delaying the game.
Comment
My main point is that the strategy might change (which is fine) but otherwise it would be annoying to have different rules for different games or parts of the game in the same tournament. There's still the question of logistics where you suddenly need the time keeper to pay way closer attention to the game than otherwise and if there might be places where it wouldn't be feasible anyways.
I'm still not convinced we'll get rid of the problem of delaying the game only now you delay the entire tournament which is something that teams could abuse to their advantage potentially. Then we would still want to keep the game delay rules but now with the added complexity of the new time keeping system.
It's also not clear to me when the time should be started – when the whistle is blown to take the free shot or when the shot is taken? Either way we still have to make rules for how to deal with delays.
I think there's a few issues here that can be addressed independently of time keeping:
- placing the ball for free shots: the rules don't actually say the ref should place the ball and there's a question of how precise it needs to be placed. If it's in goal zones it's either in the corner, in front of the goal or at the 6.5 meter line. If it's between the goal zone maybe there can be some tolerence since players can shoot the ball over to where it needs to be faster than the ref can run there and place it
- end of game penalties: we don't have a concept for a penalty that gets carried over to the next game which means delaying the game at the very end can decide outcome of the game. We could deal with that situation directly by for instance always allowing a 6.5 meter shot to be taken regardless if the time runs out. A similar rule could be made for (direct) free shots so a shot on goal can't be "stolen"
I'm less concerned about the entire schedule getting messed up though. We already have to account for extended time or penalty shootouts in finals so this would just be one new thing to content with from a planning perspective.
Comment
We anyway need a time keeper that pays attention to stop the time if the referee takes one and to write down the goals. Additionally stopping the time shouldn‘t make a big difference. However, I agree that it might not be the best option to have different rules for different games or parts of a game.
How would it be the advantage of a team to delay the entire tournament?
Thanks for raising the issue with placing the ball. It could be a good idea to have the rule that 5e referee places the ball.
We already have the rule that a 6.5m can be awarded after the time is over. This rule would never take effect with the effective play time as the time is always stopped when play is, so there should always be time left.
Comment
The point about a team being able to delay an entire tournament is simply that it would be "free" to delay restarting of the game for the offending team since the extra time is shared between all teams. Many sports have a concept of a timeout where teams can request a pause to the game to regroup so we should make sure teams don't abuse the game stoppage for instance by doing a player substitution during game stoppage (which currently needs to be timed based on what happens in the game).
As to where the ball is put for free shots I would personally prefer that players can just place the ball. The game doesn't restart until the ref blows the whistle so if it's widely off the ref could still put it in the right place or instruct players as to where it should be.
Comment
I think the rules should be written with top level of play in mind, and at the top level the referee should be placing the ball, there are two referees at the top level so there should be a referee near enough at all times. At lower levels like team training, teams will usually place the ball themselves and that is fine if everyone is fine with it.
Comment
I am against changing the time at this point. One of our low level leagues in Australia plays stop clock only for the last 10 minutes and only if the score is within a certain margin. No other low level leagues play stop clock because of how much extra time is required as a buffer. This leads me to believe that is not as easy to estimate the required time as it appears. We do have fewer stoppages than ice hockey, which could make it easier, but we also have round robins which means it impacts all following matches. Our Ice hockey isn't playing round robins and they still don't use it for their single matches.
I would support using it only for the gold and bronze matches as we almost always have time available for these two matches.
Comment
I'm curious why it's important the ref places the ball? It seems like something where we risk slowing the game down for no reason. The ref can still run over and place the ball himself if needed so it seems like a lot of free shots could be done quicker and none will be slower unless I'm missing something.
As to this change in general I tend to agree with Steven that this will make it harder for organisers to calculate how much buffer is needed for tournaments. I also think it's a bad solution to change the rules for games in the knockout stage as it seems to add new complexity for teams and organisers alike without the benefits being super clear.
It's also still unclear to me if we would restart the clock when the whistle is blown for game to continue or when game actually continues (ie when the free shot is taken) – if it's based on the whistle a team could still run the clock at the end of the game presumably.
Comment
Most of the tournaments in the german unicycle hockey league use round robin tournament schedules. There are no single matches which could last longer than today. The tournament schedules are optimised to fill the most (relative) game time into usually 8 hours of tournament time (10:00 to 18:00) with the least possible pause time. Using effective game time would make such a tight tournament schedule incalculatable. Some very active teams here for example often use trains to get to tournaments all through Germany, they need to rely on a fixed tournament schedule to get to their train home on time.
It would be inconsistent to use an effective game time just in the last x minutes of a game. To me all game time is equal, the last minutes are not more important than the first ones. Goals you did not shoot in the first minutes of a game you will probably also not shoot in the last minutes.
The same rules should apply to all games, why should group games be handled different to final games? This just creates confusion.
On the other hand we could take a look over at how unicycle basketball is handling their efffective game time (at the last unicon):
- Using several small fields adds flexibility for long and short games - mostly not applicable to hockey.
+ third/fourth referee are mandatory for time and foul count - each team could send two instead of one player as referees / time keepers to the next game.
- no fixed tournament schedule, you do not know when your next game will start
What are advantages and disadvantages of using an effective game time in unicycle hockey?
+ Fair use of all game time
+ minimised delay of game time
+ reduced rush at game end
- reduced game time due to expected pause time
- increased delay of tournament time
- increased number of unofficials per game
- higher difficulty of tournament organisation
- increased chance of backtalk or game delay at stopped clock
In fact already today a referee could enforce effective game time by taking time outs at every stoppage of play! what do you think about that?
Over the last year I witnessed more referees taking time outs to discuss unclear situations with the co-referee or players, which I think is a good way in between.
This would mean a big change in unicycle hockey. I do not see the neccessity to change this. I think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
Ciao Ole
Comment
Here are some example comparisons between effective time and relative time in some sports:
https://www.nationalsarmrace.com/?p=475
Comment
A clarification of a previous message from me
I am against changing the time at this point. One of our low level ICE HOCKEY leagues in Australia plays stop clock only for the last 10 minutes and only if the score is within a certain margin. No other low level ICE HOCKEY leagues play stop clock because of how much extra time is required as a buffer.
Comment
Ok so we have three options
1) Stop clock rules for all matches
2) Stop clock rules for final (?) minutes of match
3) Stop clock rules for only medal matches
4) No stop clock rules.
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*Four options
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Thanks for the summary.
In my opinion your third option are in reality two options:
3a) stop clock rule for medal matches during entire duration
3b) stop clock rule for medal matches for final (?) minutes of match
And one additional thing would be to discuss what exactly the "medal matches" would be and if we would like to extend this to matches during the knockout phase.
As many points were brought up that point towards the difficulty of the effective play time, option 1) doesn't seem feasible. Thus in my opinion, we should go for option 3b (or option 2).
Comment
If we are to use stop clock rules my suggestion is to use 3A for the entirety of 1 vs 2 and 3 vs 4 match at tournaments.
3a) stop clock rule for medal matches during entire duration all minutes of the match are just as important so I do not see the value in using 3B
It seems to me it may be the most likely ignored rule by tournament organisers at lower competitions and would likely only be used at big tournaments like UNICON and European Championships. At UNICON we often have specific time set aside for these finals matches because UNICON organisers want the ability for spectators to attend. This means we have much less issues with timing for the final two matches and therefore running it for the entire duration of the match should be possible. If we find that it works very well at a unicon then perhaps we can extend to other knock out matches in a future rulebook.
My final thoughts are just a few random ones
Would it realistically be used for all hockey comps at a UNICON. B probably, but C seems unnecessary.
If we are only using it for a few matches, do we specifically need this to be in the rule book? Could we instead discuss with A teams and implement at next UNICON to trial it in the final two matches?
Where does it go in the rulebook if only using for the final two matches and not using it for A B and C? Do we put it in the 14C Judges and Officials Rules section as a suggestion?
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I would expect these kinds of rules to be put in a section with rule where we accept more organiser discretion. In that case there's no problem in saying that at Unicon knockout games after a certain level has effective play time with the understanding it might be different in the A- and B-tournament. There's already discretion in game duration and finals are typically longer than regular games already – this will make them even longer if the nominal game time is kept.
Comment
I stopped the effective game time of three half times of euhc games today: half time length was 10 minutes. Effective game time was 7:45, 7:42 and 7:14. I stopped the clock at referee whistles and started it, when players continued by playing the ball, or crossing the middle line.
My main concern is: the time keeper has to be VERY CONCENTRATED on the game and must not be distracted.
So far the rulebook only knows single unicycle hockey games. There is no distinguishment between games, tournaments, group games or finales.
Comment
During our meeting on Friday, we came to the conclusion that we have to test the effective play time before we can come to any decision. We had the opportunity to test the effective play time during the EUHC2023 (thanks again to Ole for taking the time during several matches to have a first estimate and to Ansgar for talking to the organizers and making it possible!).
Here are some learnings from the three matches where we tested the effective play time and some additional discussion with players not part of this rulebook:
* (Almost) all players were open to this change but concerned about the additional effort (time keeper) and the planability of a tournament. Quite a few asked whether this would be implemented for all games, which wouldn‘t be a good idea in their opinion.
* The time keeper has to be very concentrated during the game. He should be a player or otherwise know the game quite well, otherwise it might be very hard. Doing this job for several hours is (probably) not possible as it is quite tiring. A potential upside might be that the time keeper is forced to pay attention which might not always be the case with the current rules.
* The time keeper needs the support of the (first) referee by lowering the arm when the ball is played in situations where the time keeper doesn‘t see the ball (e.g. corners).
* For players and spectators, the difference between relative and effective play time is (in most games and situations) very small. At least that was the feedback I got from a few spectators and players I talked to.
* For referees, the effective play time is nice as they don‘t need to rush and can take heir time to come to a decision.
* Effective play time is fairer in that sense that all teams play exactly the same amount of time and not different time depending on the amount of goals and fouls and the time the players take to execute a free short or restart after a game.
Based on the above points, I think we can conclude that playing with effective play time would be possible in unicycle hockey. However, as the difference is quite small, the question remains whether it’s worth the additional effort.
Going forward, I personally see a few possibilities:
* we don‘t change the rules and keep the relative play time
* we add the possibility to play with relative play time for certain games but use a very vague wording for which games it is used and thus leave it up to the organizers if they want to use it (and for which games)
* we specify that games above a certain length are played using effective play time (which has the drawback of increasing the length of already longer games)
* we include in the rules the definition of specific games (e.g. medal games or games in the knockout phase) and specify that for those effective play time is used
Comment
One drawback of specifying a time limit for when this is used is that it would effectively make a certain length of game not viable. If, say, it has to be used above 2x20 then a game of 2x20 will take 40 minutes + break (so maybe 35 minutes effective playtime) whereas a game of 2x25 would suddenly add 15+ minutes as each half is 5 minutes longer and the breaks have to be factored in.
Personally I think it might make sense to add it as an option for now and then perhaps the next EUHC could trial effective play time for more games and see if it's viable in a tournament setting. In general that seems like a good place to try out new rules.
Comment
* we don‘t change the rules and keep the relative play time
* we add the possibility to play with relative play time for certain games but use a very vague wording for which games it is used and thus leave it up to the organizers if they want to use it (and for which games)
I think either of these are the best options but I think the first option is likely the best where we leave it out of the rulebook and implement it at tournaments for the final two matches if agreed upon by the teams and organizers. The second option could also work if the vague wording allows the organizers to also use it for no games if that is the best option because of logistics.
My reasoning is that I think we would hopefully be able to use it for most large tournament finals, but there may always be logistical issues that make it a worse option and therefore we need the option to not use it also.
If we find that we only have two high level teams at a tournament that are both in the final, and the remaining players available to ref and time keep are lower quality referees/time keepers then we may feel it will increase our likelihood of stuffing up the time during the final and not want to use it.