Shugmaster wrote:Metal Iain wrote:No it doesn't, you silly billy!
It means that it gives managers the opportunity to deal with problems as and when they arise. That isn't tactical; that's merely convenient. Not that you can account for injuries like that of Ribery, but part of being a manager is choosing your subs in advance and in accordance with the problems that may arise playing against Italy, to continue that same example. Instead of having the opportunity to choose subs from the remainder of their squad during a game, a manager should have to make decisions concerning which players they'll likely need to use before the game. Otherwise it makes football super-pants number one.
Right Rugby boy... don't Rugby Union sides have a Gazillion replacements to choose from???
Does this make Rugby super-pants number one??
They have seven subs but you don't really have much leeway choosing them because rugby has specialist positions in a way that football doesn't. For example, you're bound to need a hooker, a scrum-half and a stand-off on the bench because their positions involve quite a bit that others don't. Then you're likely to have a prop, a second row, a back row and one other back to make up the numbers but, even then, you need to have people that know what they're doing so the line out and scrum doesn't go to the dogs. Then there're also issues of knowing that you have someone that can kick well if your first-choice kicker gets injured. This sort of throws a spanner into the works of the football-rugby comparison because, whereas you could sub on a defender for a striker if you had no alternative in football, subbing on a prop for a fullback would be suicide in rugby because the dimensions of the players in rugby vary a lot, i.e. unlike football players they're not all 5' 8" and 11 stone.
It used to be that they would have two replacements, i.e. you could only bring one player on for another if the player on t'field was incapable of going on, but the advent of professionalism - c. 1996 - changed things round a bit. You also get blood replacements: a player is subbed off for a short period of time to get stitches or whatever because someone deemed it dangerous to have players bleeding all over the pitch. Let's not forget that rugby also involves about 10, 000 percent the physical exertion that football does so it sort of makes sense to have more subs.
