The decision to add considerably more World Cup injury time on average to matches was fueled by the wishes of the general public. That says Head of Referees Pierluigi Collina in an interview with FIFA.
The goal is to increase clean playing time. And that is already working quite well, according to the football association. “The problem of matches that contain less than 50 minutes of clean playing time is something that has been going on for some time,” said Collina. “People want to see football, more football. And we, FIFA and the IFAB (the international association of the rules of the game), have been asked to do something about this for years.’
“We asked the referees to try to add more accurate stoppage time at the end of each half,” continues Collina, who has given clear guidelines to the World Cup referees. “We have named specific interruptions. Especially the delay for injured players. We see that many injuries require more than a minute of treatment time.’
A good example of the upgraded injury time comes from the game between England and Iran, to which a total of 23 minutes was added. “We had the Iranian goalkeeper treated for 11 minutes and an English player who had three minutes of injury treatment. So fourteen of the 23 minutes came from those two events. And it should not be forgotten that eight goals were scored, with cheers added. Plus two VAR moments. A lot happened that resulted in so much injury time being given.’
France manager, has his own take on this extended injury time in the aftermath of his team’s loss against Tunisia. “We also have to take into account that we now play matches of 105 minutes,” Deschamps referred to the many injuries in injury times in this tournament.
“My guys are not exhausted,” Deschamps remarked. “But they invested a burst of power into the first two games. We didn’t go all-in on Tunisia. However, we also made several personal errors. This result indicates that we did not meet all of our objectives. But the major goal was to make it to the final sixteen.”
