Villaflor: Making sense of the first leg experiment

SOMETHING odd happened during the first leg of the PFF Suzuki Under-23 National Cup Finals between fierce rivals Bacolod and Iloilo, the home team.

It wasn’t the home team losing that made it odd but the game going into extra time in the first leg. Now this was unusual, if not unheard of, and got me scratching my head the whole day.

According to a report published on national broadsheet Manila Bulletin yesterday, “Negros and Iloilo battled to a 1-all tie after the regulation ended, but to the players and coaches’ surprise tournament officials ruled that a 30-minute extra time was needed.”


“Usually, an extra time is only allowed in the second leg of a home-and-away series, but Red Avelino, the overall tournament coordinator, said it was part of the technical rules,” the report said.

Sports Editor Mike Limpag and I tried to recall any tournament that employed a first-leg extra time, to no avail. And was it even allowed?

There was only one way to find out, so I checked Fifa’s Laws of the Game and found this section: “Procedures to determine the winner of a match of home-and-away.”

The section states that extra time is one of the three methods “approved for
determining the winning team where competition rules require there to be a winning team after a match has been drawn.” The other two methods are the away goals and penalty kicks.


“Competition rules may provide for two further equal periods, not exceeding 15 minutes each, to be played,” the section says of extra time.

Take note of the phrase “may provide,” which suggest using extra time is optional. The rules also didn’t explicitly state that extra time can’t be used in the first leg of a two-leg series. So to the first question, yes the alteration did not violate anything.

Since I haven’t secured a copy of the technical rules of the competition, I figured that organizers probably didn’t find the need to employ the away goals rule in the U-23 finals, as they have opted for extra time in the first leg, although nothing could have stopped them from throwing in away goals just to complicate things.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why the organizers decided to depart from a format that football fans are more familiar with: a home-and-away match decided on away goals, and in case of an aggregate tie after the second leg, going to extra time, then penalty kicks.


There was one logical explanation, however, why the organizers might have conjured the first leg extra time: it was to take away the inherent advantage of the home team in the second leg. How so?


Since extra time is conventionally used in the second leg, the home team gets an undue advantage of 30 more minutes of having the crowd on their side plus many other intangibles that come with playing in home soil. The away team, on the other hand didn’t such an advantage in the first leg. (There is even a London study published in 2007 providing evidence of the second leg home advantage phenomenon.)

Anyway, to even things out, the U-23 finals organizers probably believed they have arrived at a “Solomonic” decision. But I’m just speculating, of course.

The finals, which stand at 1-3 in favor of Bacolod, will culminate with the second leg at the Panaad Stadium tomorrow, with IloIlo, which squandered its home advantage last Friday, now facing a nearly insurmountable task in hostile territory.

To be fair, the tournament matches did not disappoint, starting from the build up from the early stages leading to the “dream” finals between the country’s traditional football powerhouses.

And may I stress that discussions on extraneous aspects of the tournament, no matter how bothersome, shouldn’t distract us from a match up that has already lived up to expectations.

I figured we’ll have extra time after extra time to nitpick after the game.

(nsvillaflor@gmail.com)

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on May 21, 2011.