New rules to make the game less static

New rules to make the game less static

|Tuesday 23 July 2013, 09:43|Wolfgang Philipps© Wolfgang Philipps

As usual a Technical Water Polo Congress was held again right before the opening the post-Olympic FINA World Championships here in Barcelona, Spain and approved several changes.
Most of the new rules intend to assist in removing static situations and providing more clarity to the correct application of the rules, regarding advantage and wasting-time rules.
All new rules shall be applied in the new season on FINA and LEN level.

Some of the new rules might change the style of playing.

Now an exclusion is already to be called for a player for holding with two hands or use two hands on an opponent anywhere in the field of play, other rules are making impeding more difficult. In case of a free-throw now the defending player shall move away from the player taking the free-throw before raising an arm to block a pass or shot.

The waste of time by the attacking team is to be punished from now on; right at the moment teams can only lose the ball by the 30-second-rule.

Other changes are concerning the setting of the matches. In the case of simultaneous exclusions of players of opposing teams the shot-clock will not be reset any more.

Furthermore there will now be one time-out per period for each team instead of the former two ones during the entire match which can make a game last longer, but extra-times will now be abolished to be replaced by an immediate penalty shootout in case of demand.

Finally each team must have a maximum of 11 field players and two goalkeepers so now that #13 playerwill be a second goalkeeper in any case. 

Only one TPWC proposal was declined which intended to call a penalty foul when an attacking player is fouled in the 5 meter area, whether or not the attacking player is holding the ball. Quite a number of proposals of rules were also handed in by the French and Brazilian Federation as well, but all of them were finally declined. One of them was playing men’s matches on a 25 meter pitch which would have made waterpolo closer to Basketball; a pretty small pitch. Another idea was to prohibit the rising of hands in case of free-throws which would have made scoring of instant free-throw much easier.