I love snow games. I love them with a passion. You get to see the sport you love, in a setting that makes professional athletes stumble around like toddlers because of the conditions. But, even I’ve got to admit that snow games aren’t always fun — especially when one team decides to wear white.
Istanbul Basaksehir and Sivasspor played in the Turkish Super Lig back on January 16, and Sivasspor wore white. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but heavy snow started falling during the game — and by the second half they were almost completely camouflaged with the pitch.
By all accounts this didn’t impact the game on the field. The players were still able to identify each other, but on TV it just looked like one team of disembodied heads running around the field. It was weird, confusing, and a bit of a mess really.
That said, this is FAR from the worst incident of snow making things confusing in soccer. Glentoran played Linfield on Boxing Day of 1995 in an Irish match, in a game where heavy snow blanketed the pitch. The orange snow ball burst in the first half, and the teams didn’t have a back up snow ball for the game — causing them to have to use an all-white ball. It was a mess.
Raucous crowds chanted “Can’t see the ball!” players got lost too, sometimes tackling players nowhere near the ball, thinking they had it at their feet. Now THIS is something I can truly get behind, because it’s so dumb it totally breaks the game.
We need more snow games. Just one or two a year is fine. Just to remind us that athletes are fallible like the rest of us.