Null Grav Footballers

The following page is a brief that is only available to NGF players, coaches, referees and people with a relevant Academic specialisation. Please do not copy and paste the contents to other players.

With that proviso you may feel free to communicate the information IC using your own words.

Each team plays all the other teams twice in a season. To add a little more excitement, there is then a knockout stage between the top four teams. The fixtures are generally arranged so that Red and Green play each other towards the end of the stages.

Fixture list

The season starts in July (Turn 2), with two games per team per month. The knockout stage begins in April (Turn 11) and the final is in June (Turn 13).

The top four teams (plus their department or sector) will get bonus rations for the duration of the knock-out stage. People who are residents of a winning sector and part of a winning department will get double the prize.

There are prizes and glory for the top three teams, including extra luxury rations and more computer run-time. What's more, the whole sector or department of the overall champion gets a bonus to their resource allocations. Plus, the sector has access to a special edition shirt and the coveted Special Flavour Sauce, an addition to the food fabbers formulated just for your sector! As Red won last season, Red sector residents can enjoy Ketchup on all their meals.

NGF is played by two teams of 11 players with a spherical ball 200mm in diameter. The walls of the pitch are transparent, allowing the audience to view the game strapped into banks of chairs. The players wear special footwear which, when stamped with sufficient force, sticks to the walls. This creates a semblance of gravity, and allows players to arrest their momentum and change directions. Top players make this look easy; the teams at the bottom of the league show the difficulty of these acrobatic manoeuvres.

Although called football, players can use any part of their body to propel the ball. It is a contact sport, and there is no penalty for physical challenges. It is also legal to propel a team-mate with the ball. To stop a player 'hugging' the ball and being propelled into the goal, the opposing team can perform a 'tackle', which involves any manoeuvre which causes the player in possession to stop moving towards the opposing goal-wall. The player in possession must then relinquish the ball within 3 seconds or be sent off for 5 minutes. The match consists of two halves of 40 minutes each. The number of substitutes depends on the league, but is generally high as the injury rate tends to be high.

There are two referees who stay off the pitch in the normal run of play. They will enter the pitch if a player who has been sent off refuses to leave, and are permitted to use sufficient force to remove them.

Whilst there is no penalty for physical challenges, injuries that cause a game stoppage for the pieces to be picked up is frowned upon, because game stoppages are dull. It's much better if the injured party can get themselves off-pitch for treatment.

Tackles are a common way of defending: make the player with the ball move backwards and they have 3 seconds to relinquish the ball. 'Relinquish the ball' can mean passing it to a team mate or attempting to score. If the tackled player doesn't relinquish the ball, they are sent off for 5 minutes in the sin bin.

Referees can send people off to the sin bin for 'violent conduct' or not playing 'to the spirit of the game'. This is rare, probably because the sin bin is located next to the referee box…

Each team can have up to 7 players on the substitutes bench, and substitutions can be made at any time. The entrances to the pitch are behind the goals, so a player must go behind his/her goal and swap with the sub. Players are allowed to be re-substituted back into the game.

Transfers between teams are permissible, as long as the player belongs to the relevant sector or department. In the knockout stage, players can only play for the team they last played for, so there are no transfers between the league stage and the knockout stage.

NGF is brutal and harsh. Saying that, there is an unwritten rule that games should be entertaining rather than one-sided blood-baths. Not many people want to see a career-ending injury.

There are several betting syndicates for NGF. The up-market, Computer-sanctioned betting does not allow players or coaches to bet on the games, but some people would probably take your bet if you tried to find them.

There have not been any enquiries regarding match-fixing for about 20 years. This isn't to say it doesn't happen, just that it is not seen as such a problem that Harmony or Computer has had to do anything about it recently.

A new NGF referee is being recruited following the post-season retirement of Polly Blue - recently a minor celebrity for her controversial decisions in the last finals match. Apparently the post-game celebrations were a bit much for her and she was taken to Health suffering from a massive drug overdose (which is odd, given that Polly was not known to be much for narcotics). In a statement issued from the med-bay she stated that she was retiring immediately from the game.

The new referee is likely to be someone from Harmony. Marshal Alyssa Red is taking charge of vetting the candidates before they go before Computer for selection.

UPDATE (Turn 2): Lyla Red is the new referee.

The major news has obviously been Wheatley Red's transfer to Harmony, but there have been a couple of the more traditional transfers from departments to sectors: Roy Blue has moved from Engineering to Blue, and Sly White has moved from Navigation to White. With several weeks still to go before the new season, will there be any new transfers or debutantes?