Boss attends UEFA meeting

Vicente Del Bosque was one of Europe's top coaches called to a UEFA meeting in Geneva on Thursday to discuss radical changes to the game.

Del Bosque joined Barcelona's Carles Rexach and Deportivo La Coruna's Javier Irureta as the Spanish representatives present at the meeting which was also attended by other renowned coaches including Fabio Capello, Marcello Lippi, Gerard Houllier and Fatih Terim to discuss plans that they feel would improve the game.

Five radical ideas were proposed to UEFA officials during the meeting, including a rule to change the number of substitutions in a game from three to five, plus increasing the number of substitutes on the bench from six to nine.

Other ideas brainstormed were the potential re-scheduling of international friendlies to Tuesday's to give resting time before the weekend league matches, plus the coaches agreed that they all would like to see an end to the current yellow card system, whereby castigations are accumulated until a player has five yellow cards and is forced to miss the next game. Sometimes this means that a player has to miss playing in an important final as was the case with Valencia's Amedeo Carboni two years ago when he missed out on the Champions League final. The coaches want the ruling changed to the one similar to what is in operation in France - whereby when a player is penalized he then goes for five games without receiving a yellow card, then the original card is overlooked leaving the player with a clean slate and removing the chance of accumulating cards during the course of a tournament.

Lastly, all of the coaches want to do away with the use of deciding a drawn match with the golden goal, they would prefer to see a return to the old system of resolving stalemate ties with a penalty shoot-out.