soccer usages

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:40 PM -0400 10/24/02, Fritz Juengling wrote:
>Of course not.  A goal is something that you are trying to attain.  You don't
>guard your own goal.  Your goalie stands in front of the other team's goal.
>same priciple as in basketball.  The other team has a basket, or goal, and
>you try to keep them from scoring into it, i.e. their basket or goal.
>Fritz
>
Not to pile on here, but the phrase "an own goal" (in soccer) seems
to confirm that the goal your keeper/goalie is guarding is indeed
your own goal, not the other team's.  (The phrase relates to what
happens when a player inadvertently--at least one assumes it was
inadvertently--knocks the ball into his own goal, scoring for the
other team.  This happens in basketball too, but there's no specific
term for it.  In hockey it happens more frequently, but I'm not sure
whether "own goal" applies.  My understanding is the same as most of
the other commentators here:  in each sport, you defend your own goal.

One more piece of indirect evidence:  in basketball, there's of
course no goalie or keeper, but there is "goal-tending", in
particular normal ("defensive") goaltending, when an opposing
player's shot is blocked on the way down or swatted against the
backboard, the referee calls goaltending, and the shot is allowed as
if it had gone in (there are subtle rules on when it counts as
goaltending and when it counts as a legitimate block).  In such
cases, the defender is overzealously "tending" his own goal.  There
is a much more rarely called "offensive goaltending" violation in
which a player tries to tap in or rebound a ball in the abstract
"cone" above the opposing basket, but this is clearly derivative and
marked.

Larry