Dead Balls, Deaf Ears

Watching the FA Cup first round highlights today I paid particular attention to the dead ball situations following a football question at last night’s quiz, which posed “in which two dead ball restarts does the ball have to be kicked forwards” that stimulated heated debate over the second one (the kick-off was agreed), that the protagonists then missed the next three questions in getting to an impasse over the interpretation of “forward” – I took the absolutist view that forward was towards the opponent’s goal, which by a process of elimination gave the penalty kick as the answer, while others took a relative point of view that forward was the way the kicker was facing and so reckoned a corner, with my reductio ad absurdum counter-argument that in fact you could back heel any dead ball so none had to go forward, falling on deaf ears; so a corner kick was included in our answer to be duly marked wrong.