I am immersed in soccer. Football, as it is known on this side of the Atlantic. I watch a half-dozen matches a week. Sometimes more. I edit soccer copy every day I walk inside the offices of The National. Soccer (or cricket) is on the TV behind me hour after hour.

I can tell you who is going to win the major European leagues and who will probably be relegated, and I know way, way too much about the UAE’s domestic league. (Kalba relegated last night; we all saw that coming; Shabab might actually make the last 16 of the Asian Champions League?)

What I am not getting past, though, are some really basic flaws in the game of soccer. Flaws its fans don’t seem to notice because, often, it is the only sport they follow.

To wit: the utter randomness of too many goals in a game that produces too few goals.

Al Jazira, one of the bigger UAE clubs, played at Dubai SC last night. Jazira dominated the game but did not score for 80-plus minutes against a tightly packed Dubai defense.

Dubai’s negative tactics (another problem with a game that produces so few scores; too often the team that packs it in gets a result; see Chelsea v Barcelona, circa 2012) looked like they would yield a victory when a Dubai guy put a shot through the legs of Jazira’s goalkeeper, Ali Kasheif, in the 62nd minute.

Dubai ought to have won, except for this fluke Jazira goal.

Abdullah Mousa, Jazira’s left back, was outside the box, not far from the line, when he lobbed a ball in front of goal. Jazira had zero guys in the box, or even headed for it, but there it went. Just throwing it in there. For lack of anything else to do.

The ball was touched, lightly, by a first Dubai defender, than a second, and was barely moving, after the second deflection, when it angled downward and went off the toe of the shoe of a third Dubai defender — and directly into the goal.

Did Jazira deserve that goal? Not at all. Unless you want to get to some secondary and tertiary lines of thinking, such as “hang around the other guy’s end long enough and good will come from it” … “bloop it into the middle and maybe one of your guys will get his head on it” … or “throw it in there and hope that something weird happens”.

Too many soccer games pivot on that sort of goal. One that took no particular skill. Accidents.

In a sport where the average score might be 2-1, to have a significant fraction of goals scored accidentally (or, worse, via penalty) … detracts from the quality of the game.

If I’m going to have so few goals in my sport, could I please have them be legit, real goals, that involved skill and not good/awful luck?

This is a problem for me. Always has been. Would be for others, too, if they knew any better. I really do believe that.