The Culture of Diving: What’s the next step forward?

As an attacker, if you’re marginally fouled but it puts you in a worse position to score than you were before, players will make the instinctive decision to go down and regain that lost advantage. This is especially true when referees tend not to give penalties for slight fouls that don’t actually knock the player of his feet. It’s rare to see a penalty given for a slight body check or shirt pull that in other areas of the pitch would be instantly blown up for a free kick. Is being able to draw that contact and make the most of it part of the skill in being an attacking player? Can tempting the defender into making illegal contact, whether it be though leg contact, or shirt pulling, or holding be part of our beautiful game?

Most spectators will still instinctively say no, that it still ultimately constitutes a fraud. So what can we do about it if we’re going to put a stop to it? It seems apparent that with the pace of the modern game, referees can’t be expected to get every decision right, and stopping the game for every decision would change the flow of the game beyond recognition. So retrospective action seems to be the popular opinion, with a three match ban the most oft cited punishment. Yet that puts the punishment alongside bans for violent conduct such as elbowing or stamping on opponents. Surely an attempt to injure a fellow professional is worse than trying to con your way into a penalty?

Given the difficulty in judging the weight and severity of contact, and whether it is sufficient to unbalance a player, I think that it’s unlikely that a panel would be able to make a clear accusation of diving and impose a ban. Indeed it’s likely to alienate the very players that we are paying to entertain us. More plausible is that there could be retrospective punishment introduced for clear cases where there is no contact, and I would propose that a single match ban with the stigma that comes from that a sufficient punishment. It’s a limited step forwards, but draws an important theoretical line in the sand over what we deem to be acceptable behaviour in the sport.

More from Nick Bell @tracking_back

Footnote – Gary Neville’s peerless punditry on the matter is highly recommended. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNx5ok60U6A

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