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Diving is a blight on our modern game. We complain endlessly about referees getting decisions wrong, yet who can blame them when the players are doing everything they can to fool them? Diving is cheating, plain and simple, and football is the only sport I can think of where cheating is accepted as “part of the game”, and it’s accepted to the point where we’ve started to forget the rules.
One of the apologists favourite excuses is “oh, but there was contact”. There was contact therefore it was a penalty regardless. We had an example of it in the Stoke v Chelsea match this weekend when Frank Lampard burst into the box and then went down.
At first viewing it seemed as though he had been fouled, but the replay clearly showed Lampard simulating a trip before the defender made any contact with him. That is a dive and cheating, for the following reasons:
- There is no guarantee that, had Lampard not already begun his dive, there would have been any contact.
- In order to throw himself to the floor, Lampard had to subvert the instinct to avoid a collision.
- Even if there had been contact there is no guarantee that it would have been sufficient to bring Lampard down.
In that instance the referee did not give a penalty, nor did he punish the dive. This suggests that either he felt the “contact” did not merit a foul or he did not apply the rules when it comes to simulation. My money is on the latter – in fact, either way the referee should have cautioned Lampard for diving. Yet another example of a referee reluctant to make a decision for fear of getting it wrong.
The idea that contact equals penalty is wrong. For that to be true it would require a completely different definition of the word “foul” for use inside the opposition penalty area. Ask yourself this: would Lampard have gone down like that in his own penalty area even if there had been sufficient contact first? Clearly not, instead you would have seen him desperately struggle to stay on his feet to try and avert the danger.
For the players, there is little to be lost in giving the dive a try – they know that in the unlikely event of their being caught the worst they can expect is a booking. The punishments are not severe enough and neither are the referees.