Evanston: diving
Evanston: diving
This is the nineteenth soccer World Cup.
The previous eighteen have been won by only seven countries:
Brazil 5
Italy 4
West Germany 3
Uruguay 2
Argentina 2
England 1
France 1
I hadn’t realized before compiling this list, but South America and Europe are presently tied 9-9.
If you count Turkey as part of Europe--and for soccer purposes it is; Turkish club teams compete in the Champions League, which is the European club championship--then only one team outside Europe and South America has ever even made the semi-finals, and that was South Korea in 2002 when they were co-hosts with Japan.
This excludes a United States third place finish in the first World Cup in 1930 as being in the-real-teams-weren’t-there category, along with the United States gold medal in rugby at the 1920 Olympics.
I don’t have a favorite team to win this year’s World Cup, other than my previously expressed wish that it be an outsider, but I do have some teams I hope don’t win the cup because their players take too many dives. Chief among them is Italy, and second is Portugal, which is too bad because I like Portugal.
If you don’t know, a dive is taking an exaggerated fall after contact by an opposing player, and sometimes with no contact at all, in hopes of fooling the referee into calling a foul and awarding a free or a penalty kick.
Dives are the ugliest part of soccer, the equivalent of brawls in ice hockey, which are one of the reasons I don’t watch that sport.
I was told recently that professional ice hockey has attempted to clean up its act by adding another official.
Soccer is a flow sport, unlike major American sports which take place in bursts. I recall reading that in U.S. football, the ball is actually in play for about twelve minutes in a sixty minute game. In baseball, three hours of players standing and sitting are interrupted by seconds of action. And even basketball seldom sees a minute of continuous action without being stopped for a foul shot. So I don’t believe that adding an additional soccer official or having some sort of instant replay, which would compromise the essential flow of the game, is an acceptable solution.
However, FIFA and the governing bodies of the various major national leagues could reduce diving by suspending players after post-game reviews.
This is already an established practice in several sports, including I believe Australian Rules Football and rugby union.
Make the suspensions without pay and long enough to be painful to the players, their national teams and their clubs, and I expect that we would soon see far fewer dives; and the beautiful game would become still more beautiful.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010