Diving in Football

This past Sunday Steven Gerrard was booked for diving during the Liverpool-Chelsea match. This got me thinking again about this insidious problem and how to tackle it (so to speak). I'm not trying to single out Gerrard b/c I have no idea if he is a particularly grievous offender, but he's definitely a high-profile player and this one incident was a blatant dive in the later stages of very important game that was tied at the time. So, apologies to Liverpool fans for bringing up the topic with that lead in.

Right now we're stuck in limbo where commentators and fans generally deride diving and point out the obvious ones, but nothing is done about it, so it continues. I think the diving epidemic needs to be dealt with in one of three ways.

First, it's possible that fans deal with it by slowly accepting it as part of the game. I think this is largely the case in some of the continental European leagues and South American leagues. There, it's not something that is done proudly or a lot, but when it happens it is not met with outrage. Think of basketball and how the hard foul has become an accepted way to stop a fast break. Why didn't popular opinion develop to see this as a cheap, unsporting tactic? For a baseball example, why is the pitcher allowed to try to pick off runners, but the defense can't use trickery to turn an infield fly into a double play? In the first instance, the "trickery" is accepted and in the second it is not and therefore the infield fly rule was put in. The point is, in all sports teams are going to figure out every way to get any small advantage that falls within the rulebook. Sometimes these strategies are seen as positive, smart innovations and sometimes they are seen as cheap tactics that violate the spirit of the game. Right now most people see diving as falling into the second category, but I don't see any a priori reason why it has to be there. (As an aside, the ridiculous number of offensive charging calls in college basketball has become a huge pet peeve of mine. In my opinion, this was a tactic that started out as a smart innovation to break up a fast break, but has since tipped over into a cheap, overused tactic that definitely violates the spirit of the game - I mean, those guys aren't even TRYING to play defense, they're trying to stand there and get run into!!!! Perhaps this is a topic for another day and how Duke is the number one violator).

OK, but for those of us who do see diving as violating the spirit of the game (and for that matter, the spirit of your manhood), what can be done to stop it?

Option two would be to deal with it like American Football would. In American football, there are 25 referees on the field, a million rules, stoppages in play every 7 seconds, and video replay. This allows the game to be very tightly controlled and every infraction to be spotted and penalized. This works quite well for American football. In football, referees could be added and/or video replay could be used to identify diving and there would be some penalty associated with it. For instance, an impartial observer could watch the replay of a match and retrospectively give out yellow cards for diving. I think this would work pretty well. Not only would accumulated yellow cards lead to suspension as it does now, a running tally of "diving cards" could be kept and shame heaped upon the worst offenders.

An even better solution would be one where the players themselves enforce no diving as an "unwritten rule" of the game like baseball and hockey players do. In this scenario, the penalty for diving would be perhaps a hard foul later in the game, but also, and more importantly, the scorn of your peers. Doesn't this work well in baseball and hockey? I don't know enough about hockey to come up with a good example, but in baseball there is the obvious one of a pitcher beaning a home run-admiring rookie (which seems like a harsh punishment for the crime, when you think about it). Why couldn't a Roy Keane type figure deal out some vigilante justice to floppers?

There's a few reasons why this last approach might not work. First, the consensus amongst players obviously isn't there yet. This is partly why the Gerrard dive caught my attention so much. Here is a great player, an Englishman, a rough n tumble type of guy - if he's diving then everyone's diving. Second, the penalties in football are too harsh for any kind of retaliation or self-enforcement to work. A hard tackle, if seen as deliberate, could easily be a straight red card. Now your team is playing with 10 men for the rest of the game, and you're looking at a 3 game suspension. In a 38 game season, that is too much of a consequence.

So, it looks like option #2 is the way to go. Let's lobby to get this instituted right away!