With all of the talk in recent weeks it appears that the PL/FA or whoever may have told the refs to be hard on divers. Today we have seen Torres and Sterling booked after being fouled and the refs got it wrong. Torres got a red card for being fouled (and one of several questionable decisions today that favoured Man U) and Sterling got booked. On top of that there were other questionable decisions in Man Us favour today. So yet again the main talking point of the day is not football, but refs decisions
The players have only themselves to blame. They have over the last 20 years made this shameful acting into the norm. One of my best memories of football was in the 1990 WC opening game Arg v Cameroon in which Claudia Caniggia skips 2 attempts to fell him but he kept going until finally he is hacked down by the big lump who got sent off. I love the way Caniggia kept going and didn't go down. Diving used to occur every now and then back in the , mostly a player would go down to stop play and give his team a breather if they were under pressure. But now it's ridiculous. It ruins the game. If FIFA/UEFA/FA had dealt with it properly when it first started becoming prevalent it would not have got this bad. But now that it is, we will see innocent casualties in this war on diving. Seems we either accept bad decisions won by the cheats, or accept that non-divers will get the red card if the refs think they dived. Let's see if this approach has any effect.
I'm sorry mate but you cant have it both ways, people have been claiming for weeks that refs need to take a hard line on diving, now that they are people are up in arms about it. The torres one could have been interpreted either way, I'm not convinced he dived, but in also not convinced he was fouled. One thing you can be sure is that all players will have seen what happened this weekend and will think twice before diving, so what's the problem, of course there will be wrong decisions, but im glad they are taking a hard line on it, as it's the only way to stop it. This has only been blown out of proportion because chelsea already had a man (rightfully) sent of, and because it was such a high profile game, if it had been in the Wigan v west ham game the media would not be giving a ****.
The Torres booking is tricky. He was both fouled and dived. The contact was not enough to bring him down the way he went (nor to induce the agony in which he was rolling around until the card came out and it suddently disappeared ), so if the ref got it wrong, it was because Torres felt the need to gild the Lily. Tough. And as Enigma says, sends out a strong message to make them think about diving - although the furore around it will probably ruin that bit.
The problem with booking players for exaggerating contact is that litterally every player in world football does it, including the british cloggers
I read somewhere today that someone said the only way to stamp this out is to allow action to be taken against the players involved using video evidence. They were saying like in rugby with video refs, but any action would do for this. For example, if a player was proven to have dived by video evidence then they are given a one game ban or if it resulted in a game changing result like a red card or winning goal give them a 3 game ban. Theyd soon start trying to stay on their feet.
