When playing football, or soccer as it's called in South Africa and other countries, players sometimes fall down. It is to be expected given that they run very fast while opponents chase them as a ball rolls at their feet. Even without all of that people fall down. It's part of life, a part of the game and is accepted.
However not accepted in football is something the rulebook of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) calls 'simulation'. Simulation is in essence simulating falling down or, if not entirely simulating falling down, then embellishing your fall down so it looks like a worse fall down than it was or, more to the point, so it looks as if your opponent made you fall down when in fact he or she may had nothing to do with it. This is more commonly called diving.
Players Dive in Football to Gain Penalty Kick or Opponent Send-off
It likely did not take players long to realize that an advantage might be gained by feigning contact from the opposition (e.g. a penalty kick) and once they did figure it out diving was born. The carding system for infractions, invented by English referee Ken Ashton, was first used at the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Mexico and once again it is likely that players quickly saw that by simulating a fall they might gain the advantage of an opposing player being carded or sent off.
It's not sporting but arguably has been on the rise and become more...dramatic. If you saw Brazil play the Ivory Coast in the 2010 World Cup you saw an example of simulation. Kader Keita bumped, it seemed purposeful, into Brazilian star Kaka and Kaka's elbow hit Keita's chest, not hard. Immediately Keita grabbed at his face as if he'd just had a shot of Botox and he then flew backwards to the ground. French referee Stephane Lannoy bought it and gave Kaka a yellow card, Kaka's second of the match, which meant an immediate send-off.
However in England's 1-0 victory over Slovenia on Wed. June 23 at the 2010 World Cup German referee Wolfgang Stark did not buy what might well have been a dive by Ashley Cole; Stark gave Slovenia a kick for simulation when Cole fell with more drama than the referee felt warranted. Even with slow motion replay it was hard to tell whether Stark got it right,showing how difficult it is to call a dive.
Young Players See Heroes Dive on Pitch and Try it Themselves
Like wonderful ball control, passing or brilliant set-pieces, when young players see their football heroes dive many will emulate them. Consequently diving is now something seen in the young levels of play in most countries and by needs is being addressed by coaches.
"Unfortunately it's part of the modern day game as we have seen during the World cup and I hope FIFA allows referees to punish players for diving and give out suspensions for blatant diving," says Burns Jennings, a coach of kids near Vancouver, Canada. "When I coach the boys, I challenge them to stay on their feet. I tell them: 'challenge hard but stay on your feet.'"
FIFA Teaching Referees to Identify Dives and Punish Players
Embellishing, simulating, diving, whatever it's called, Kader Keita's behavour, and Ashley Cole's is not what the game, this is according to FIFA and common sense, needs or wants. FIFA is in fact being pro-active in trying to rid football of these histrionics and. like in hockey, have trained their officials in the art of determining if a fall down was a simulation or a legitimate result of a tackle. FIFA has also been part of studies on how to detect diving and are passing the information along to their referees.
At the annual general meeting of the Int. Football Association Board (IFAB), of which FIFA is a member, in March of 2008, the organization declined Scottish FA suggestion to implement video replays to be viewed after a match in order to sanction simulation that may have been missed by the ref. However IFAB did release the following statement: "...IFAB members agreed that simulation is an act of cheating which must be intensively fought and sanctioned."
Football Dives Continue But FIFA Looks to Stop It
For now though, and the 2010 World Cup in South Africa appears proof of it, diving continues but with FIFA and it's member organizations continuing to work at eradicating the practice it shouldn't be too long before fans see the incidences of diving taking a dive.
On youtube you can view a commercial from England's Guardian newspaper used to draw fans to it's coverage of the 2004 Euro Cup; the paper's TV ad takes a poke at Italy, a country many English football fans feel produces the greatest diving offenders. You can also view what is reputed by some to be the all-time most blatant dive,this one by Alberto Gilardino of AC Milan.
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