Diving In Football - Is It Now Part of the Game?
Call me 'Bella from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light' because association football is gaslighting me! There's been a peculiar re-assessment of 'diving' in the last two decades, and it's a transformation that had passed me by until recently. Simulating or exaggerating, contact with an opponent to win a foul has imperceptibly and deftly undergone something of character rehabilitation. I'm old enough (24) to remember when diving was the most ignominious misdeed it was possible to commit on a football pitch. I'm absolutely positive that's what we all thought about diving. There was a consensus. Now I'm being assured that diving is fine. Was it even a problem in the first place? Have I gone mad?
Prior to this newfound amnesty for the 'diver', this moniker placed its bearers among the sport's most decried miscreants. Diving, and its proponents, were a cancer. It was a moralistic failure, a blight, a satanic act, tearing the beautiful game asunder and rendering a godless 'Wild West' of a sport from its sullied chunks.
And suddenly: Danny Murphy is eulogising about a canny fall on Match of the Day. Owen Hargreaves is praising that which was once called unscrupulousness; now cleverness. Has diving become a benign part of the game? Is it on-par with a goalkeeper cocooning the ball in a quasi-foetal embrace after intercepting a late cross into the box? Is it now no more controversial than bringing on an expert shot-stopper in the death throes of extra-time in anticipation of the impending penalty shootout? It seems that diving has been largely stripped of its reputation as the public enemy No. 1 of football. Its transgressive qualities all but dissipated, promoting it to a position of acceptance. An uncontroversial entry into the footballing canon.
Even the more critical end of the spectrum has lost its fervour in condemning diving. I write this during Portugal vs France European Championships game, as Jermaine Jenas opines on the subject of hard sliding tackles and their virtual eradication from the game. It's an earnest plea for such play to be allowed in the modern-day, more than a castigation of players these days. Really, these tackles are already relics. They exist now only in the fading memory and the haziness of footage from seasons past, ensconced in the prism of 4:3 television broadcasts, with black leather boots and shin pads with dimensions that rival the thickness of Jeff Bezos's wallet. A few years ago, as recently as a few years ago, making contact with the ball before the player was all the alibi a tackler required. A stud so much as grazing the football, a glancing connection, was enough to justify whatever collateral damage formed part of the transaction. The ensuing corporeal ramifications were a footnote, providing the tackler got to the ball first. In an age when VAR is poking its interventionist fingers into the equation, there's ample opportunity for
Now, defenders' licence to crunch has been withdrawn, and fouls are awarded if the defender is adjudged to have made unfair contact at any point in the tackle, even after successful dispossession of the attacker. I'll freely admit that, even at my age, I'm one of football's old-fashioned misers. I feel eternally miserable at the prospect of being subjected to a lifetime of daft transfer reveal videos. I'm keenly aware of the tragedy of the ultra-sanitised "Fans were class today. We go again," Tweets that have usurped the taciturn match-day programme interview as our best glimpse into the life of an elite footballer (in which Favourite food: pasta and Go-to karaoke song: Nothing Compares 2 U were mainstay answers). It's true; my appetite for revolution in football is probably not overly dissimilar from your grandad's, so you can probably guess which side of the debate I fall on.
My own misgivings aside, how does the pardoning of diving affect the sport materially? It certainly gives more credence to football as an offensive spectacle. Tricksy dribblers are free to play with impunity now that their opponents can be reprimanded for so much as attempting a tackle. Watch any footage of Diego Maradona, and you can see how the sport's disposition has altered in that regard over the last forty-odd years. The doctrine for dealing with the Argentinian was to batter, harry, and assault him in a manner that would probably earn you a GBH charge nowadays, let alone a stoic 'play-on' gesture from the referee. It's obvious that a Maradona playing today would be allowed to conduct themselves with undiminished aplomb. Emancipated from the fear of having your ankles broken by Graeme Souness, which, in fairness, is a basic human right that we should all enjoy in the workplace, whether your office is the verdant green of a World Cup pitch, or…well… an office.
In some ways, I can't help but feel the genius of Maradona would have
been somewhat undermined had he been operating in an era that protected players like him. Had it been acceptable for the superstar to exaggerate contact to curry favour with the officials, had Barry Davies been able to purr over el Diego's furtive and underhand simulation - would his achievements have lost some of their lustre? For me, the unbridled joy of watching footage of Maradona is seeing how brutally he was kicked, chopped, barged, and elbowed by the game's more agricultural personalities, only to respond with the most astonishing skill and inventiveness. To run the length of the pitch and score is impressive still. It was a hundred times as impressive in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final when eleven fully-grown Englishmen earnestly tried to cause you harm. Doubtless, Maradona would disagree, but I feel that diving and the implications thereof extract some of the romanticism of football. Overcoming adversity makes for a great story. Maradona's highlights are a testament to that, even if the bruises on his shins take umbrage with my argument. I'll politely decline to comment on any other goals in that 1986 WC quarter-final since I feel they are not at all relevant to my point…
One modern player who I enjoy watching, due in no small part to his eschewing of the newly-accepted dark art of diving, is Romelu Lukaku, who's been making an account of himself in the Euros. The Belgium and Inter Milan striker cuts a muscular and powerful figure, fights through tackles and plays with a determination that endears me towards him. When a defender trips or otherwise disrupts him, Lukaku's intention is to keep going, to right himself. It's become a bold decision to forgo the easy spot-kick in favour of a bit of tried-and-tested DIY. You don't need to go down if you're just good enough to shake off tacklers and press on anyway. Of course, Lukaku's an ideal. Not many attackers can boast his physicality and fortitude, and the out-muscling of Serie A centre-halves is easier typed than done (I presume, having never had the opportunity to tussle against Giorgio Chiellini, but the night is still young, I suppose).
This leaves me pondering: why the change? When did it all go so right for the Jurgen Klinsmann's and Neymar's of this world? My mind goes first to the oft-recited fact about Aston Villa midfielder Jack Grealish: the most-fouled player in the Premier League two years running. It has swiftly become one of the unwritten rules of football commentary (nestled cosily between you are only allowed to speak in an impersonation of Jon Motson and always have some sort of Lynamesque comment about skipping work whenever England are kicking off during office hours) to mention this fact, and I find the connotations of this statement rather interesting. Implicitly, the England maestro is credited with drawing fouls. It's a first-class statistic of his, on nodding terms with goals and assists. Indeed, I couldn't tell you where he ranks on the leaderboard of 'headers won', but I could certainly tell you how often his dribbles culminate in a free-kick. In the past, I feel like such a sentiment would have been reeled off contemptuously, as evidence that said player was a habitual diver, an egregious simulator. Could it be that diving was viewed with a xenophobic suspicion for most of the last twenty years? A 'foreign import' come to introduce deception and subterfuge to the purity of the English game? It's hard to say. Certainly, plenty of English players have garnered their fair share of criticism, earning reputations as divers. Still, I can't escape the feeling that this euphemistic phrasing of the Grealish statistic bears some of the familiarity of that old footballing phrase: "you'd love to have a player like that in your side". When other nationalities are diving, it's wrong. When your own players are doing it, the English press finds it easier to get on board.
Diving, as a concept, has surely been around for as long as humans have been able to both deceive and kick, but as a pressing issue of sporting morality, it seems to spawn from the early days of the newly-rebranded Premier League. It was an era when, amongst a cast of mostly white British players, an overseas introduction was much more of a novelty. An age when televised football was still pretty thin on the ground, and footage of players from other countries was virtually inaccessible, aside from major international tournaments. In these conditions, every player coming to Britain was an education. A microcosm of what lay beyond the British Isles. It was a time when the idea that diving was un-British was easier to propagate. It just wasn't cricket.
Of course, this mood change also coincides with the prevalence of increasingly high-definition slow-motion replays. Every moment in a modern match can be revisited with as much clarity as contemporary broadcasting technology can provide, and tackles always look worse when slowed down. Every gory detail of every hammering tackle can be poured over and analysed. It probably shows us, mere mortals, just how nasty a tackle from an elite player can be. Similar ramifications have been felt in other sports, even ones without football's reputation for diving. In 2018, Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews was flagged for ending his sacking of Alex Smith on top of the quarterback. The infamous officiating decision certainly wouldn't have occurred in the days when players were distant and blurry facsimiles of people on a screen. Nowadays, they're unambiguously human beings, with fragile and breakable bodies that clash with vivid fleshiness. It's little wonder that contact sports have moved in the direction of protecting athletes from collisions in various ways. Probably there's an element of understanding. Diving is seen less as an outright simulation of a bad tackle but as emphasis on unfair play. Used not as outright fraud but as accentuation, ensuring that the referee is not allowed to miss what just happened. Tell-all action replays make diving more obvious, but they also highlight the more subtle fouls, and there's now a ready acceptance of free kicks and penalties won in such circumstances. Previously these imperceptible fouls went somewhat under the radar, and defenders could get away with being a little more heavy-handed.
Despite all this conjecture, I can't help but feel we've all just got tired of condemning it. Ciro Immobile was guilty of an extremely flagrant bit of simulation in Italy's quarter-final against Belgium, writhing agonisingly in the 18-yard box, before peering up to see Nicolo Barella wheeling away in celebration and rising from his malingering state to join the festivities. Fifteen years ago, every tabloid newspaper in the land would be leading some kind of pious crusade against him, attempting to hound the ignoble striker out of the tournament. In 2021 I just scoffed at it briefly, amused more than anything else, and mostly forgot about it. I don't know if any of us have grown or changed at all, I think we've just become more dejected and despondent, and if that's not the perfect quintessence of the misery of a lifetime of football supporting, then I don't know what is.
Recipes
Written by Ben Cotton
Alongside his normal job, Ben Cotton does his bit for the British twaddle industry by manufacturing inconsequential codswallop masquerading as comedy for Gumf Magazine. He is also doomed to support Stoke City, the Chicago Bears, and the Chicago Cubs in repentance for something REALLY bad he did in a past life.
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