The Art of Diving

"Hi! My name is Mark; I'm a soccer player and I love to dive." This is how non-soccer supporters view soccer players. Diving is an event in sports where a player fakes a foul for an unfair advantage. When some people hear the word Soccer; they think of diving and not great plays that result in goals. Diving is accepted part of the culture of the game of soccer. Soccer is often related to a "stage." Solid portions of players have taken that term way to literal. Players are slowly turning from athletes into actors.All people involved in soccer, one way or another have forgotten that diving is a bad thing. Diving is something that shouldn't be tolerated. Diving falls into a category called descent. This term is described in the rulebook as misconduct. Descent is described as an action that gives a team unfair advantage with deceiving intentions. There are quite a few other versions of descent but I will focus on diving. Diving falls into descent because it is a deceiving action. There are many types of diving.The most obvious form of diving is the fake contact. This type generally involves a player taking an unfair advantage of a situation by acting as if there was too much of contact. An attacking player recognizing a scenario where a defender is sticking out his foot is a frequent example. The attacker takes the advantage of the defender by running really close to his or her foot and hops over. The attacker finishes the play by falling to the ground and looking at the referee for validation. It does become quite a show for those players that have the timing down to an art. A real life example happened earlier this year. I was watching a Columbus Crew game on TV. One of their top forwards saw a defender being flat-footed. The defender just stuck out his foot and the forward hopped over the foot with ease but fell to the ground and looked bewildered. The ref was sold on the call and the Crew had a shot from 20 yards out. The call created an unfair chance for the Crew requiring the goalkeeper to come up with a huge save. The call didn't affect the overall outcome of the game but it is still unacceptable.
The fake injury and embellishment are the next two forms of diving. The overall goal of these dives is to draw a card. The point of drawing a card is that it changes the other team strategy. If a red card is thrown then a player is ejected and the team plays a man down. That is a huge advantage and becomes unfair when the "red" is unwarranted. The fake injury is another easy one to understand but not always the easiest to detect. A player gets fouled and holds a part of body in order to show injury has allegedly happened. This creates an advantage because the foul looks more severe then it actually was and can draw a card in certain cases. The next form of diving is embellishment. This is another kind of dive that fools the ref on the severity of fouls or contact. In most cases the "victim" rolls around, and does the dramatic “dust off” trick. The ”dust off” trick is when a player hits the ground and gets up slowly looking like he or she is collecting there self. I witness these kinds of dives up close and personal. I was playing a game and I was in net for the game. The opposing team came down the field and one of my defender's bumped into a forward. The forward did both of these dives. He screamed like he was on fire and rolled around and held his shin. The referee was so sold on this embarrassing performance. This gave them an extreme advantage because it was in the box and a penalty kick was awarded. I stopped the kick by the way. It still infuriates me that he didn't get a card for that pathetic performance. The guy rolled seven times after that bump. "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?" Seven times, I never rolled once when I blew out either of my ACLs.

The next form of diving is when players put themselves in compromising positions. There are several styles for this form of dive. This dive is hard to detect and missed by refs a lot of the time. A quick example of this is where a shorter guy runs into an elbow of a taller guy and forcing a fouling situation. The taller guy gets called for elbowing when in reality he didn't do anything wrong. Another example is when a attacker notices a slide tackle coming and changes direction to create the contact with the defender. A variation of this is the attacker doesn't make any effort to avoid the contact. Both situations are dangerous and can cause injury to one or both players. This is wrong because the attacker is getting an unfair advantage by exploiting a dangerous situation. Defenders can be guilty of this kind of dive and descent. An example of this is a defender watches a attacker getting ready to kick ball from heighten position. The defender tries to beat the ball to the attackers foot. In this situation the defender "takes one for the team" in the face and makes the attacker look like the bad guy. The timing of this kind of dive takes tremendous practice and shows that players are focusing on the wrong part of their game.
The problem is that players are learning to dive, instead of working on creating scoring chances. This kind of mentality needs to be changed. The 500-dollar question is " How do we solve this problem?" That answer is simple; FIFA needs to take a stronger role with these kinds of issues. To start off with, getting a second pair of eyes on the field would help good portion of these dives. Another thing that would help is that league officials review tapes of games in more depth. Fouls are reviewed but they need to expand the range of what is subject to fines and suspensions. Diving and other unsportsman like behavior should be apart of tape review. Why does something like the recent Chelsea incident have to raise a red flag? The next step is making the penalties harsher for players and organizations. “Slap on the wrist fines” or 1-3 game suspensions are not cutting it anymore. The leagues have to deal with the player(s) involved in an incident in a quicker fashion (not a month or two later). It is our responsibility to set an example for other sports. It is time for this type of "stage" to close its curtain.