This story's about a week old but I just read it today and it's truly a step in the right direction.
The Scottish FA will review video in an attempt to stamp out diving and fake injuries that slow the game down and are really a blight on the sport. The FA will hand out retrospective yellow cards to those deemed as having committed bookable offenses.
This is truly a revolutionary step forward and hopefully it will catch on throughout the world. I've always felt that the only way to truly stamp out diving was to go after those who did it. It's one thing to card a player during the match; a referee may bite or not. But if a player knows that he might get caught cheating well after the final whistle, he may think twice about diving.
Faking injuries really disturbs me as well. It brings the game to a crawl. I feel that if a player goes down and trainers have to go out to the field to tend to him, the player should be forced to wait on the sideline for at least two minutes before getting back on the field. That would cut down on fake injuries too, and if a player really is injured, he knows he'll have a couple of minutes to regroup before charging back out on the pitch.
Still, the latter is just my idea. The former is something that is already in place, and it's exciting that someone stepped forward and produced a real attempt at a solution for a problem that plagues the beautiful game.
8 comments:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/6928105.stm
According to this article, FIFA may stop the league from implementing this plan.
Matt
Sadly, FIFA already shot this idea down.
FIFA
is
lame.
FIFA is correct this was a stupid idea. The referee controls the game during the game. Retroactively enforcing rules that affect a game is stupid.
Trying to determine if a player should have gone to ground for a certain amount of contact is a dreadfully inexact science.
Interesting how this was proposed in a league that is known for its lack of flair and overly physically style of play.
So is this how it works in your fantasy world of replay after the game. An attacking player is thrown violently to the ground 10 times in a match while a defender makes no play on the ball. At one point late in the game he goes to ground with a slight bump and he is penalized after the game for diving because it was determined he wasn't bumped hard enough to fall.
Most professional sports can retroactively punish players for misdeeds on the fields...so this isn't something new. However, it would be better if this was 'symmetric', i.e. not only do you punish egregious dives, but you also punish those egregious fouls (not the 'professional' fouls of grabbing to stop a breakway...but I hate those, too...but the trips, kicks, elbows, etc). Keep it focused on only obvious dives/fouls and you're OK; don't waste time 'nit-picking' and trying turn this into some kind of pseduo-science
I just don't see any other way to deal with the diving and feigning of injuries than to do something as revolutionary as this idea.
Last Anon was right, as long as you keep it on the issue it'll work.
Diving is a plague. Rolling around on the turf after normal contact is a plague. Those things hurt the sport.
This is one approach to solve it, better than having referees stay on heightened approach, better than stern warnings during games, better than anything else in place right now.
Solve it like this....a player dives in a game and a foul is given. Afterwards the refs, players, and medi watch the reply and discover it was a dive.
The refs give the player fewer calls in the next game...motioning for him to get up even when actual fouls are committed. Someone says something to the player letting him know he isn't getting calls because he is known to dive.
Player eventually stops diving.
Matt
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