At least, that is how I remember the World Cup’s final match. For a number of North Americans the final did nothing but reaffirm the reasons they dislike soccer in the first place. I was shocked to discover that many of my friends’ experiences of the match were vastly different from my own. Apparently, they saw a long and uneventful game that was plagued by diving, cheating, and play-acting. Iniesta, rather than being feted as a genius, was derided as the worst of a bad lot, and despised as a cheat, a con-man, a fraudster. Listening to our differing accounts, one would be forgiven for assuming that my friends and I had watched two different games. In a way, they would be right. My friends and I did see wildly different World Cup finals, and I’d like to try and examine why. Actually, that may not be entirely true. I probably will not examine this phenomenon in any sort of critical manner. My reluctance to do so is based on the very simple explanation I have to offer. I think we saw different matches because we are steeped in vastly dissimilar sporting cultures that owe allegiance to entirely irreconcilable sets of values. The banality of that explanation leaves little to examine. Instead, I think I would like to emphasize some of the various aspects of the World Cup that engendered particularly jarring instances of culture shock, both for me and for my friends who watch North American sports. What I want to do is go through some of these topics and give you my evaluation of our disparate value systems. Hopefully this will enlighten my friends as to why we cannot see eye-to-eye on these issues, and maybe help them to understand the game that the majority of the world feels so passionate about.
Diving/Cheating/Violence: The most common criticism I hear from my football and hockey watching friends is that soccer cannot be taken seriously as long as players fall around on the field pretending to be hurt. Diving, to them, is not only a serious moral offense, but also undermines the very integrity of the sport. I would like to defend the persistence of diving in soccer by highlighting the sheer silliness of the moral high ground taken by North American sporting culture. Whenever I’m confronted by the diving=cheating argument, I always stop to ask exactly what it is a professional athlete is being paid to do. The answer seems simple, right? They’re paid to play a sport that both we as fans, and they as players, love, so that we may be entertained. But this answer is slightly deficient. What athletes are really being paid to do is WIN. Organized sports are specifically designed to be a competition with clear winners and losers. This has significant consequences for the economics of sport. People want their team to win and hate being on the losing side. Teams that do well attract fans, bringing in more money with which the team can purchase or pay better talent, hopefully leading to further victories and the perpetuation of the cycle. Losing teams often see their finances dwindle as fans become apathetic or disillusioned. Winning, then, is arguably the goal of any sports team. These teams pay their players not to play a game, but to win a game. All other concerns are secondary, as could be expected from any company competing for its very survival. Diving is an activity meant specifically to achieve victory under difficult circumstances. In effect, a player that dives is doing nothing more than fulfilling the obligations of his contract. Yes, it’s against the rules, and it’s also probably morally questionable, but so are a number of other activities engaged in by professional athletes in North America that gain no similar notoriety.
Fouling another player is illegal in basketball, tripping is illegal in hockey, and holding a player’s helmet is illegal in football. All these activities are attempts to gain an advantage that are against the rules of the game. Each of them are equally morally questionable (as they’re all cheating), and each is punished if the offender is caught. Diving in soccer is no different from any of these rules violations, except in its unfamiliarity to North American audiences (note, I will not discuss the numerous times that basketball and hockey players dive, though it happens a lot more than fans of these sports would like to admit). Simulation, to give it its official name, is thus no more a strike against soccer than tripping is a strike against hockey. Furthermore, though I’ll get into this more another time, questioning the moral standing of divers is downright ridiculous. We don’t pay athletes to teach us moral lessons, we pay them to win. Apparently people are still confused about this point.
A second, and probably more fruitful way to defend diving is to equate it with fighting in hockey. This may sound silly at first, but both serve, or have served, the exact same purpose: protecting star players from injury. What many casual viewers of hockey don’t seem to realize is that fighting plays an integral role in the game. Most players understand that taking out the opposing team’s star player is a great way to increase your chance of winning. Additionally, it is often the case that any kind of penalty would be seen as worth the effort if a particularly good player could be injured or intimidated to the point of ineffectiveness. To combat this, hockey teams began to designate fighters to enforce a code of honour on opposing players. Take one too many liberties with a star player and you’d find yourself getting punched out by some goon. Until recently, this served to keep many of the rowdier players in check, and protect stars such as Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. Unfortunately, stricter rules against fighting have resulted in a greater number of injuries to star players, as the old codes no longer hold. But I digress. My point is that diving in soccer is also a means of protecting players from injury. Let me explain by using the World Cup final as a case study.
One team (Spain) uses its superior ball handling and passing skills to retain possession of the ball for extended periods of time. Alternately, a star player often uses his skills to run past or dodge around opponents, making them look inept or silly. The other team (The Netherlands) gets frustrated, tired, or both, resulting in a large number of violent, dangerous, or intentionally mistimed tackles (Witness Nigel de Jong’s kick on Xabi Alonso during the first half). If such play, which is equally as illegal and morally abhorrent as diving, goes unpunished by the referee, then the finesse team has to take matters into their own hands. They do this by emphasizing the effects of any subsequent tackles in order to get the referee’s attention and force him to act in their defense. This is also why star players tend to dive more than others; they receive a disproportional amount of mistimed challenges, and are far more likely to be attacked out of frustration as they dribble around an opponent. Diving, in this case, acts exactly as fighting does in hockey. It helps protect players from violent play and potentially career-ending injuries. The moral argument should even come down on the side of diving in this instance. A simulated fall is far less morally abhorrent than a karate-style kick to a star player’s chest.
So, I argue that diving is a legitimate strategy aimed at protecting players from injury, and not just some silly affectation that seems to make sense to people everywhere but here. Hopefully this discussion has led you to question any notions you may have had about diving in soccer and its actual role in the game. Until next time, Forza Juventus per sempre!
No comments:
Post a Comment