Project Zeus
Steve Chettle
The problem, with both immediate and retrospective action, is that there is just too much of a grey area to definitively punish players. Whilst I agree that players who are performing a ridiculous pirouette with no contact whatsoever should be banned, the vast majority of dives are challenges in which the player completely exaggerates minimal contact. These cases are difficult to prosecute; the letter of the law says that any contact is a foul, but we all know that the player is using this to his advantage. The real problem is not the players' integrity, it is the laws of the game allowing those players to make a gamble with higher reward than risk (as someone mentioned), with no consistent method of categorising and punishing them. Any solution would rely on human judgement, which will always result in mistakes.
As an aside, it would be amusing to witness how awfully our teams, both domestically and internationally, would do if we completely eradicated diving. We'd be even worse than we are now...
As an aside, it would be amusing to witness how awfully our teams, both domestically and internationally, would do if we completely eradicated diving. We'd be even worse than we are now...