Britain’s representative on the FIFA panel, Jim Boyce, has brought diving talks into FIFA, and the FA (EPL). This is fantastic and needs to be seriously considered. The idea is to ban diving retrospectively by reviewing matches after the fact to determine any offending players who embellished or completely fabricated a penalty.
Apparently the FA has already had discussions about diving penalties in the past, but the notion was refuted. Unfortunately, I feel the new requests by Boyce will most definitely be declined by FIFA, but it does have an outside chance of at least coming to fruition in the EPL. Much has been made in the English news about players such as Luiz Suarez, who has been recognized as a diver and cannot even get a blatant foul call.
Boyce wishes the other representatives from other nations on the FIFA panel will join him in acting against diving, and also hopes other leagues around the world take action too. Boyce also said, “If leagues won’t do anything a manager could step in and tell the player to smarten his act,” which I agree with.
As a Manchester United fan I use Ashley Young as a prime example. He dove two matches in a row to get calls and Sir Alex benched him the next two matches for this behaviour. I have since watched Young closely and I believe he has improved in terms of diving (or rather not diving) for United. However, when Young played in the Euro’s for England he reverted back to diving. This goes to show how much impact a manager can have, and I wish others would follow Sir Alex on this one! He’s not always right, but he certainly has many fine moments.
In English football I see a lot of PK’s awarded as a result of diving. In Italy you see the players roll around like they were shot, only to get right back up when play resumes. In many leagues within South America it is completely out of hand. We all remember the famous dives by Brazilian star, Rivaldo, but those dives are commonplace in South American leagues.
Football would be a much better game if we could eliminate this garbage that happens all over the world in every country, it is now deemed as part of the game… diving! Part of the game? It’s certainly not a good part of the game.
How great would it be for retrospective diving suspensions to take place in football? It seems like such an obvious solution, but would we not have the same problem that we currently have with vicious tackles? Calls against seem to escape the big clubs and big name players. This is probably what would happen, but that’s not an excuse not to try something. And who knows, maybe in time we will see that slowly eliminate, starting with diving suspensions.
Parting Shots: Look, we know diving is out of control and needs to stop, so anything that works to solve that glaring issue is a great idea to me, and I applaud Jim Boyce for talking about it. The problem is that it won’t go anywhere anytime soon. As fellow LWOS writer Frank Giuliano brought to my attention many years ago, FIFA wants control of their tournaments. This is why goal line review is still not in the sport, although that seems like it might come soon because FIFA are being pressured by, well, everyone. We all know FIFA is a business and we have all seen funny things happen in World Cup tournaments. The last thing they want to do is make the game fair, as pessimistic as that sounds. Don’t get too excited about goal line review talks and diving suspensions, because they are just not in any position to give up control anytime soon!
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