The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion
The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2012 05:20 PM PDT NOV 3 — Two words have hogged the football headlines over the past week — "diving" and "monkey." The former is associated with foreign players, while the latter with black players and the taunts they receive from fans of opposing teams. Both issues hurt the image of the beautiful game of football, but between the two, it is diving that can and will destroy the game unless football administrators are truly serious about eradicating the menace. Yet, we are reading and seeing more reaction to the monkeying around than the diving performed by players week-in week-out. Racially-motivated taunts are not the result of racism in football. Instead, football is just an innocent passer-by as it occasionally encounters the scum of the greater society that is out there, and who happens to be attending a football match. Racism is not going to hurt football, because players will survive and move on. Let the other supporters take care of the miscreants in their midst. However, it is diving that will bring the game into disrepute, destroying careers, while also hurting the fortunes of clubs and its supporters who put all their heart and soul into following a particular club. You may think I am exaggerating but think of it as the "butterfly effect" in football. The actions of one player, taking flight, flailing arms and all, as he hopes to wrangle a freekick or penalty from the referee, can cause an opponent to be carded, a team to lose a match, relegation, loss of income and, in the worst-case scenario, going bust over financial losses. Yes, I have a wild imagination. One dive in one game is not going to do all that, you say. The thing is, we do not connect it as such because we seem to think everything evens itself out in football. Well, let me tell you, it does not. That is like saying, "Oh, don't worry about the snatch theft you fell victim to because over the next few weeks, you are sure to win first prize in the 4D lottery … because everything evens itself out." Well, if it does not happen in life, it sure as hell does not happen in football, as people hope. Diving is, and must be treated as, a mortal sin, to use the Catholic point of reference in terms of classifying the seriousness of wrongs that one might commit. If Moses was a football-supporting prophet, number one on his list of 10 commandments will surely be "Thou shalt not dive nor play-act to gain the favour of the match official." But how do we get rid of this menace when referees are only human and do not have the benefit of looking at instant TV replays. Well, the one simple process which can easily be adopted and enforced by FIFA or even at the English FA level is post-match review of such occasions. I rather that the authorities hire more people — there are hundreds, if not thousands of former players who could be roped in — to review the controversial moments in the many games where an alleged dive may or may not have taken place. This can be done within a week or two of the matches. Only players are to be judged and punishment is to be effected once there is any confirmation that a dive had taken place. Players who have been wrongly judged must have their cards or dismissals reversed, while players who got off scot free in a match will be suspended for at least three matches. Player suspensions will hurt their own pocket as clubs will in turn deduct their wages for the loss of services, besides them losing appearance and win bonuses. Besides that, their teams will suffer too from the needless loss of a resource on the pitch. Diving is one aspect of cheating in the beautiful game that just does not merit enough attention for all the bad it brings to the pitch on a weekly basis. Calling it by any other name, i.e. simulation, does not change its cheating nature. So, it is time for the authorities to act on this for the good of football. And as we enter into the weekend's round of football in the English Premier League, do note too that it is not just the foreign players who are easily going to ground these days. The early kick-off tonight between Manchester United and Arsenal at Old Trafford might showcase the simple but well-executed dives of a few English players too. That they happen to be black, and so could be referred to as "diving monkeys", would not solve anything. Instead, it might only serve to take away the attention from the greater crime of diving that these players have been prone to commit in matches on their way to winning freekicks and penalties. To paraphrase The Beatles, "All we are saying … is give cheats no chance." * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2012 05:04 PM PDT NOV 3 — Sports fans love a statistic or two. Among the milestones that are being pointed in our direction ahead of this weekend's football fixtures are the facts that Serie A leaders Juventus are on the brink of completing a half-century of unbeaten league games, and that Leo Messi is fast closing in on Pele's record of 75 goals in a calendar year. They are both interesting pieces of information, and Juve's attempts to reach the 50 mark against second-placed Inter Milan tonight could well be the highlight of this weekend's European football calendar. But it also should be considered that during their long unbeaten run — which stretches back nearly 18 months to a 1-0 loss at Parma in May 2011 — Juve have not actually been quite as dominant a force as you might think. True, they won Serie A last season; but only just, as they needed a late surge of victories to overtake long-time leaders AC Milan, who actually won more games than Juve over the course of the season. That was possible because Juve's unbeaten 38-game campaign included no less than a league-high 15 draws, which is where the illusion of invincibility suggested by the bare "49 games unbeaten" statistic starts to become less convincing. Of course Juve are a very strong team — they wouldn't have remained undefeated in a high-quality league like Serie A for a year and a half otherwise. But it also true that they draw an awful lot of games, so maybe they are not quite the all-conquering, domineering force that the statistic suggests. After all, you would surely expect a Serie A champion with such a long unbeaten run under their belts to be among the leading contenders for the Champions League. However, Juve have drawn (those draws again) all three of their opening Champions League games this season — including a 1-1 tie with unfancied Danish outfit Nordsjaellend — and are now in danger of failing to progress to the knockout stage. And then there's the Messi stat. The Barcelona striker has scored no less than 73 goals in 2012, which of course still has two months to run, and it's just a matter of time before he overtakes Pele's 75-goal haul and then closes in on Gerd Muller's all-time record of 85. But perhaps the most important Lionel Messi statistic from 2012 is one missed penalty: against Chelsea in April's Champions League semi-final. His shot against Petr Cech's crossbar eventually led to Barca's exit from the competition and contributed hugely to the Spanish club's failure to land a major trophy last season (although they did manage the consolation prize of the Spanish Cup). However many goals Messi manages to score between now and the end of December, it will not alter the fact that 2012 was not a particularly successful year for the Argentine wizard in the category that matters the most: winning significant trophies. Of course, that was hardly his fault, and the goals that Messi has scored in the opening weeks of the new season have put Barca in a great position to regain the Spanish title in May, but it goes to show that bare statistics do not always tell the full story. Greater context is often required. Many statistics are circumstantial curiosity items rather than meaningful insights into the progress or possible outcome of sporting events. Earlier this week, for example, I was informed on Twitter that Barcelona have won every game in which David Villa has scored since a 2-2 draw with AC Milan more than a year ago. The inference was that Villa should start every week because if he scored it would virtually guarantee victory, which is plain nonsense, of course — for a variety of reasons he just hasn't scored a late equaliser or had an early opener cancelled out for a while. It doesn't mean that it won't happen in the future. Some stats are even more irrelevant. During the time that I worked at Reading FC, I remember a bit of a fuss being made when young striker Darius Henderson scored the 5,000th league goal in the club's history — an entirely pointless milestone if ever there was one, especially when it later emerged there had been a miscalculation and that it was actually goal number 5,001. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't pay any attention to statistics, records and milestones. Some of them can be extremely illuminating and genuinely give us a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. But we need to learn to be more selective with our absorption and understanding of the endless parade of information that the Internet constantly spews forth. Perhaps all statistics should be forced to pass a relevance test before they can be unleashed upon the public: "Stoke have only won three of their last 22 games at Norwich? Don't care! Irrelevant! You may not proceed!" And for the more subtle cases, we'd need to form a sub-committee specialising in context: "Juve are unbeaten in 49 games? Fine, that's relevant — but don't forget to point out how many games they've drawn!" As a football fan, I want to understand how the game works and statistics can often do that job. For example, the fact that Juan Mata has been credited with more assists than any other Premier League player since the start of last season is a useful insight because it demonstrates his consistent ability to create goalscoring chances over a long period of time. But forgive me for being less than overwhelmed when someone tells me that Jose Mourinho has won 99 games as Real Madrid manager, or that three of the eight yellow cards shown to players for removing their shirts in the Premier League have been to Southampton players. My relevance test might just decline them. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. |
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