Soccer had its chance and it failed.
Game by game, year by year, our ground-ball counterparts let diving and simulation creep into their sport. They didn’t deal with it when they had the opportunity to. Now, it’s too late.
It’s too rife. It’s too messy. FIFA, UEFA, the Premier League, all of them allowed blatant cheating to run wild in their games and now look at them. Where would you even begin to stamp out diving in soccer?
At least with the GAA, it’s not part of the culture. Not yet anyway. Diving and cheating are still unnacceptable and ostracised deviants from the norm but they can only be kept like that if the organisation comes down hard on simulation and takes a zero-tolerance approach to it.
Why the hell wouldn’t they?
"For a big man like Aidan O’Shea to go down like that…" – Sean Quigley not happy with Mayo penalty https://t.co/xnlePqpi7K
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) July 9, 2016
Aidan O’Shea took a lot of flak on Saturday.
He seemed to go down easily during Mayo’s comeback against Fermanagh and, with one point between the teams, referee Joe McQuillan awarded him a penalty when the Breaffy man couldn’t have bought a free all day.
Sean Quigley said afterwards that the Cavan whistler was ‘covering himself’ for not granting Cillian O’Connor a penalty earlier in the half and the decision was certainly out of sorts from the rest of the game where McQuillan took a hard but unfair stance with his officiating.
Jesus, you could nearly see where O’Shea was coming from when he looked to throw himself to ground. Nearly. There were times in the first half in particular that he was being scraped, pulled and pushed in every direction. As soon as he got the ball, he was dragged to ground and there were very few warnings, never mind cards, being dished out for it.
It doesn’t condone diving but you have to wonder if there’s an attitude that big lads need less protection. Or if there’s an attitude that they need to be fouled more severely to be even considered for refereeing sympathy.
Was this a penalty for Mayo? Cillian O'Connor has converted it, regardless of the controversy. @rteone now. https://t.co/2mhbDJIPfY
— The Sunday Game (@TheSundayGame) July 9, 2016
Whatever the contributing factors, when the end result is diving, the reaction needs to be immediate and brutal.
Diving is cheating.
Cheating is unacceptable. And it is unaccepted.
Athletes all over the world are given years and years of suspensions for drug-taking. Why? Because it is unethical. It is gaining an unfair advantage. It is bending the rules to affect the result. It is cheating.
Diving is all of those things except it happens in real time and it happens right in front of everyone’s eyes. Unashamedly.
And yet people will still approach with caution. They’ll tell you that it’s too drastic to punish it with a red card and that it’s too hard to police. The risk is that someone would be sent off when they have actually been fouled or when they just innocently fell over.
Okay, that’s the risk but why does that really matter? It’s hard to police anyway. Obviously. Penalties are given when they’re not really penalties. Free kicks are granted and games are changed every single week because of the bad decisions of referees. Those risks are the exact same with the identical intention of ensuring that the game is played fairly.
But if even one player was caught diving and was given the appropriate punishment for once – a straight red card and subsequent suspension – he’d never do it again. It wouldn’t even come in to his thinking.
If he wasn’t caught, then bring in retrospective analysis and start clearly defining who is falling and who is throwing themselves over. Bring in a physicist, bring in an acting expert, who cares? Just start taking deliberate action to weed this out now.
The rest of the country would sit up and take notice. Would they really try such a blatant and largely unnecessary act if the risk was so clear-cut and great? Why would you want to throw yourself over and get sent off and suspended when you could’ve just went and won the ball in the first place?
That’s the logical viewpoint but the longer we go without action, the more blurred that logic becomes. The longer we go on allowing cheating to prosper, the more heads and minds begin to turn and wander in the other direction.
The longer this culture new to the sport festers, the more likely it is to stay.
And unless the GAA grows a set and lumps diving straight into the cheating category now, we’ll sooner or later fall down the road of soccer where those grand pieces of gamesmanship won’t be rare, but rife.
The time for action is now. The type of action must be extreme. And, for God’s sake, do it now. Before it’s too late.
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