As I continued to be absorbed by the World Cup, I began to wonder at what point in their soccer playing careers the sportsmen begin to whine, cry and act like fragile babies on the field?
When kids start playing soccer, it is about being tough. You get hit, you get up, you play on. Your teammates, friends, and family support you for being tough and focused.
Yet somehow, by the time you make it to being a professional player you feel that falling to the ground grimacing and wailing at the slightest hit (and sometimes as no hit at all!) is proper behavior.
What happened?
Where along the line did the admiration switch from the tough players to those who whine the most? Is it because crying and faking gets more calls, more calls means more wins, and more wins means more money?
I think it has to do with when money becomes involved. Add money and suddenly everyone thinks winning involves diving.
Soccer strikes me as one of the only sports where opponents regularly cheat by attempting to trick the referees into thinking that they were fouled. This particular aspect of soccer really irritates me. Sport should be about fair competition — tough and hard fought — but fair. That some of the top players in the world regularly resort to this sort of cheating is disgusting.
It seems that FIFA is now starting to crack down on that a bit more, instructing referees to issue yellow cards for ‘diving’, but still, is that what soccer has come to?
Do other sports suffer from this same problem? I can’t think of any …
Have two view points:
1. Some players just get more expressive along their career path (maybe all those locker room years, when they figure out that silence is just a waste anyways)
2. Some way along a bad fish spoiled it all and then maybe came the thought – ‘If he does it then why shouldn’t I ?!’ And probably so came the part of faking it.
I wonder if Jeffrey Marcus from the New York Times reads chickenmonkeydog:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/sports/soccer/21diving.html
I just saw this ad running Czech Republic and it seemed to address your post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGtB9j7QCg
[…] on in the World Cup we posted about our disappointment with the way some players dramatize and over-exaggerate their injuries during play. Today I feel it […]