One of the reasons watching soccer frustrates me is that every hit results in a flop on the ground that looks like the player was shot with a high-powered rifle from the stands.
Do they have a flop rule in soccer? Do the refs have the ability to get a yellow card? I can imagine a full-out kick that lands in the groin of another player would hurt, but when I see a guy get brushed and flop to the ground, only to get up and continue to play after a few minutes on the ground, it’s just embarrassing.
Yeah, there’s a diving rule and refs can hand out yellow cards for excessively theatrical behavior. Most often though they will just ignore a player in agony, since if a player is truly hurting it will typically sort itself out. As for football players being babies: they’re acting as though they are, but it is acting, so they’re not really babies. And of course it’s a mixed bag. Since the play is so heavily focused on the foot and ankle area since that is where the ball usually is, people can and do get heavily injured - one of the Slovenian (not Slovakian) players left the pitch with a broken ankle, and broken bones do occur more often. Also, like you sometimes see in hockey, people can be stitched up off the pitch to continue play afterwards (I remember Jaap Stam getting his eyebrow stitched back up in some game but I can’t find any footage).
I’m no fan of floppers myself, but I think people should bear in mind that when a player is running at full speed while trying to control a ball with his feet, it doesn’t take much contact to send them tumbling.
Well on the one hand watch some Lionel Messi highlights on youtube. He just ignores guys grabbing him or bumping him, and he just jumps over outstretched legs when he can. Which is much to be admired. However the diving popular amongst nations that rely on skill is really a response to the cynical tactics of the past when skillful players were hacked to pieces by thugs.
While I enjoy the World Cup, this is a very annoying and sometimes flat out embarrasing behaviour. The reason it is there, is because it works. If you dive and scream in agony, the chances you get a free kick (which might decide the game), are twenty times higher than if you just stumbled and kept to your feet. So they act, and sometimes it destroys the game.
One rather new thing is to grab the ball when you fall, which always work. If you fall and grab the ball with your hands, without exception – as far as I’ve seen – you get the free kick. It’s like, what else should the ref do? The alternative is a red card, but the ref obviously don’t have the guts to throw it. Annoying as hell.
The way I have recently heard it described is that in many countries soccer is both sport and theater. The idea of embellishing every little bit of contact is as normal in some places as it is alien in Canada and the US.
That said, some countries seem to bring teams that are better suited for a pool rather than a pitch…
Usually, I don’t like the idea of committees reviewing matches afterwards to change or add to the decisions of the referee. I don’t want politics to play a greater role than it already does. But the theatrics of players are one of the few areas where I wished we would punish obvious showmen later to caution copycats. I’d also act more harshly against the opposite: brutal attacks that threaten the health of players. We should suspend such players for more often afterwards and for a longer time. Though we should limit reviews to the obvious occurrences – or functionaries will start to decide tournaments instead of the men on the field.
Agree that sometimes the play acting is just embarrassing to watch, but sometimes being kicked really does hurt, especially hits to the achilles tendon. Also bear in mind that footballers are often carrying knocks, as contact is frequent. You can usually tell from the slow motion replay if they really are in pain, if the player screws up their face immediately it’s an involuntary reaction.
This. I imagine the OP has never played soccer/football, or maybe any other real sport. I have, and understand how much stuff can hurt, but still sometimes get upset at the embellishment. But it can be difficult to discern between the histrionics of some players and real injuries. For example, in the last moments of the USA v Slovenia game, I was irritated at the player lying on the ground milking out the last few minutes of the clock. Turns out he had a broken ankle. What a pussy, right?
I’ve seen twice very serious leg fractures, neither of which looked like much when they occurred. On of my teammates had his femur shattered into ten pieces by a slide from behind by an English team that didn’t even draw a card. Another was a bit of a freak accident where two players hit the ball at the exact same time. The ball never moved and the energy of the kicks transferred through the ball. My teammate had a “Joe Theisman” type break of the bones of his lower leg, with the whole lower half of his leg at a weird angle from. Both bones broken in two places. The other had just broken the smaller bone is his lower leg.
My personal most painful injury was something I’ll never forget. An Argentine player gave me the lightest little flick with the bottom of his shoe while I had the ball on my thigh. If I were watching it, it would have looked like nothing. Suddenly I collapsed in pain. Probably looked like I had been shot; it certainly felt like it. He had somehow burst a vein in my testicles, and by the time I got home my balls were swollen and purple with blood. It actually only hurt badly only for a second, but it was kind of an embarrassing injury - I was only 16 at the time and my father was out of town, so I had to explain to my mother that I was afraid my balls were going to explode so could we please go to the doctor.
Yes, there is acting, and there is pain that comes hard and goes away as quickly as it came. Let me kick you in the shin and I bet I can get you to go down as if you’re shot, but in a minute you’ll be back up ready to kick my ass.
I’m glad that this thread isn’t all about castigating divers, since seemingly inocuous things can indeed hurt a lot. Another thing I’ve noticed is that many, almost all really, referees just don’t give you a free kick if you stay on your feet. I’ve seen this a few times with some of the players of the African nations and (I believe) Altidore of the US as well. So when a player is fouled and wants the free kick he desereves he often has little choice but to fall. Also, good defenders are very good at destabalizing attackers without it looking like a real foul. So you have the ball, try to get to the goal and get bumped to the side which takes you away from the ball ending all hopes of becoming dangerous; you can choose to just stand (after stumbling a few times and not going to ground) there without the ball and resign yourself to the fact your life as an attacker sucks, or you can just not try to stay on your feet and just don’t put any effort in staying upright. Especially for quick players (Messi, Robben, Rommedahl, Lennon, Walcott, etc.) a slight touch can end any chance of becoming dangerous.
Just to be clear, I hate divers. But then mainly the guys who go down without being touched (yes Portugal and Italy I’m looking at you)* If you get fouled and falling over is the only way to get your deserved free kick, I’m sort of fine with it…if you’re on the team I’m rooting for at least
*One of the few things where I’m fine with generalizations, despite Germany being the team that had the most obvious dives in the Australia game.
Before I post I just want to say I am in no way a football fan. That out of the way I did lightly watch the latest England game in that a player seemed to get slapped in the side of the face. There was then a momentary pause and then the player went to his knees and elbows covering his head in his hands, almost like he was praying or some such. It just didn’t look right to me but then I don’t know how it felt for him.
On the other side is the possibility of having no injury just the shock of the collision. Playing with some friends in the park and someone slid into the ball which then wiped out my feet. It seemed to me that I spun around the axis of my waist and then fell. I was on the ground on my back just trying to recover my breath.
It just when you watch games like rugby and you see seemingly harsh contact between the players resulting in nothing more than a bit of dirt on the clothing and the player running back into position. It’s this difference in the games that I see and results in me agreeing with the op, footballers are the biggest babies on the planet.
Getting kicked in the shins or any part of the lower legs hurts really really fucking bad so even a minor hit leaves you in extreme amounts of pain. Some times they are clearly faking but it’s mostly the fall that gets faked, if you can actually see contact between players you better believe it fucking hurts even if it looks relatively minor.
Sometimes something really can hurt like hell momentarily and then be fine in a few seconds. The most painful soccer moment I had was… getting hit in the crotch by a hard shot from ten feet away. But the second most painful was getting hit in the thigh by a hard shot from short distance on a cold, wet, raw day. No bruise, no permanent damage of any kind, but man did that hurt for a minute or so. It also cramped up instantaneously and put me out of commission until it relaxed again.
Sure, otoh, I played football and team handball and the differences in theatrics is amazing. Lately, we see more of that in the second sport too but fortunately, most players still consider it sissy instead of clever.
But I agree with you that kicks to the lower legs deal out a spike of explosive pain that is more often than not impossible to ignore, especially when it comes from men who have trained their legs to kick a ball hard enough to accelerate it far beyond 100km/h.
But we still should do more against obvious dives; counter measures might mostly lead to more sophisticated swindles but I’d still be glad if I didn’t have to see a player thrive in pain again while no one has even touched him.
Well, as an example in the US game against Slovenia, there was a play where Dempsey actually stepped onto the ball, which caused him to slip and fall. Despite a lack of contact with an opposing player, I don’t think anyone would doubt that the fall caused Dempsey some pain.
The referee whistled a foul against Slovenia, even though their man likely had nothing to do with it.
I agree. I’ve said this before, but the only way to deal with ‘simulation’ and professional fouls is with after the game video reviews and suspensions.
I watched the half time discussions in the It - NZ game on Swedish TV, and one ex-footballer said that while diving is a problem, you really have to exaggerate your reaction to a foul to get the ref to blow his whistle. No fall = no call.
There are some incidents in soccer that remind me of one of Bill Cosby’s old sketches. The setup was that his Temple University football team was playing on local TV (a rare occurrence for the hapless Owls), and his coach gave the team a stern lecture to act maturely for the cameras, including a final admonition: “do not touch certain parts of your body”. So of course during the game the Cos gets tackled and kicked right in the groin. He remembers his coach’s warning…so he writhes in pain on the ground grabbing his head instead. “They even bandaged up my head!”
A while back I saw a compilation of soccer players getting hit, or not hit, in the legs, stomach, back, anywhere but the head. Every one of them pulled a Cos.
