I’m a United fan, but I have no problem admitting that Ashley Young dived (dove?) on Sunday to win a penalty and set us on the way to a crucial win against Villa. I also have no problem admitting that I have no problem with diving.
That probably sounds like a United fan trying to justify diving by a player who plays for the team he supports, but let me continue.
All he’s done is try to gain an advantage for his team. There are so many little incidents that happen on a pitch whereby a player uses his brain to try and gain an advantage for his side and this is simply one of them.
For me, diving is no worse that kicking a ball away to waste time, appealing for a goal when you know the ball isn’t anywhere near over the line, or wasting time by walking off the pitch slowly when you’re being subbed late on. What about those dodgy free kicks and corners that are given falsely and lead to goals? Where is the huge media outrage after them?
At the end of the day the referee is the guy who blows the whistle, so if anyone needs to be blamed for Ashley Young getting given penalties then it’s the refs. You could try to impose retrospective bans on players who have been deemed to dive, but there’s often such a fine line between what is and what isn’t a true foul that you’d have a hard job trying to police it.
I will hold my hands up and admit that I’m often found thinking a fully grown man should never buckle under the kind of pressure you see put on players like Sergio Busquets, but in the Spanish football culture he gets away with it. Again you have to say this isn’t his fault – even though he is a massive fanny – because if the referees didn’t go along with his theatrics then he’d soon pack it in. But in cases where a player’s running at full pelt it doesn’t take much of a shove to put him off balance, that’s just plain fact.
You’ve also got to think about how multi-cultural the game is these days. Players come here from all over the world, and they’ve all grown up thinking it’s acceptable to behave in different ways on a football pitch. Is it fair to expect players to change their game all of a sudden? Personally I think it is, but at the same time you can’t have people clattering into each other in the way some ‘old fashioned English’ players do. There’d be no legs left.
Is it cheating? I don’t think so. It’s part of the game. If the authorities were that bothered about diving they’d have done something about it a long time ago. It’s been around for ages, Ashley Young hasn’t invented it in the last few weeks. It’s just the fact that he plays for a big club and has won big decisions at a crucial time of the season which has seen him gain so much attention for it. Ultimately he did get those decisions. So whether or not you agree with what he did – and yes he went down like a complete fairy – I’m sure he won’t care a single bit and neither will his team-mates. He won his team a penalty, a goal, and a huge 6 points at this stage of the season.
Don’t get me wrong, when my team – either United or when I’m actually playing at the weekend – get a dodgy foul given against us I’m livid. But you can’t really blame the players for having a go. You’ve got to blame the refs. If they think there’s been a dive they won’t give a foul, and that’s the end of the story.
For me, if we make football a perfect sport where every single decision is correct by the letter of the law we’d lose something. A good portion of why I love football is the talking points and disagreements it throws up, and the fact that different people can see the same thing in completely different ways. That stays the same from grass roots all the way to the World Cup final, and I hope it stays that way too.