The most entertaining part about the World Cup...

...has got to be the play acting of some of the players when they get tripped up. It's always the same reaction. They reach for their ankles, howl in pain, and then stealthily look around to see if the ref is taking notice. Then a team of medics rush out to the field, stretcher in hand, and water bottles-a-spraying. I only wonder why the Last Rites hasn't been administered to some of these guys. They writhe in pain for a few moments, then they are delicately placed on the stretcher where they promptly go limp, then they are carried off. Then they miraculously pop up off the stretcher on the side lines, and are back in the game within minutes, fresh as a daisy. And the European announcers at least just take it all in stride, saying stuff like "Oh, it looks like so-and-so has managed to overcome his injury..." or whatever. Can you imagine guys so blatantly faking injuries in any of the major North American sports. Say what you want about any of the dirty play that surely does go on in football/basketball/hockey and even baseball, at least the players don't go from death's door one moment to scoring the winning goal the next.

Poor Aussies...

this sort of thing is happening a lot more in this World Cup. The reason is that FIFA and their refs were dumb enough to start being "harsher", which means acts which were routine fouls and relatively minor are now getting cards. Since they were also dumb enough NOT to change the price of a card, as in two yellows equals a one-game suspension for instance, these formerly average fouls are very costly. This is also compounded by plain old bad refereeing. Now, since the games are a lot less fluid and static because of the tight calling, players are doing whatever they can to get an advantage, and it seems as though the refs are once again dumb enough to fall for flopping. Since players are now finding out that the refs will fall for their flops, they are doing it quite extensively, and it sucks.

In my opinion, this doesn't happen nearly as much in most leagues (the English Premier League especially). It really sucks that this recipe for diving and frustration has been conjured for the World Cup.

I simply am amazed these guys are willing to flop around like this, pretending to have a broken wing. And it's more amazing they have a whole supporting cast in the medical staffs who come rushing out, with everything in hand but a defibrillator.

When they get the signal from a teammate or the referee, they have to run onto the field. You could end up with a situation like Wayne Rooney, who many fans thought was faking when he went down (at Anfield, I believe) and was actually getting jeered, until it became obvious something was very wrong.

The medical staff are not exactly willing accomplices in this mess. Now, they should insist that if a player has been writhing in pain that they "recover" a bit more before returning to the action (most medical experts would probably want to ensure the patient has no lasting effects from the injury) and the referees should really be more restrictive about letting these guys back onto the field.

All this flopping, writhing and then miracle recoveries reminds me of a kid I played Little League against. He swung at an inside pitch and it hit his arm. I wasn't exactly a flamethrower, so it surprised me a little that the kid started bawling like his kid sister. He was awarded first base for HBP, and suddenly he made an amazing recovery and the tears were gone. Then I approached the umpire and pointed out that he had been swinging at the pitch, so it should be a strike. The umpire agreed and called the kid out (strike three) at which point the kid started bawling again. Just to stop the little twerp from crying, they awarded him first base.

So whenever I see these little girls do their swan dives, it really pisses me off. Especially that asshole from Italy who weaseled his way into a penalty kick that handed the Italians the match against the Socceroos. Be a man and play through the pain or get the hell off the field.

have to pretend to be interested in soccer because of the World Cup. Face it....it's not a sport that has caught on in Canada or the U.S.A. I know a lot of kids play it, but I think that's mostly because it's a sport that doesn't cost anything for the equipment to play. How many of the kids who play it in school go on to play it professionaly?...Frankly, I hope I don't offend any aficianados but I find it a very boring sport to watch. You watch people run up and down for 90 minutes and the score can often be 0-0.
Your point about the fake injuries is also valid. I would think they would have more pride then to put on such obvious phony dramatics!

either. I think the point is valid, however, that kids who play in high school really don't care about the sport otherwise. Essentially, soccer is the autumn alternate to football in most high schools. So if you're an athlete but either don't like football or can't afford all the gear, you play soccer. It's a game you can play cheaply, with only a handful of people and it's fun to play. Basketball and baseball are also fairly cheap to play, and they translate well to TV. Soccer does not.

There is a history of baseball in this country. Fathers and sons have gone to baseball games together for 125 years. The NBA and NFL have come to life in the past few decades and are challenging baseball's hold as the national sport (football may have already passed it).

Soccer will never catch on here. There is no tradition, no history, no passion and really, no room for it on the national landscape. It isn't a good sport for TV (no convenient timeouts every 10-15 minutes) and it isn't an American-type sport. As is often pointed out in these discussions, Americans will not support a sport where you can't use your hands. I doubt that is the reason, but it's a good talking point. Americans have the attention span of a ferret on crack; soccer is a slow, methodical game which takes patience to watch. If you can appreciate the way a good team holds the ball at midfield, passing around the perimeter, probing for weaknesses or looking to send a sprinter on a run to the net, you'll like soccer. Most Americans don't like that. Hell, in hockey if a team spends as much as 30 seconds passing the puck around on a power play, the fans start going nuts. If a batter or pitcher take too much time between pitches, the fans get upset. And the NFL had to put a time limit on the instant replays because the fans might have to wait more than 3 minutes between plays!

I like soccer, but I don't care if it never catches on big here. I enjoy the pace, the strategy, the heart-stopping moments as a ball drifts through the air towards the net - knowing that a single mistake or great play can make all the difference.

As for the diving, it's a terrible blot on this year's World Cup. Between the diving and the excruciating officiating it has been a World Cup to forget. There have been only a few memorable (for good reasons) matches. One would think that these Greg Louganis wannabes would be roundly criticized back home for their theatrics, but no one in Italy is complaining about Grosso's bellyflop in the closing seconds against Australia.

etc... All of which have middling interest, but still interest that goes well into the population. Covering soccer makes sense. MLS' attendance has consistently risen over the years, after all, and television ratings for European soccer matches shown in the US also increase regularly. No, it doesn't compete with the big-3, but American football has hit its high mark, the NBA hit its high mark years ago, and baseball is not a TV sport either, despite the breaks between innings.

I'm a football fan but yeah, the acting sucks alot.
My thoughts about it? I think it got already mentioned, the problem isn't really that some players are divers, the problem is that they get rewarded by the referee. And most of the time when the ref sees a dive, it doesn't get sanctioned (at least not often enough).
It would be nice if divers could get sanctioned later like severe fouls can lead to later suspensions. It already happened a few times but it is just not done consequently.

When I see another actor rolling on the floor, I always ask myself whether they don't spend a thought about what their families/wife think about these charades. Sometimes it is just too ridiculous. I'd be ashamed if I saw myself in TV like this, with hundreds of millions watching.

That's English Premiere League ;)

In this World Cup, it has not. The referees have almost exclusively given the benefit of the doubt to the player going down and penalizing the defender. Whether that is because the dives simply have fooled the referees or they are feeling the pressure from FIFA to crack down on fouls (or a combination), the fact remains that there are a lot of players diving and getting away with it.

I'd be ashamed to do some of these bellyflops in front of 80,000 people in the arena and 1.5 billion television watchers worldwide. But if you do it and get away with it and it helps your team, you're golden.

enforce the same rules for medical attention as other sports have. If you get medical attention on the field (if the medics come out) you leave the field and cannot return until the next legal substitution time (stoppage of play) the minute you go down, and the sportsmanship of kicking the ball out of play happens, they call in the medics, once they reach you, you HAVE to leave the pitch until the next stoppage. if you're really hurt, it's not a problem, if you are simply buying time, then your team plays a man down for a while, or has to forfeit possession to get you back.

simple and elegant.

Don't know whether I got you but it might be the best solution against divers, but what if someone really got fouled? That he has to stay out until the next stoppage while the other team might even score would be a severe disadvantage just because you got fouled.
One also has to consider that sometimes the pain goes away pretty fast.

to need medical attention, then certainly a card should be issued, right? who wouldn't trade a minute or two with a man down for a card on the other team? on the other hand, the other team might trade a yellow card for a couple of minutes man up. hmm. interesting predicament.

In basketball, players flail their arms and yell out as if pained when they make contact with a defender to get a foul. This is rarely ever criticized. What's more is that an accepted basketball technique is to fake a shot, get the defender in the air, and then blatantly jump into the defender with no intention of making a basket to get to the free throw line. The defender wasn't trying to commit a foul, and the "shooter" wasn't even trying to really shoot the ball, but the foul is called anyway and the "shooter" gets free throws for it. This is little different than what happens in soccer, and yet in soccer this gets criticized while in basketball it is praised.

In (American) football, just about every "roughing the kicker/passer" calls that I've seen are very dramatized. If anyone can remember the Titans-Steelers playoff game from a few years back, the Titan kicker misses the game winning field goal, but a Steeler blocker grazes his leg and he spins around a few times before dramatically falling to the ground. Flag, penalty, re-kick, Titans win. How much criticism was there? Very little, and the mild criticism came when the kicker pretty much admitted to it (Didier Drogba style for anyone in the know) during a press-conference, saying, "...I might consider a career in drama" (very accurate paraphrasing). More than this, when there is a holding call, the player who is being held will flail their arms and "dramatize" their disadvantage to get the flag thrown; passing interference is also often embellished by the "victim" of the foul.

In soccer, many dives are due to actual fouls, but the ref can't really call them if the player tries to stay on his/her feet, so they go down to indicate the foul that occurred. Oftentimes when a player is truly fouled and they attempt to continue, they will be dispossessed. Now, I've already shown why this World Cup is something of an anomaly, and the disgraceful flopping and pathetic refereeing has made the tournament somewhat frustrating (understatement), especially to soccer fans. You can watch an MLS game after the World Cup is over, and the level of flopping is extremely, extremely lower (Carlos Ruiz of FC Dallas, who is called "el pescadito", or "the little fish" for his flopping antics, is a rare exception). MLS is not a league with the best officiating (which is an incentive to dive for many players), but it is indicative of the fact that soccer does not usually see a high level of diving and acting and the like.

I sometimes thought about Basketball as well whenever Football gets so much criticism. And basketball is a sport where pretty much every contact is forbidden (if I'm correct) and yet one often sees exagerrated gestures when someone gets touched. I'm no expert but I have the feeling that this kind of behaviour that you described is widely accepted.
And it's obviously a sad truth that honest playing without acting barely results in fair calls by the referee.
On the other side, the Premier League got already mentioned which I like to watch, and there you don't get away with minutes of rolling on the floor. Pretty much every player there seems to know that.

It's still bugging me that bad or unlucky calls in this WC seem to have such a great impact on too many matches already.
And I continue to be for suspensions after the game for clear dives that had effect on the game (like penealties, cards).

The Patriots were playing a team (I can't remember) and the team was driving down the field. They had gotten inside the Patriot's 20 when Willie McGinnest of the Patriots went down on a play and appeared to be injured. It took a couple minutes to get him off the field and in that time his team was able to set up a play and get some badly needed rest. He came back on the field after missing the obligatory play and the Pat's made the big time stop they have become known for.

It happens in the NFL all the time.

....July 10th! That is the most entertaining part of the World Cup. The day after the last game. The air is sweeter, the sun is warmer, food tastes better....:P

Not everything has a political component.

Keep trolling. Give me a break.

If you suggest you don't like soccer - even in a humorous way - you're a troll.

I see.

if only because I support the Azzurri

Ancora una Stella !!!!