YOU can fool some people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
By HARRY REDKNAPP
In football, you cannot fall over all of the time and fool the referee all of the time.
Diving is a hot topic once again and it is an unsavoury subject. That’s a good thing because it proves it’s not tolerated in the English game and happily, it is nowhere near as prevalent here as in other countries.
There is no doubt in my mind that the increase in the number of foreign players in our game has triggered a rise in the playacting and diving over here.
Of course, going by the book, every penalty claim should be judged on its individual merits and taken separately.
However, referees watch Match of the Day, they watch Sky and they talk to each other. So they know who the con artists are.
If a player has won a dodgy penalty one week and the referee realises he has been mugged, it will spread through the union and that player gets saddled with a reputation for it. Take Luis Suarez. I love him as a player. He is fantastic, he is a mazy dribbler and is up there with the best in the Premier League.
But he has a reputation for throwing himself around a bit. He can be prone to theatricals, for going to ground and over-doing it. It’s a shame referees probably think of him as a bit of a Tom Daley.
If he has pulled the wool over one referee’s eyes one week then next week the next official will be on alert, in the same way they keep an eye out for players more likely to put in an over-the-top tackle. That’s human nature.
Maybe he dives when he should not. That means after time he might not get penalties when he should, because the referee is aware of his image.
Perhaps that is not fair but if we are honest you cannot help but think ‘That’s what you get for diving around’ — you can’t expect sympathy. Players who dive make a rod for their own backs.
The first time I ever witnessed the ‘art’ of diving was as boss of Portsmouth when we played at Arsenal. Robert Pires ran at our defender, then threw his leg out at our man and went down.
At first I thought it was a genuine penalty but then replays showed what really happened and I was shocked and saddened.
Look at some of the players we have in the Premier League at the moment. Sergio Aguero, Eden Hazard for instance. They have low centres of gravity and are so quick they tease the defender with the ball, nick it away at the last moment with a lightning change of direction and suddenly a size 13 boot is heading their way and it is a foul.
That is genuine, that is a foul. But when players deliberately stick out a leg or a foot and throw themselves at defenders to get penalties it is not.
It is mostly the foreign players who do it, although I’m not saying it did not exist before so many foreign players came to play here.
Franny Lee was a great player but he could also play the game to win a penalty. He was the exception to the rule though and still not many British players are comfortable with conning the refs. Ashley Young has problems with it and his Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson dealt with it quickly.
Claims that English players get the rub of the green with refs and win more penalties are a bit hard to swallow.
But the swift response is ‘Don’t dive and maybe you’ll get them’.
As I said, it’s not an English disease to go to ground.
But I must add how impressed I was with Manchester City boss Roberto Mancini this week when he admitted that his team should not have had a penalty against Borussia Dortmund.
I applaud that. The defender had no option but to have his arms out. Had he not he would have been off balance. I felt very sorry for him.
It was poor refereeing and soon it might become another ‘art form’ as diving is regarded in some countries, to chip the ball at a defender’s arms to win a penalty.
Personally, I don’t lose sleep over diving however distasteful it looks. I find brutal tackling far more abhorrent.
But making the right decision on a dive is one of the most difficult a ref has to make.
