Does play-acting bring shame on a country?
Post categories: World Cup 2010,ÌýWorld Cup Have Your Say
| 23:15 UK time, Monday, 21 June 2010
Although that was more one-sided than a , the real talking point in Group H was the earlier game between - in which both sides were equally guilty.
Guilty, that is, of acts of seemingly blatent play-acting.
First, Switzerland's defender Velram Behrami was sent off for his minor tangle with Arturo Vidal.
While Behrami's arm was raised and did make some minor contact, Vidal's went down as if he'd taken an Acme-sized anvil in the chops. This was after only 30 minutes, and put the Swiss - who had pulled off the first real shock of the World Cup by beating the Spanish in their opening match - on the back foot for pretty much the rest of the game; from that point on, Chile began to dominate.
But, as Jeremy Wilson points out in the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper, when Steve von Bergen went down with his hands at his face when he seemed only to have been pushed on the neck.
This all took place after in the group G match on Sunday, when Ivorian Kader Keita went down clutching his face in response to a light tap from the Brazilian midfielder.
Such play-acting of course has a precedent in the World Cup, most infamously in the 2002 tournament when Brazil's star forward Rivaldo went down claiming he had been hit in the face by a loose ball Hakan Unsal, when in fact it was his leg that had been struck.
When hit with a Fifa fine, however, Rivaldo defended what he did, saying:
"I am not sorry about anything... obviously the ball didn't hit me in the face, but I was still the victim. I did not hit anyone in the face."
Undeniably, with so much at stake in a World Cup match, it can be easy to see the temptation.
The principle, arguably, is the same as that of a penalty. If contact is made, an offence has taken place. So what if a player enhances their reaction to ensure the referee notices it happened?
Certainly no-one wants to see a return to the days when flying elbows were a common part of the game - an attitude that led to half of Tottenham defender 's face being demolished in an early Premier League encounter.
And if drawing attention to any such contact gives your national team a boost by putting the opposition down to 10 men, is that not laudible, rather than something worthy of condemnation?
Is - as Rivaldo argued - play-acting nothing to apologise for? Or if you were Ivorian, Swiss or Chilean, would you be feeling ashamed of your team today?
