No diving!

Look, diving in Football ("Soccer") is a seemingly simple thing to spot. Why it needs some academic to appear on radio and TV to tell us about it, I don't know.

The human body has evolved over thousands of years into a remarkably resilient and adaptable piece of bio-engineering. If you've ever watched a contact sport like Rugby or American Football, you'll have witnessed many times the almost miraculous ability of athletes to stop themselves falling over when they need to. Other sports - baseline rallies in Tennis, evenly-matched Judo players, skiers, ice skaters, you name it - demonstrate time and again, almost to the point where we stop noticing and take it for granted, that if someone wants to stay on their feet it takes a heck of a lot to knock them over.

It's only when you add an area of a playing field that penalises foul play, like the penalty area in Football (and Basketball, come to that) which can be manipulated by an attacker to gain a tactical advantage over his opponents, that drawing a foul and/or deliberately going to ground as if fouled makes sense (to some...).

This is an open invitation to the unscrupulous, the unskilled, the frustrated and the downright crooked to play-act and fall about - cheat, in other words - and I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks it's easy enough to spot, albeit via TV cameras (but they have spare officials around who could look at those, if necessary). It needn't hold things up much, as play would have come to a halt anyway, or it could be looked at once it does.

We've all seen them and yelled at the telly - the swan dive, the I've-been-shot-in-the-back, the tuck-and-roll, the spin-and-twist, the shoulder-bump-and-collapse. You look at the replay sometimes and watch the culprit tuck in an otherwise unimpeded standing foot and belly-flop onto the turf, whilst already beginning to look round and appeal to the referee, and think "Has nobody else seen that?"

The worst of it all, though, is the hypocrisy of the pundits, ex-players all, who sit in their golfing sweaters on sofas and say things like "Well, there is some contact there. He had no choice but to go down." NO! He did have a choice, and that was to play better and get out of the situation properly.

Makes my blood boil...

Taking the advice of history

I listened today as an elderly man described a dispute he'd been having with a near neighbour. He sounded tired, sad, deflated. He'd seemingly done his best to resolve the issues with his nuisance neighbour but had been unable to do so by means of dialogue and persuasion.

The man was Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and his dispute was with Adolf Hitler, whose invasion of Poland was to have disastrous consequences for that generation and their men and women of fighting age.

A wag on the radio has since said; "A British Prime Minister fooled by a foreign dictator - it couldn't happen today...", referring to Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein. Well, it's easy to be smart after the event, but then that's the whole idea of looking to the past for guidance in avoiding mistakes in the present that will affect the future.