Time to sort out football’s fakers and divers

CALL me a hard-hearted old cynic, but there was something almost perversely refreshing about Wayne Rooney being struck down by the dreaded curse of the fractured metatarsal.

It had to do with that look of genuine anguish on his face the moment he felt the bone in his foot snap.

We’ve seen that expression many times in football, invariably accompanied by a squeal of pain, a deranged waving of the arms and at least half a dozen forward rolls, before the victim finally comes to a shuddering halt and lies motionless on the turf, his hands clamped around his leg in a wordless statement of intense personal distress.

Confronted with this terrible scene, impressionable sorts would already be mentally composing a solemn death notice for the newspapers but, soft, something stirs in the land of the mortally wounded.

Having raised one eye from the grass to check if (a) he’s won a penalty (b) had an opponent sent off or (c) received an offer from Hollywood, our fallen hero rises slowly to his feet and takes his first faltering steps back into the land of the living, grimacing and shaking his finger at the blind injustice of a referee who has chosen to completely ignore his close brush with The Reaper.

A moment later, his miraculous recovery suddenly complete, our hero astonishes the world by haring after the ball, lightly glancing off the nearest available opponent, who in turn collapses like a cheap deckchair, rolls over and over in agony and… Well, I think you get the picture.

The modern taste for euphemism means we are invited to call it ‘simulation’. ‘Acting the maggot’ would be more appropriate. Others prefer plain, old, unvarnished ‘cheating’.

Of course, the problem with the latter is that sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between it and something called ‘gamesmanship’, which we have all long been encouraged to think of as a normal, even admirable, part of sport.

After a scintillating run, a striker in the box finds an outstretched leg in his way, with the ball just beginning to run out of his control: he could vault it, of course, but only a saint wouldn’t go down in those circumstances. Or your name is Diego Maradona and you stick a hand in the air to tip the ball over Peter Shilton in the finals of the World Cup; who could possibly be upset about that? (Pause for laughter).

Or you’re Ireland and Holland in Italia ‘90 and you both know that a draw will suffice to get you through to the next round, so you spend the final period of the game having a polite dialogue that goes something like, “After you Ruud”, “No, no, after you Mick”. Don’t recall hearing too many complaints about that little arrangement around these parts.

So I think we can agree that we’re not entirely opposed to cheating – sorry, gamesmanship — at least not when it’s in the service of “a good cause”. There can also be an element of natural justice involved.

Consider the mess that is offside: officials now get this so wrong, so often, that good play is effectively being penalised. Who then can blame the players if they choose another moment to try and even up the score?

Still, there is something uniquely annoying about the theatrical dive, and television is partly responsible for our heightened sensitivity to the act: an apparent trip and tumble at full pace can look pretty convincing at first glance, but see it again in intimate slow-motion and the ‘simulation’ is revealed as the frankly pathetic fresh-air stunt that it is. And when it’s clear that the thing is done solely in an attempt to get an opponent booked or sent off, then there can be no room left for sneaky admiration.

By contrast, poor Wayne Rooney’s downfall was the real deal in every way, the slow-motion footage of his foot bending agonisingly under a clean, honest challenge by Paulo Ferreira, the stuff of documentary not soap opera.

I reckon I have more chance of playing in Germany this summer than Wayne has, but if it is the end of his World Cup, it’s not exactly the end of his world. All genuine football fans will rue the absence of his amazing talent this summer, but Rooney is a strong, young man who will surely get other opportunities to perform on football’s greatest stage.

The same cannot be said with any certainty of Arsenal’s young French midfielder Abou Diaby who was left with a fractured ankle and dislocated ankle ligaments, after an horrific tackle by Sunderland’s Dan Smith in the dying moments of their game last Monday. An incensed Arsene Wenger, who has threatened legal action and called for Smith to be banned for at least as long as Diaby is out of the game, has even go so far as to describe the player’s injury as potentially career-ending.

“If you do that to a guy in the street you go to jail,” said Wenger, making the reasonable point that sport should not be immune from the law of the land. Nevertheless, Smith, who is only 19, has strenuously denied the charge that he went into the tackle with the intent of harming Diaby, although there is no doubt that he was guilty of recklessness endangerment at the very least, and this at a meaningless point in the dying seconds of a lost game.

This row looks like it will run and run which, sadly, is more than can be said for the unfortunate Diaby. But his plight does bring a sense of perspective to bear on Rooney’s woes — and reminds us to redouble our scorn for the spoofers and bluffers in the sometimes seriously harsh and painful world of football.