I Dive

At first I found it a little strange that The FA haven't put a "no diving" clause into their new "Code of Conduct." With all the publicity about diving at the moment it would have seemed a good way to signal an attempt to eradicate it, or at least show that it won't be tolerated.

After a bit of thought though it occurred to me that obviously there wasn't any real need to, because, as everyone knows, English people don't dive. Can you really imagine Steven Gerrard [and yes, I could here have named many an English player, including some Man Utd ones but it works so much better with Stevie G because the whole blinkered "honest English players" view upholds him as the great bulldog type English spirit, no nonsense, no fancy foreign nonsense, whereas the truth is he is very good at diving, you could probably say he's a natural, he could teach Suarez a thing or two about diving, because whatever anyone says, Suarez is an awful diver, that's why he's always getting flak for it, if he was any good, he'd get caught less, like Stevie G] throwing himself to the floor in an attempt to gain an advantage?

Every major tournament we go and we have high expectations and the moral high ground and every major tournament we come home having been cheated out of victory, not outplayed, never outplayed, cheated out of our rightful place at football's pinnacle.  We all saw for ourselves how the Spanish went from being also-rans to World and European champions - not by becoming better at football, developing a great passing team and technically gifted players, but by becoming more cunning and devious, put simply, they became better at cheating.

All of this poses the question, "But aren't you English therefore just a little bit stupid, why stay on your clean but trophyless high horse, when you could be down here competing with us?  And frankly, you've had us foreigners in your country for a decade or so now, and you've let us play football, and yet none of our cheating ways has infected your own players, who still play the game as it was intended, in the spirit of little children in the park and Luis Suarez."

We like to stay isolated from these foreign influences, it's been the same throughout history, never let any outside influences into our culture.  You can even see it in the fact that our footballers hate going to play overseas, it's not through lack of offers, but we see the cheating that goes on over there (literally every game of football is just people falling over holding their faces in acres of space) and we say "no."

(Another way of reading Sir Alex's comments on foreign players (except Nani) diving is to do the wonderful paper trick of reading too deeply into everything he says.  So for instance if he congratulates van Persie on having a good game and looking sharp you read that as a criticism of Rooney for having a bad game.  So, here's his quote:

"We have known for quite a few years there are plenty of players diving and, you have to say, particularly foreign players," said Ferguson.

But the 70-year-old Scot insisted: "Nani is not the type to dive. He has never been that type of player."

First thing we could do is just assume that he is actually slagging off Nani, because that's another trick the papers like to pull - everything is a sign that Sir Alex no longer likes Nani and wants rid.  When he says "he's not that type of player," he really means he is.  Or we could just read that as him saying that he wants Nani to stop being that type of player, so if he says he isn't he'll have to stop.

Or we could probably just read the whole thing as one of the dangers of having a manager whose getting on and is pretty old-school and whose opinions on foreign players, presumably set in the days when they were all considered a bit fancy with all their flair and their fancy hairs and the like, are just too deep-set to change and best ignored, although it comes to something when anyone takes such nonsense seriously.