Premier League Nonsense

Cheating is a fact of life. We’re doing it at school when we copy other people’s work or we surreptiously smuggle notes into exams or even pay someone to complete our homework. We do it when we go for job interviews and we inflate our two week stint stocking shelves in a supermarket into a high sounding Stock Assessor & Replenisher Executive. We do it when we drive, forever looking for the slightest advantage to get ahead of the car in front to save us a valuable few seconds and if we don’t use the mirrors when we pull out well, C’est la vie.

We see cheating all around us be it bankers paying themselves massive bonuses while losing their company money to politicians fiddling expenses to rich types squirreling their funds offshore to avoid paying the taxes the rest of us have to.

We cheat for a couple of reasons. We cheat because we think we can get away with it and the ends justify the means.

It’s a shame that many of us view cheating inconsistently. When our team gets away with it, we’re fine. When it goes against us we’re up in arms. And when it goes against us but we win anyway we are happy to overlook it.

Take Luis Suarez and his outrageous dive against Arsenal. The guy isn’t exactly flavor of the moth so you’d think he would be going out of his way to avoid controversy but there he is, rolling round in fake agony, shin pad out. The ref fell for it and pointed to the spot and Liverpool got what they wanted.

As iit happened, Liverpool missed the penalty and went on to lose the game in injury time despite dominating for large periods. Justice perhaps was seen to be done.

But in fact justice will never be done until such incidents are punished and the offenders penalized.

We have the dubious goals panel in England whose job it is to decide who should be credited with a goal when it is not clear initially. An onerous job for sure and one for the boys no doubt but hardly the best way of optimizing the technology that now covers the game.

We see and we hear about yellow and red cards being rescinded. But why don’t we hear about players being retroactively punished cheating. For diving, for time wasting, for falling to the ground like they have been shot.

It now looks like goal line technology is on the way though perhaps too late for Mark Hughes and his Queens’ Park Rangers team who were decided a sure fire goal against Bolton Wanderers at the weekend, but surely the technology is there, and there are more than enough pundits, former match officials and commentators out there who would love the chance to rehash games on a Monday dishing out punishments retroactively.

Human error is a part of football and the linesman getting that decision wrong is human error. Fine, use technology to help them in their jobs and it’s a win win for everyone.

Cheating is not human error. It is deliberate, calculatin and embarrassing to see grown men spectacularly throw themselves to the floor to seek an advantage. It is also hypocritical to see a player cheating one week then seeing them complain when the other team does it a few days later.

Why not use technology to stamp out the cheats?

(First appeared in Jakarta Globe)

# posted by Me @ 5:57 AM