First: Zach recently asked why Americans focus so much on diving in soccer, when American sports have their own problems with cheating. This is something I've wondered about, too, and after giving it some thought, my latest guess is that it's not the diving Americans mind so much as the writhing on the ground feigning injury. Basketball, as I wrote in that earlier post, is rife with flopping and theatrical attempts to draw fouls. But basketball players seldom follow up a flop with forty seconds of convulsions designed to suggest that they're being beaten with dining trays in an invisible prison riot. I think it's those melodramatic performances of weakness, which have no real counterpart in American sports, that underlie the disgust fans feel toward diving both here and in Europe.
You could catch the precise tone of that disgust at around the forty-minute mark in the Portugal-Germany match yesterday. With Germany leading 2-0 and Portugal beginning to press their attack, Michael Ballack was lightly grazed by a defender, eased himself to the turf, and began a comfortable course of suffering that lasted just long enough to stop the flow of the match. This sort of thing happens so often that I hardly even noticed, but for some reason it went down badly with Andy Gray, who launched into a "Why do you have to do that? Why?" speech. Finally, he broke off and just emotionally heaved a sigh that seemed to go from his soul to his nostrils and to last for about ten seconds. The breath overloaded the microphone, and there, I thought, was the exact sound of loving soccer and yet being exasperated by its antics. It was all in that static whoosh. Probably Andy Gray's best work for ESPN so far.
Second: this tournament. This…tournament. It's gotten so good that I'm afraid to start poking it with adjectives; it might disintegrate on contact, leaving us like the man in the mirage who brings clear water to his lips and swallows a palmful of sand. But I don't know. Sometimes there's a genuine oasis. I'm starting to have faith.
Anyway, this might sound crazy, but I think Portugal-Germany might have been the best match of the tournament so far. At the very least it was the match that epitomized the distinct style of greatness that's been brought home for us these last two weeks. The Turkey-Czech Republic match had twilight-of-the-gods drama, rain, the immediately legendary comeback, a crumbling apocalypse of a pitch: it was so high-stakes that it stood out from everything, looked like a peak, had no time for connections below the clouds. Pillars were toppled and civilizations came to an end. But isolated cloudbursts haven't really been the style of Euro 2008; it's been a tournament of steady tension, dauntless attack, and a flow that seems to go from one match to the next. The Turkey-Czech Republic game, for all its intensity, ultimately reached its dramatic pinnacle largely because the quality of play deteriorated and the Czechs imploded, obviously looking and feeling beaten even while they still had the lead. When it ended, it ended hard.
That wasn't the case in the Portugal-Germany match. Portugal never had the lead, but they played like they were stretching out to take it, and they came closer to doing so than the fact of the defeat suggested. Control rolled from one team to the other, and the team on the weaker foot always held on with the confident knowledge that they were about to get it back. Even at the end, when Germany were marking time and Portugal were on fire with the spirit, Germany got in that great counterattack that Podolski only narrowly failed to make pay. Ultimately, the match was a sustained draw with three tiny turning points at which Portugal made mistakes: Moutinho's confused knee-that-should-have-been-a-header shot in the first half, Pepe's bad miss in the fifty-eighth minute, and Ronaldo's failure to mark Klose on the goal he shouldered in. Any two of those turned the other way would have been enough to make the difference.
In any case, the match never felt like it ended, even when it did. Some brilliant moments from Holland and Spain aside, that's been the mark of the competition so far. Everyone's indomitable, and the losers only run out of time. It's that ongoing, buoyant, processional quality that's made this tournament so invigorating. We're used to the greatness of sporting events coming down in climactic moments, and this one's given us measured medium thrill. And then, of course, the sole unstoppable meteor of Nihat at the end of the Czech Republic game. But it's the sustained quality of the quality that's been so impressive. Dancing looks different when they do it in the street for three days.
You just hit the nail on the head. Very good post.
However, I think thankfully the antics of faking injury has slightly declined from its peak 3 or 4 years ago, although its still very much a part of the game. It annoys me that its not the number 1 priority to clamp down on this.
The faking injury is also far less accepted in the EPL than in other leagues, (La Liga, Portugal and South American leagues are the worst for the 'flop with forty seconds of convulsions')
Turkey-Croatia just ended. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the section of this post in which I discuss the contenders for best match of the tournament has been rendered moot. More thoughts when I'm capable of having them.
I'm not so sure about Portugal Brian, it looked to me that they kind of gave up and let their heads drop in the last 10 minutes or so. So unlike the attitude of what Turks in this tournament.
A., they scored in the 87th minute!
They did score but the intensity in their play was waning badly in the closing stages. It wasn't the busting guts stuff that one would have expected if say Germany was losing at the death of game.
I reckon it's 'easier' to make a bigger meal of things in soccer than it is basketball, just by the nature of the fouls and types of contact etc.
Maybe they were a bit tired, but they dominated possession and forced the Germans into some pretty desperate defending. The real problem to me was that they kept fouling the defenders and having to waste time getting the ball back, but that could be taken as a sign of trying too hard rather than of giving up.
I also thought that, Postiga excepted, they settled for too many long-range shots—probably a mark of the strength of the German defense. But they still attempted something like seven shots in the last ten minutes, got 4-5 of them on target, and scored one. Nani, who was responsible for some of the bad misses, also played with terrific intensity and really drove the rest of the team forward at times.
Agreed about the structural difference between basketball and football and the opportunities they afford for play-acting. Another big part of the difference is that there are no yellow cards in basketball, so players usually have less motivation to try to sell a foul as "violent". But I do think there's a difference in ethos as well. Basketball players talk so much about "respect" and "toughness" and I think many of them would be too proud to go through the extreme pantomimes of pain that we sometimes see in soccer.
Of course, the ethos is probably a luxury allowed by the structure; replace the seldom-invoked flagrant foul call with a yellow/red-card system and players might start swallowing their pride.
Perhaps you're right with regards to Portugal and I might have a different view on a second viewing but I remember the feeling I got watching live before the goal that the energy and 'belief' was visibly diminishing on a lot of the players' faces. Even Scolari looked resigned to defeat on the bench as the players took hopeful punts from long range. Nani and Postiga did provide some cutting edge and Deco was trying till the end but some of the rest were more drained, shall we say.
A thought on basketball flops: I bet if faking an injury conferred a possible advantage, NBA players would writhe all over the floor. As it is, though, technicals for flagrant fouls are comparatively rare and seem to be given only in relatively clear-cut circumstances. Yellow cards, on the other hand, are pretty common and are handed out on a highly discretionary basis, and so faking injury on the soccer field confers more possible advantage than on the basketball court. I would say that the only "American" sport in which feigned injury yields a tactical advantage is that manly game of men, our helmeted regional variant of rugby football. And there, of course, one does see it.
It's interesting to note that in the leagues where play acting is thought to be- and probably is- more prevalent, such as Italy and Spain, referees treat contact almost like in basketball. In those leagues it seems at times that basically anything other than shoulder to shoulder is deemed a foul (outside the box, of course!).
A., that's a really good point. I'm not sure what to make of it, but you're right. Is it that the referee is more focused on protecting the players, so it's easier to draw a yellow card by acting hurt? Or is it the moral decadence of a culture of fragility?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's not the moral decadence of a culture of fragility.
Zach, I think that's exactly right. And probably at that point we'd see Americans start to complain more about flopping in basketball.
…and then there was Holland vs Russia and an epic demolition.
A. – just thinking out loud here, but do you think the attitudes to play-acting in Spain and Italy you describe above have anything to do with the popularity of basketball in those countries? Would basketball in Spain and Italy be strong enough for this to transfer from basketball to football?
Definitively no.
The popularity of flopping in Spain and Italy has more to do with the quality of refereeing. Spanish referees are without question now the worst in any of European major league and particularly susceptible to being taken in by operatic reactions (in part because they are often behind the play and don't see the actual contact and in part because many of them have operatic tendencies themselves). Spanish refs are also intimidated by big crowds (and are inclined to give big clubs the benefit of every doubt anyway), and melodramatic reactions are needed to get the guys in the third tier at the Bernabeu or Camp Nou going, as the players look like ants from up there.
North Americans tend to think of Italy as the home of diving because Pippo Inzaghi has refined it to a high art and because North American commentators love to gripe about it, but it has actually become significantly less common in recent years, largely due to a Collina-led crackdown that has included a significant focus on "simulazione" in the endless "moviola" replay segments that occupy hours and hours of Italian television time every week.
The silent movie era face-grabbing that the Russians were pulling last night was for me the worst blot on a brilliant performance that channeled both the best of Lobanovski and the sublime Soviet ice hockey team of the 70s.
If I was Platini, I would simply bring in post hoc cards and suspensions for that kind of crap based on video evidence; it would disappear within a month.
You make a good point regarding Russia, but I was thinking that they were trying to imitate the artful brilliance of some of the Oranje (Van der Vaar, Sneijder, Van Nistelrooy) in making the slightest of contacts look like a certain foul but they ended up doing it amateurishly and hence melodramatically, in particular from Zhirkov who was the main culprit.