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.

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.

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.

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')