It’s February of 2011: the Super Bowl. The New York Jets are leading the Minnesota Vikings 24-20 in the fourth quarter—in fact there are only four seconds left in the game. But the Vikings have the ball on the Jet 23-yard line. Time for one shot to the end zone. Brett Favre drops back and lofts a pass to the right sideline, where Adrian Peterson is (surprisingly) running a wheel route. Jets linebacker Bryan Thomas is chasing Peterson but knows he’s in trouble: just as Peterson crosses the goal line—but before he touches the ball—Thomas dives, reaches as far as he can, clips Peterson’s ankle. Peterson and the ball fall to the turf. The side judge throws his flag for pass interference in the end zone. Thomas spreads his arms out wide in the universal gesture of innocence, but everyone on the stadium knows that he committed the penalty and did so intentionally.
The clock reads all zeroes, but the Vikings get one more play from the one-yard line. Favre takes the snap, but as he is turning to hand the ball to Peterson his center steps on his foot. He stretches out the ball as he’s falling but it bounces off Peterson’s leg and onto the turf; Peterson picks it up but has no time to make a move before the Jets’ defenders are on him. Game over. The Jets win the Super Bowl.
If this happens, what will people say about Bryan Thomas (on Twitter, in newspapers, on comment threads)? Will anyone say that he has violated the ethics of the game, that he deserves further punishment? Will anyone argue that the rules of the game need to be changed so that teams cannot benefit from committing a penalty? I suspect, rather, that Thomas will be generally credited with a very smart play.
How is what Luis Suárez did at the end of yesterday’s match against Ghana any different?
I think it’s different in two ways—though I am not sure how important these differences are. First, in the example I give above, Peterson could drop the ball—receivers drop perfectly thrown balls fairly frequently—whereas the ball Suárez slapped away was unquestionably headed into the goal. The act of preventing something that otherwise would certainly have happened simply is more significant than the act of preventing something that would likely have happened. (Brian tweeted yesterday, “Seriously, how is Suárez different from an NBA player fouling to stop a dunk at the end of a tie game?” It’s different because basketball players do sometimes miss dunks, or lose the ball as they’re going up for a shot, or get called for traveling—none of those things often, not as often as receivers drop passes, but sometimes.) And of course, given the game time, the certain goal would also have meant a certain win for Ghana.
Second, and more important, Thomas’s act feels far less transgressive because there is no taboo involved. Defensive players tackle offensive players from behind repeatedly during any given game: Thomas’s offense is simply a matter of inappropriate timing. Similarly, soccer players regularly commit intentional fouls, which we call “professional” if we support the team doing the fouling, and “cynical” if we support the team being fouled. But outfield players are never to touch the ball during play.
Moreover, one of the strange but universally true things about taboos—absolute prohibitions within a particular community—is that they bear upon us with more force when they are, or seem, arbitrary. “It’s just wrong” or “We don’t ever do that” are more psychologically compelling explanations than “We don’t do that for the following rational reasons.” If you tell me not to eat pork because I could get trichinosis, I might think, well, how bad is trichinosis, really? And maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones to avoid it, because man, that bacon really smells good. But if you tell me simply that the pig is unclean (Leviticus 11), that’s actually scarier, especially if I don’t know how it’s unclean. As Paul Ricoeur has taught us, few terrors are greater than the terror of invisible pollution. And that’s what a handball does: it pollutes the offender, all the more so because the prohibition is arbitrary—if it’s taken away you don’t die, you just find yourself in a rugby match. Where of course you might die, but my point stands.
So that’s why I think people are so freaked out about what Suárez did: he prevented a certain goal (which would certainly have sent Ghana through to the next round) by breaking a taboo. If at precisely the same stage of the match, Suárez had deliberately and violently fouled a player who had the ball at his feet as near the goal as, say, Miroslav Klose was on Germany’s second goal against Argentina today, and in that way prevented a certain score, and did so without using his hands, the soccer world would not be in such an uproar. The violation of taboo multiplies the anger exponentially.
All that said, I don’t get all the wrath directed at Suárez himself. Every other player in the World Cup would have done exactly the same thing in his situation; and almost every fan would have done it for his or her team. You can’t expect moral heroism at moments like that; you really can’t ever expect moral heroism from mere human beings. The rules can be changed, and perhaps should be, but not human nature.
And finally: in general, the laws of soccer are already rather fierce when it comes to violations of this essential taboo: look at what happened to Harry Kewell, as already discussed in these pages. This is one area in which the law-makers seems likely to stir themselves. I bet we’ll get changes in the goal-line-handball rules before we get instant replays of goal-line calls.
Read More: World Cup
by Alan Jacobs · July 3, 2010
Great minds think alike, it would appear…
http://www.davesfootballblog.com/post/2010/07/03/luis-suarez-and-the-art-of-the-tactical-foul/
@Dave’s Football Blog Weirdly alike, in this case. . . .
@Dave’s Football Blog I think Ed Reed and Bryan Thomas are going to have to fight it out to see who represents Suárez .
I think the fact that many (most?) professionals would probably have done the same thing (the “he didn’t have a choice” argument) made Suarez’s “crime” less terrible, but his reaction, his celebration at the end of the game and his comments afterwards – bragging about it being the real “hand of God” – added to the sheer cynicism of the act itself and made it a disgusting, repulsive way to help his team progress. Suarez has lost any respect he may have had left among neutrals and the way his teammates praised him after the game, hoisting him on their shoulders, means that they as a team, as a nation and as individual players have had their image and their reputation tainted. Rather than talking about a good Cup run from a team whose glory days seem very distant and the incredible form of Diego Forlan, formerly written off as a Man United reject, everyone will now associate Uruguay with the Suarez handball – cynical, unsportsmanlike and ultimately soulless., the polar opposite of the beautiful game and the Fair Play ethos FIFA is trying to push.
In this example, is Darelle Revis the entire Paraguayan back line?
Seriously though, great article. Loved the football/football comparison (especially with the Jets winning the super bowl!), and this line in particular.
“Every other player in the World Cup would have done exactly the same thing in his situation; and almost every fan would have done it for his or her team. You can’t expect moral heroism at moments like that.”
I’ve had multiple arguments in real life and on twitter defending that exact point.
@Louwrens Yeah, that has been pretty ugly. I don’t blame Suarez too much for what he did in the heat of the moment, but his behavior since, after he has had time to think, has been rather revelatory, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
I think that eventually, if enough players keep using their hands to touch the ball, FIFA will have to revisit the blanket prohibition and carve out a few exceptions. Right after they introduce replay technology.
That’s a stunning argument. I love the Harry Kewel piece but I have to wonder about this taboo thing…
(In rugby, the ref can award a try if he deems a foul has stopped a “certain” try; maybe this will come to football.)
Anyway, kudos for getting Leviticus into football debate.
The thing is in the NFL the official has the right to call a touchdown if he believes something is WAY over the line of fairness. It’s called the “Palpably Unfair Act”. Granted, it has only been used once when a player ran from the sidelines to tackle a player running into the end zone in the 1954 Cotton Bowl, but at least the ref has the discretion to use it. Maybe FIFA refs should have the same discretion?
For reference, see the last rule on this page: http://www.nfl.com/rulebook/penaltysummaries
@Rogersworthe Excellent idea — it could be the rarely-used chartreuse card. But if players waved imaginary ones at refs, would the other team get a goal? (“No ref, I was waving a yellow — a yellow, I swear!)
He traded his place in the field, reducing his team’s numbers, for a penalty. He’traded’ one game player, for an avoided goal+ penalty chance. Why all the commotion?
@Jose Carlos I wonder if you read the article you so articulately commented on? I think to add to Alan’s point, one of the essences of a taboo is that it seeks to prevent an act without having a method of prevention beyond the fact of taboo itself. The commotion is because Suarez took advantage of the fact that within the rules of the game there is nothing that truly punishes him or his team adequately for what he did. The structure of the game and its rules simply don’t allow for it because he stepped so completely outside the rules. Regardless of whether Ghana score that (first) penalty 9 times out of 10, or even 99 times out of 100, Uruguay have gained something, in essence, without losing anything. He went above and beyond the boundaries of the game. Indeed he really stopped playing the game at all.
Football can be described very simply: 10 people try to propel a ball without using your hands, into a net. Not much more is needed (especially once you add the keeper, and the offside rule) and any action so obviously contrary to that is not football.
The timing of his act of course had much to do with its significance. Being done in the 5th minute, it simply would have been cowardly and stupid. Being done in the 121st, it was as close to cheating as one can get. [Could an already substituted player come onto the field and head the ball away, in exchange for a red card, a penalty and a reduction to ten men?] In my view, Suarez sacrificed football for something else (money, fame, sex, whatever). The problem being that it is only with football that those exist and it is only with people adhering to the taboos that football exists.
This argument is, of course, all undermined by FIFA’s response. Taboo’s real threat is ostracization, and since Uruguay are hardly going to do the job, FIFA should force the rest of the soccer world to. But then, as you can imagine, I think FIFA’s response is completely inappropriate. Suarez shouldn’t see another minute of World Cup time in South Africa. But perhaps all I can hope for is that the Dutch ensure he sees it on the losing end in Port Elizabeth and not in Soccer City.
You can’t expect moral heroism at moments like that; you really can’t ever expect moral heroism from mere human beings.
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on this point I feel you’re right in the sense that you can’t expect it from people but by the same token you can’t expect people not to be dissappointed by his choice.
For every moment of ethical “purity” from Robbie fowler refusing a penalty when he felt he wasn’t fouled, to di canio stopping play while clear on goal to allow an injured opponent to be treated, the crowd applauds these actions for their moral “integrity”; I think on the flipside, it’s only normal, if not completely logical, for dissappoinment at “taboos”, if anything, because they assist in forming a dim, cynical view of human decency and fair play as general concepts.
Great article, as always.
I have read many people suggest that Suarez didn’t need to use his hands because he was in a position to head the ball away, or be “hit in the face” as one put it. Changes of rules are all very noble, but it very rarely are such incidents clear cut.
Further, Suarez did not actually prevent Ghana from winning because they had two further opportunities to do so that they were unable to take advantage of.
I don’t mean to condone what he did, merely to suggest that rather than directly cause Ghana’s defeat by cheating he created the situation where they brought defeat upon themselves.
After all, had Suarez simply fouled an opponent and then Ghana missed 3 penalties from 5 as they did on Friday, the reaction would have been that they had blown it and didn’t deserve to progress.
Most of the vitriol does stem from the taboo inherent in the nature of his “crime”.
Quibble first: I’m not sure I agree with your point about probability versus certainty. The NFL pass interference analogy is imperfect because…that rule has inconsistent penalties. When it’s not committed in the end zone, pass interference is penalized with the equivalent of a completion at the spot of the foul (plus an automatic first down). But when it’s committed in the end zone, the ball is placed at the one-yard line; a completion for a touchdown isn’t assumed. Why did football’s rulemakers suddenly get concerned about the fact that “people drop passes” when the penalty occurs in the end zone? Superficially, “because there’s more at stake”; but that just penalizes the offensive team — forcing them to complete another pass in the end zone. Automatic TDs would make the rule more consistent (and eliminate the Peterson/Thomas scenario).
Rereading your previous post about the discourses of the sport preferring referees with a sense of equity, I wonder if it isn’t time for a rule change regarding these cases that requires that sense be operationalized; if, in the judgment of the referee, a handball prevents a goal from being scored, the referee awards an automatic goal. Or, to use Brian’s tweet against him, this is the equivalent of basketball’s basket interference — even though you can use your hands to block a shot, a hand in the cylinder is considered perforce unfair and worth an automatic two points, even if the ball clangs off the rim.
@Bob Lalasz That doesn’t really use my tweet against me (anyway, my tweet would plead the fifth) because I wasn’t arguing against a rule change. I was talking about Suárez’s choice in light of the existing rules, and pointing out the fact that we don’t run to the hills screaming “cheat!” every time a player commits a tactical foul to benefit his team. As an action, this was more like goaltending; as a tactical choice, it was more like a foul to stop a last-second layup.
I basically agree with your proposed rule change, I think. I definitely agree that if you want to eliminate tactical fouling, you have to do it through rules and enforcement, rather than by expecting players to police themselves. The same goes for diving. There’s too much incentive; newspaper honor is not going to make it stop.
@Brian Phillips My bad…tweets do lead independent (although ephemeral) lives, and in any case it turned out I wasn’t using it against you, even if I intended to. (And I didn’t, even though I said I did.)
Not that yours or Alan Jacobs’ arguments exemplify this, but the analogies are swirling ever more thickly these days between soccer and life — i.e., soccer is “life-like” in its cruelty, inconclusiveness, unfairness and episodic corruption, therefore many instances of that cruelty, etc. have special dispensation because they dutifully bring us back to what we were presumably escaping. I did find merit in Peter Singer’s recent arguments about cheating and moral examples, and I keep on thinking about golf as the only sport where you call fouls on yourself — the only sport that requires you to be the superego — but that’s the only sport that doesn’t require referees in the first place. In addition to a kind of mass revulsion at taboo, a lot of us might be reacting badly to Suarez as a way of draw a line in the sand against this banal metaphorizing. We don’t want the touchline to be an entirely permeable membrane.
@Bob Lalasz Ha! And see, I knew you didn’t even though I said you did because you said you did.
I’m still shaking my head in amazement at the over-reaction to what Suárez did. Thirty seconds before The Ignominy, Ghana were awarded a free kick as a reward for one of their players doing some blatant play-acting. One second before The Ignominy, Ghana would have scored and won the match, if they hadn’t precision-targeted the ball straight at Suárez’s knee. A minute after The Ignominy, Ghana would have scored and won the match, if they hadn’t banged the ensuing penalty onto the bar. They then had half an hour in which to score a goal, and didn’t, and then five further chances to score penalties to win the match, blowing two of them.
Surely that, by anyone’s reckoning, amounts to a whole bunch of carrots that Ghana failed to get their teeth into, while Uruguay had to bear the sticks of the improperly awarded free kick that led to The Ignominy, the resulting penalty against them, and the red card and automatic one-match suspension imposed on The Ignominious One, thereby depriving them of arguably their greatest asset – his is, after all, the top goal-scorer in Europe – not only for the penalty shoot-out but also for the whole duration of any semi-final that might, and as it turns out did, follow.
I’m not even sure that, if scored on the Claudio Gentile Scale of Gross Heinosity, the Ignominy would even rank head and shoulders above all other unconscionable acts on a football pitch. Isn’t it equally a de facto goal when Leo Messi is hacked down from behind as he’s about to chip the keeper? And that happens every week.
@Archie_V Well said. I’ve been surprised that more hasn’t been made of the fact that Ghana’s free kick preceding the handball probably shouldn’t have been given.
I just noticed that Henry Winter’s unhinged rant about Suárez in the Telegraph describes him as “polluting” the World Cup. Score one for Alan’s taboo theory.
@Jose Carlos
I don’t get it either. Have folks recently started watching football (not aimed at folks here but definitely in other sites and media coverage)? Well obviously not here, but with the extremely hyped media focus on every possible thing now-a-days it’s turned into a bunch of talking heads, talking out of their rears who don’t know the game and it filters down.
Also it gives “credible” football journalists a story to hang on too.
Does anybody else miss watching football back in the day? Sometimes I do, but I guess I am part of that chatter universe, *sigh*
Tal vez lo que resulta más molesto a la gente que no tiene una intensa cultura de fútbol, sean más las declaraciones posteriores, que la acción en sí misma de detener la pelota con la mano. Además de un tabú roto, hay un fenómeno de malinterpretación de lo que dijo Suárez. No se vanagloria de su actitud, habla desde la premisa de que es antideportiva.
Una, cien mil veces he visto suceder lo mismo en el fútbol. La Argentina del 78 y la España del 90 detuvieron pelotas que entraban a su arco, y curiosamente en ambos casos el penal no fue convertido. Ni siquiera expulsaron a los jugadores en ese entonces. La Alemania del 66 detuvo un gol de Uruguay con la mano, y esa vez ni siquiera se cobró penal.
Es una acción antideportiva, sobre eso no puede haber dos opiniones. Las patadas, los agarrones, los insultos, los salivazos. La desestabilización provocadora de Materazzi, el cabezazo de Zidane, la simulación exagerada de dolor.
Pero desengáñense: en todos los deportes sucede algo similar, aunque no siempre trasciende registrado por decenas de cámaras. Es la naturaleza humana, como sabiamente escribe Alan Jacobs. El deporte es una metáfora del conflicto, tras la cual nadie sale gravemente herido.
In these comments, the fact that other players would have done the same thing in Suárez’s situation has been mentioned. The fact of Suárez’s (and the Uruguayan team’s) rather lame comments afterward has been mentioned. But my intense dislike of Suárez also stems from his play in the first 122 minutes of the game as well. He dove all over, committed cheap fouls, and couldn’t put the ball in the net after receiving some beautiful passes and being the beneficiary of some lucky rebounds. You can only act like a baby if you make up for it with creative, high-quality play. And if you compare Suárez to class-act (and play-maker) Forlán, the former comes off even worse.
I think you can take the basketball analogy further. The player didn’t get fouled as he kicked the ball into the net, another player blocked it on its way in. That’s goaltending in basketball. When goaltending occurs, the player is granted the two points…Maybe soccer could consider a similar rule – in cases where there is a handball at the goal-line and the ball is clearly on its way into the goal, maybe they should just grant the goal.
@Brian In the end, fate had it that Suarez and Uruguay got their punishment by the outcome of his red card.
Great piece. The only exception is the fact that the whole play resulting in Suarez handball started with a faul that never happened (the Ghana player clearly dived) and involved an offside.