Article from the Guardian:
Legends of the fall
Didier Zokora’s comically inept dive on Sunday caused outrage. If you must perform a ‘simulation’, do it properly.
Harry Pearson October 2, 2006 11:59 PM
Since his arrival at Tottenham Hotspur Didier Zokora has often looked like a man who couldn’t pass a leg of lamb without feeling the urge to fling himself over it. On Sunday evening at White Hart Lane he excelled himself, crumpling to the ground to earn a match-winning penalty under a tackle from Portmouth’s Pedro Mendes that wasn’t so much a challenge as a diffident inquiry. The football phone-ins were soon full up with irate callers who had witnessed the incident live on radio and were so incoherent with rage they might as well have abandoned speech in favour of banging on a dustbin lid with a mole-wrench.
Yet the truth is that it is not Zokora’s dive that has created the furore; it is its ineptitude. The man from the Ivory Coast has not been in this country long, but he will soon learn that when it comes to cheating, we expect a degree of professionalism from our footballers.
Diving is not an easy art. Of all football’s skills it ranks as the third hardest, just behind the bicycle kick and blowing your nose with your hand without getting snot all down the front of your shirt. The trick is to pick from one of the tried-and-trusted styles and then work and work at it until you have got it right.
The absent-minded sprinter
By far the simplest of all diving techniques and one used by many top talents, including Luis Figo and Robert Pires. The diver rushes forward normally until opponents close in, at which point he suffers a temporary loss of memory and leaves his feet behind. His head and torso continue on their forward journey while his boots remain rooted to the turf, inevitably causing the player to topple earthwards. A nice embellishment to this approach is for the diver to kick one of his own ankles as he falls and then cast about urgently as if looking for the culprit in the manner of Eric Morecambe pretending that Glenda Jackson has pinched his bottom.
The unbearable lightness of being Michael Owen
Some players are clearly too saintly to actually dive. They are simply the victims of bodies so lacking in ballast that the merest brush of a sleeve can send them crashing to the ground. England striker Michael Owen, with his pleasant face, sensible haircut and general air of an aspiring junior executive who’s just checked into a luxury hotel and taken full advantage of the in-room trouser-press facility, is clearly not the sort of man to try and pull the wool over anybody’s eyes, and yet . . . he has fallen over an awful lot, most notably in World Cup games against Argentina. This is not cheating, though. It is just that Michael is so lacking in substance that the very breath of a South American defender is enough to unbalance the little fellow. Clearly not many players are so blessed, but using Zen actualisation techniques and muttering the mantra: “I am as thistledown wafting on the breeze,” even the burliest of strikers can achieve similar results.
The Oscar nominee
Most diving is purely utilitarian, but some players like to bring a pinch of melodrama to the act, engaging in wild histrionics that call to mind the movie actors of the silent age. The great German striker Jurgen Klinsmann, for example, would soar into the air, his body jerking hideously as if being subjected to a massive electric shock and, on hitting the ground, execute a series of rolls culminating in a final spasm and a cry of existential anguish such as you might imagine emanating from the character in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. By such methods he succeeded in getting Argentina’s Pedro Monzon sent off in the 1990 World Cup final. Klinsi was a diver of extraordinary dramatic talent. Even he, however, must bow before the greatest single exposition of the craft, which was performed in 1989 by the Chile goalkeeper Roberto Rojas during a World Cup qualifier match with Brazil. Faced with certain defeat and elimination from the World Cup, Rojas hit on a brilliant scheme - forcing the match to be abandoned. When a firework thrown from the crowd landed in his penalty area Rojas hurled himself down, took a razor blade out of his glove and slashed open his scalp. Carried off on a stretcher while his team-mates created a riot, his plan seemed to have worked when the game was stopped. Sadly his antics had been caught on camera and after Fifa reviewed the evidence it was Chile, not Brazil, that were kicked out of the tournament. Rojas was banned from the game for life.
The smart torpedo
Like a cruise missile, some forwards can pilot themselves through the air and into the opposition penalty area with pinpoint accuracy no matter where they start their dive (though unlike cruise missiles they rarely veer mysteriously off course and crash into a nearby hospital). One of the great exponents of this style was Francis Lee of Manchester City who, during the 1970s, won and then converted so many penalties that many believed his surname was actually Lee Pen. Whenever, or wherever, a defender’s leg was left outstretched Lee could contrive to trip over it and fly into the box, his chunky body and swift progress through the air calling to mind an alarmed grouse. Some have recently claimed that Ruud van Nistelrooy, late of Manchester United, was even better than Lee, but those who witnessed the great man in his pomp will hear none of it, though that may simply be a case of the past lending disenchantment.
The contemporary artist
According to Spurs manager Martin Jol, Zokora’s tumble on Sunday was not a deliberate attempt to cheat. The Dutchman explained that his player went down because “he was possibly anticipating action from Mendes”. In other words, he wasn’t diving - he was simply tumbling over a challenge that didn’t happen. Strangely enough, a few months ago BBC pundit Garth Crooks offered a similar explanation when Shaun Wright-Phillips of Chelsea fell over after not being tripped by Newcastle’s Robbie Elliot (Elliot was sent off). This may seem far-fetched but that is to ignore the impact modern art theory has had on football. What both Jol and Crooks were telling us was that Zokora and Wright-Phillips had both fallen over what Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing and the other young British artists would describe as a "conceptual tackle ". Just as a bed-head attached to a wall suggests a bed even when one is not there, so Zokora and Wright-Phillips through cleverly contrived body-shapes and intriguingly executed movements had invited the referee to project the presence of an outstretched leg where no leg existed. That the match officials in both cases actually went right ahead and “saw” the “contextualised” foul should not be seen as failure to recognise a cheat, but as concrete testimony to art’s continued power to disturb its audience.