As regards your point of interest, I think it’s a very hard one to call. Generally when a player jumps a tackle it exaggerates the incident and excites the crowd. Whether he did it to avoid contact or injury (which is a judgement call in itself) or to try and get a free-kick can be hard to interpret.

If the referee considers that the tackle was over the top then I think he is entitled to take action, even if there was no contact.

It will always be a controversial area though which is why my (OK somewhat cynical view) that debating individual incidents always seems to lead to opposite and sometimes polarised views.

I’m actually quite interested to see if anyone agrees with that or not, it seems to me to be inconsistent in the way it’s called (or not called.)

There may or may not be anything partizan in your post as I don’t know who you support and whether the incidents you choose to question are as a result of this.

My point was that Victor’s choices of dives will be disputed by many (especially partizan supporters of the ‘offended’ player/team) and ultimately nobody will ever agree which, in my experience, leads the debate into the realm of “He did!”, “He didn’t!”

We see it regularly as the season’s fixtures evolve.

As for declaring “my own triumph”! WTF. I’m just making a point!

When someone is trying to make the case that Grosso dived on this play, how come I never see the accuser use this video off youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS6Wqt00gTc

What people rarely do is (A. remember that Neill is a horrible player and that committing a penalty when the game is on the line is completely within his capabilities and (B. he tried to slide tackle a player in the box and whiffed on the ball– he should be penalized just for that.

Victor, what I think that Beckham and Unsal have in common is neither of them THOUGHT about what would happen AFTER they “angrily kicked the ball at the Brazilian” or petulantly kicked an Argentinian…they just acted out. Both of them did something stupid to allow the dive to take place. But, great article, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Not necessarily. While Beckham could reasonably expect that Simeone would fall down if he kicked out at him, I doubt Hakan Unsal could have reasonably expected Rivaldo to fall down and cover his face after getting hit with a ball in the legs. Big difference.