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- sport - - 白武男; 武神海虎地狱 第32回 Today recently published an article from a professor of ethics lamenting the acceptance of cheating in football, and berating Manuel Neuer, the German goalie who faced England in the Round of 16, for not doing the right thing and admitting to The Goal Ungiven. Neuer confessed as much, that he had known that the ball was over the line, and frankly any denial would have been slightly ridiculous given the spatial awareness that top-class goalkeepers have to have. However, according to the professor, he "...missed a rare opportunity to do something noble in front of millions of people. He could have set a positive ethical example to people watching all over the world, including the many millions who are young and impressionable." Personally, I feel that, as in many other ways, football is simply mimicking real life. But first, let us examine the professor's argument. He brings up Maradona's and Henry's infamous handball goals (to which Fabiano's should really be added, except that it didn't quite have as much impact) as evidence for the "win at all costs" mentality in football, and says that they should not be exempt from criticism for these acts any more than say, taking performance-enhancing drugs. I would note here that there is a slight difference, as such cheating in football is seldom premeditated, unlike doping. What makes it even more tricky is that there is a very, very fine line between fair and foul. Should defenders be honour-bound to call themselves for a yellow card, if they feel that they have clipped an opponent a fraction of a second late? It would be a strange sport indeed. Next, he cites cricket as an example of a (more) honest sport, giving the example of Adam Gilchrist, who is known to admit it when the ball has grazed his bat, thereby dismissing himself. I have a couple of objections, the first being that the professor is arguing from the specific to the general; A single saint does not a sport holy make, and here the professor conveniently forgets things like bodyline, leg before wicket and illegal bowls, which less virtuous perpetrators presumably keep silent about when they happen.  Rats! I thought I was in luck when it landed in the water! (Source: cartoonstock.com) The second is that the costs are not commensurate. When Gilchrist outs himself, it costs his team but one of perhaps forty such opportunities. When a tennis player calls a ball in against himself (which is not all that common, by the way), it is just one point in one game of dozens, possibly hundreds. Ditto the stroke penalty for golf, which would be one or two of hundreds in a tournament, and I daresay in most other more "gentlemanly" games. Interestingly, the professor appears mistaken when he praises Fowler for taking his penalty in a way as to allow the opposition goalie to save it, since Fowler himself admitted that while he did tell the referee that it wasn't a foul (perhaps aware that referees are not supposed to change their decisions due to player input), he took the penalty to the best of his efforts anyway (and his teammate scored from the rebound, so...). [Note also that the positive examples where players have deliberately denied themselves goals came in inconsequential friendlies, or when they were already winning by a landslide.] Thus, a more comparable measure of honesty would be if Gilchrist calls himself out in the very last inning with the match on the line, or if Federer insists Nadal's volley brushed the line in a tiebreaker, or if Woods admits that his club inadvertently touched the ball on the 17th hole on the final day of a tournament, since these situations would be the rough analogue of what a goal means in football; Otherwise, their more minor acts of sportsmanship should be more fairly compared to acts like a team abandoning a good attacking move to kick the ball out of play for a downed opponent player, which does happen quite frequently. I would thus argue that footballers are not inherently less ethical than other sportsmen. It is simply that the stakes are far higher when the incentive to cheat appears, and the grey areas are larger (no thanks to FIFA). Many other sports are designed such that open cheating by players is very difficult and/or will not be rewarded; For the former case, how could a baseballer cheat to win (other than steroids, spitballs and corked bats), even if he wanted to? Or volleyball players? Or badminton players?  Whoops! (Source: latinosportslegends.com) When opposing players can come into contact with each other (e.g. basketball, American football, rugby etc), and the opportunity to be less than honest occurs, the latter case of reducing the incentive to do so applies. Does anybody believe that a basketballer would not smack a shot away from the hoop in the dying seconds of an NBA playoff game, (committing the basketball foul of goaltending) and pretend not to have done so, if he had the slightest chance of getting away with it? Nah. Then again, basketball runs to the hundreds of points, so any such individual act counts for little in the big picture. The importance of tries in American football and rugby would probably come closest to that of goals in football, but they have instant replays to remove doubt. Put another way, if Neuer were a rugby fullback, he wouldn't try too hard to kick the ball away after an opponent downed it on the line, but mostly because there is no payoff in doing so - the video referee wouldn't be swayed by that. Conversely, if FIFA had allowed video replays for referees, if only for incidents leading to goals, Neuer, Maradona and Henry would be mere footnotes, and their sneaky actions might not even have made it into the match report, being utterly inconsequential. And a professor of ethics would have had to find another group of sportsmen to paint with a broad brush. To give just another perspective on the bending of rules if it provides an advantage, a player in rugby is supposed to feed the ball into the center of the tunnel during a scrum. In theory, this means that both sides should have an approximately equal chance of getting possession. However, the player whose duty it is to feed the ball in somehow manages to put it in closer to his teammates almost every time I catch rugby on the TV, with the referees long since given up on enforcing the letter of the law. Cheating? Well, not if everybody does it... And now, to answer the original question: "Why is cheating OK in football?" and the answer is simply, it works. If referees didn't strictly enforce the rule on permissible elbow angle in cricket, I would suspect that bowlers would try to skirt it for better deliveries... and guess what, they do. If a basketballer doesn't feel contact when a reaching foul is called in his favour, he keeps quiet, and few think the worse of him because of it. Footballers dive simply because the upside is far greater than the downside. Another answer may be that because most people think it's ok. Frankly, how many football fans expected Neuer to own up (though this might have not affected anything, given that FIFA's response to replays showing that their officials messed up was to ban instant replays)? How many would have done so, had they been in Neuer's shoes, whether they felt it was right or not (talk being cheap)? I would guess very few. And how many fans would outright curse Neuer as an absolute idiot had he done the "noble, positive ethical" thing and thrown the ball into his own net? I fear that an anonymous survey (any psychology students looking for a topic?) might diminish the professor's faith in humanity. In summary, berating the seeming prevalence of cheating in football is akin to criticising the people in a city with low police presence and lots of money lying around for being more prone to theft and therefore less ethical than the residents of another city with security cameras at every street corner and plenty of locks. Humans are honest to the extent that it benefits them to be, which is a pretty high level in modern societies, and no more. That's all there is to it. Back to the World Cup, Paraguay squeaked past Japan to set up a possible all-South American semifinals, while Spain narrowly defeated Portugal, whose star man Cristano Ronaldo fell to the Nike Write The Future curse [video]. Pity. It was perhaps the best ad I've seen in my life, eclipsing even The Secret Tournament and Take It To The Next Level (both also by Nike) Next: The Hero Cheat
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