Stumble and Fall: What punishment should Eduardo get?

By: Rob | August 29th, 2009

First off, hello. I’m Rob and I’ll be here to enjoy the weekend with you. You might know me from the Champions League Offside, or The Premier League Offside, either way, a big hello.

By now you will all have seen Eduardo’s little tumble against Celtic in the Champions League midweek. The controversy from that moment is still ringing on, as the Scottish Football Association kicked up a bit of a stink, and then UEFA announced they would investigate the dive, and possibly ban Eduardo, causing the usually calm and collected Wenger to flip out and use words like Witch-hunt.

So, how are we all feeling about this? Should Eduardo be made an example of? Or is Wenger right and is this an emotional call made very badly?

First off, I think we can all agree, that diving, like handball or deliberately giving an opponent a kicking is A Bad Thing. Its seems like its definitely A Good Thing then, that UEFA is trying to clamp down and setting a precedent. Whoever was first was always going to feel like it was a bit unfair.

But hang on. A dive is not unlike another form of cheating that a ref might get wrong in a match. Usually the line on these things is that the ref’s call on it is final, and the FA’s and UEFA can’t go around contradicting referee’s after they’ve made a call. If its something the ref hasn’t seen, then they’ll act, but when the ref has made a bad call, they are usually defended.

Especially when the ref defends his call. Usually if ref admits he was wrong they might have a look, but no such thing has even happened here. At worst the ref has made an honest mistake, which is all part of the game.

So you can see, from that perspective, why Wenger is so unhappy. Diving is bad, we all know that, he knows that. And while he might be blathering on about the fact that Eduardo got touched, the fact is that he went down with the intention to win a penalty and cheated. But he’s far from the only one.

Its a tricky situation for UEFA, because it wouldn’t just set a precedent for diving, but would set one for all fouls across the pitch. Effectively UEFA would be telling us that any bad call a ref makes, they could just change, and still ban players for after the fact. This would basically render ref’s pointless. We know they make mistakes, but isn’t that part of the fun and games?

What was striking for me, is why Eduardo bothered to dive. At that point in the match, Arsenal gained very little advantage from that goal. At 0-0 Celtic needed 3 goals to win through, 3-2 on aggregate, whereas with the penalty, they needed, well 3 goals to go through on away goals. I can understand, if not condone, players cheating in a game their side really needs to win, but sometimes its just gratuitous.