Scottish Football goes after Divers

By: Bob | August 1st, 2007

Forget the sin bin. The Scottish Football Association has decided to try something different to help prevent players from diving and cheating. The SFA will require referees to watch recordings of games they officiate and they will be allowed to issue yellow cards retrospectively for diving infractions they might have missed during live action.

Taking a page from the Scarlet Letter, the football association will publicly name and shame players caught acting. Really, the world needs more naming and shaming rituals. It could help employ a whole new generation of town criers.

The man behind the new rules is SFA chief executive Gordon Smith.

‘I want people to feel this is not a nice way to act on the football field, to be disgusted by it,’ Smith said.

‘Most people are pretty disgusted by it but there seems to be a culture in our country that has come in now where we think it’s okay to do it or people accept it.

‘So I think we want to change the behaviour of players first and then after that comes the change of attitude.’

The scheme could also see players having yellow or red cards rescinded if they are found to have been the victim of simulation.

This sounds like a reasonable enough idea to me. It does not interrupt games while they occur and it does punish players who break the rules.

What do you think? Will it prevent players from cheating?

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Category: Scottish Premier League, World Football

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Luis

I say do it, if only to prove that it won't stop diving. Punitive measures will never solve the problem of diving. Players, teams will always do whatever they can within the established norm of a match - as set forth by the match official.

Establish a single standard for officiating and then make sure all refs are professionally trained to that standard. Put the word out that anything outside those guidelines will not be tolerated and then let them play the game. Even so, it doesn't mean refs won't make bad or missed calls.

Before we can talk about punishing dives, we have to come to an agreement about what constitutes a dive. That's a discussion fit for a pub.
nigel bray

What took them so long?
CD

"The scheme could also see players having yellow or red cards rescinded if they are found to have been the victim of simulation."

This is an odd statement considering that yellow and red cards are issued at the discretion of the ref and do not follow a set of concrete rules. A tackle in the 83rd minute often gets a yellow card that would never get a yellow card in the 12th minute. The referee issues cards in the context of the game evaluating those situations after the fact is a slippery slope.
CD

Horrible idea. Goal line technology is an intelligent application of technology in the game, replays for diving evaluation is not.

The refs decision during the game has to be final. You can't start going back and criticizing penalty kicks retroactively if it looks like a guy might have taken a dive.

How exactly do you determine if someone has taken a dive anyway? Do you run some sort of scientific calculation to determine what amount of force applied at what angle forcing the player in question to fall is justified? The whole idea is rubbish.

I got a better idea SPL why don't you try to make your league a little more competitive. I guess when you have a league with two teams that wins every year you have to do something that makes people think you care about being fair.
Chris

Hopefully this will help cut down on divers. This is great news and it will be interesting to see how it pans out.
Juliet

I like it. I agree that the sin bin idea is DOA, but I've always wondered why, if FIFA or the DFB reviews matches for violent conduct, no one reviews matches for diving. It's just commonsense.
Karl

Sounds like a good move to me and it's inline with FIFA's other policy of reviewing matches with unseen violent conduct in them retroactively applying suspensions and fines to player.
Maybe repeat offenders should have to wear a scarlet 'D' on the front of their shirts and each player on the opposing team gets a free swipe at them during the run of play.
Sam

It's perfect. I personally think the penalty box is nonsense, but this is good. Have the fourth official look it over and call over the ref when he's sure there was a dive. Good on the Scottish FA.
Ian

I think its a really good move and the rest of Europe's leagues will have an eye on how well it goes. If it goes well, look for it all over in a few seasons. Maybe not Italy. :)