‘It just wasn’t a penalty for me.’ Football fans have become accustomed to hearing managers say this in post-match interviews. They’re just not particularly used to hearing it from the man whose side profited from the decision.
Fair play, then, to Mark Wilson. Partick Thistle’s head coach was charitable enough to concede that the spot kick awarded to his side in Friday’s Scottish Championship match at Ayr United – a decision that ultimately decided the match – should not have been given.
‘I need to be honest because everybody’s bored of managers coming out and going, “Oh well, I didn’t see it”,’ he added. ‘I did see it. I said to the fourth official at the time, “I don’t think that’s a penalty.” And he says, “Well, we’re kind of blocked [in our view] here”.
‘We are, but I think you can kind of tell, can’t you? When you’ve been in the game a long time, you can tell what’s a foul and what’s not a foul.’
The incident in question occurred on the stroke of half-time, Thistle’s Seb Drozd tumbling inside the box – in instalments, it must be noted – under pressure from Ayr’s Liam Dick.
Standing just yards away and with a perfect view of it all, referee Matthew MacDermid had no hesitation in pointing to the spot, much to the incredulity of, well, just about everybody who saw it.
Partick Thistle front man Seb Drozd was captured smirking on the turf after his tumble
Commentating on the match for the BBC, James McFadden said: ‘I’m still struggling to see anything wrong there.’ Former Celtic striker Chris Sutton described it as ‘a contender for BBC 606’s Simulation Game’. The Ref’s View podcast, hosted by former officials, called it a ‘horrific decision’, adding: ‘Matthew MacDermid has been conned there.’
Ayr boss Gary Naysmith was understandably seething, not least because his side had been on the receiving end of a similar injustice against Dunfermline Athletic a week earlier.
‘I’ve now seen it back more than once and I think it’s another really poor decision that has gone against us,’ said the former Scotland international. ‘I think it’s a dive and I think the one last week was a dive.’
In a league where fine margins are routinely the difference between challenging for promotion and avoiding relegation, these two decisions – and the subsequent goals scored – could yet prove to be season-defining for Ayr, and potentially even affect the future of Naysmith, his staff and some of their players.
Referee Matthew MacDermid didn't cover himself in glory with the preposterous penalty call
And whilst referee MacDermid has rightly fielded considerable criticism for his part in it all – this is far from the whistler’s first controversy – the incident raises a further, more important question.
When did football get so soft on diving?
Where, for example, is the contempt for Drozd, who lay smirking on the Somerset Park turf after the penalty was awarded? His reckoning may – and should – yet come in the form of retrospective sanctions. If Thistle boss Wilson wanted to polish his own halo, he could even punish Drozd himself. A week’s wages would surely remind his squad of the standards required.
But Drozd’s tumble is merely a symptom of a bigger, enduring problem.
Once upon a time, to dive was to imperil your reputation. Fans, players, pundits – they didn’t so much take a dim view of the behaviour as regard it with unambiguous disgust. Those caught in the act were forever tainted; not quite pariahs but besmirched, for sure.
Thistle boss Mark Wilson was honest in the aftermath but should look to fine his errant player
Sometime between then and now, however, diving has become a plague that we have apparently chosen to live with, to tolerate instead of eradicate, and nobody knows exactly when or why.
Maybe it was around the time Jurgen Klinsmann laundered his reputation for such antics with a supposedly self-deprecating celebratory dive after scoring his first goal for Tottenham Hotspur in 1994, a stunt that immediately endeared the German striker to fickle fans. ‘He might be prone to cheating but at least he’s got a sense of humour,’ they cooed.
Maybe it was when the first referee dispensed with IFAB protocol and elected not to book a player for trying to con them. Maybe it was when ‘simulation’ – the acceptable face of diving, its sanitised, much cuddlier identity – transcended the rulebook and became part of the sport’s uber-trendy modern lexicon, gleefully tossed around by podcasters and pontificators galore.
Regardless, diving is cheating. It’s deliberate, disrespectful and dishonest. Unlike other forms of sporting chicanery, it should also be relatively straightforward to police.
Intent, for example, is often easier to discern. For what reason, other than an attempt to deceive, would players throw themselves to the ground, arms flailing and faces contorting as though they’d stared directly into the Ark of the Covenant? By dint of their inherently laughable theatricality, the most blatant dives are easy to distinguish from a stumble or a trip, particularly for properly trained officials.
Jurgen Klinsmann made diving fashionable by making it his signature celebration in his heyday
And yet it feels like it’s not regarded as the offence it once was. Where referees once flashed yellow cards, they now mostly motion to the players responsible to ‘get up’; a tsk-tsk in lieu of a caution.
By the midway point of last season, and despite a ‘crackdown’ by PGMOL, the body responsible for professional match officials that now goes by Pro Ref, there had been only 16 bookings for simulation in the English Premier League.
Call me cynical, but the implication that just 16 dives warranted punishment across 190 matches – 285 whole hours of football – feels far-fetched. Still, at least it was an improvement on the equivalent period the previous season, by which point only seven dives had been punished with a caution.
At a time when football appears hell-bent on tackling other forms of cheating – hello, Manchester City – it would do well to tackle all forms of it. They don’t all require litigation and thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers. A consistent application of the game’s very own rules will suffice.