Perpetual motion

In recent days, there has been great outcry over Ashley Young’s felicitous swooning in opposition penalty areas.  This follows on from Andy Carroll’s dive at the home of his boyhood team against his boyhood team, which received a yellow card.  After winning a penalty against QPR, one commentator said that Young should take a good look at himself.  He obviously enjoyed what he saw since he repeated his trick against Aston Villa.  Maybe he thought ‘I’ve damaged one relegation-threatened side, so I mustn’t show favouritism to another’.  Tonight, as Chelsea does battle with Barcelona, one can expect to see players to be on the spin cycle of a tumble dryer as they take a tumble.  On and on they roll, where they stop nobody knows.

Before Monday’s duel with Wigan, Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger bemoaned that players who go down far too easily, whether contact is made or not, should not be the recipient of a yellow card, if the referee bothers to issue it.  His proposal was for a retrospective panel handing down three-match bans to such cheats.  It will never happen because the FA is loathe to re-referee games, which could undermine the authority of the match-day officials, who, as they follow the ball, cannot fail to see a player going down when in proximity to the air-pumped sphere.

What could be done is to take a leaf out of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book (no, not cheating on wives – footballers are well-versed in that already).  When elected governor of California (after a spurious recall of the previous governor, who was subsequently found to have been stitched up by Enron for political purposes), he took to describing his Democrat opponents and any Republicans who didn’t toe his line as ‘lady-men’.  The Gubernator was unrepentant about the slur and it came to become one of the defining phrases of his term in office.  With TV commentators watching fouls from every conceivable angle, when they give out the ‘Man of the Match’ award, they can follow that up with ‘Lady-Man of the Match’, if it applies.  The latter ‘prize’, instead of receiving a bottle of bubbly, should receive a slap in the face with a pink glove.  Un-PC maybe, but you wouldn’t certainly cut down on the amount of cheating.