Wishing for un-"flop"-able officials

If there's a theme to this blog, it's that the fairness of sports is threatened by human intervention. Officiating of all sorts has the potential to intervene in the natural flow of play and taint the outcome. But officials are not the only ones. Sometimes, especially in baseball, the fans change the game. And sometimes, it's the players themselves.

We haven't talked about the World Cup here on There's a Catch. But we've been watching it. In this morning's (in the United States) match between England and Portugal, England's young striker Wayne Rooney was sent off in the sixty-second minute after stepping on the groin of a Portuguese player who had fallen to the ground next to him. After the game, the ABC analysts (Alexi Lalas, Julie Foudy, and Eric Wynalda), debated the red card that left England short a player for the last hour of the game.

Regardless of why the referee fished the red card from his pocket, I think there can be no doubt that Rooney deserved the fate he suffered. He made an idiotic play, and it simply cannot be acceptable to attack another player's person. English fans may blame the ref for their beloved team's exit from the World Cup, but only by allowing themselves to be deluded by passion.

Soccer has another kind of player manipulation, though, which it shares with basketball. "Flopping" seems the most popular name for it, though "acting" might be better. Basketball suffers from poor enforcement of the rules about offensive fouls, or "charging". Players have come to believe, probably not in error, that the only way to "draw a charge" is to firmly plant their feet and fall on their backsides.

(Another, more insidious, form of flopping sometimes occurs. In the 2005 NBA playoffs, Paul Pierce shoved Jamaal Tinsley after Tinsley had slapped him upside the head a couple times. Tinsley hit the floor without any effort to break his fall with a backwards step—a practice no doubt perfected through years of "drawing charges"—and Pierce was hit with a second technical foul as a result. You may remember this play because of the bizarre rule that was then invoked to replace Pierce for his free throws. Justice in this case would probably have seen Tinsley removed from the league for an unforgivable lack of sportsmanship, but alas!)

Soccer has created a similar problem. Players seem to think they won't get the calls they think they deserve without exaggerating their injuries—falling to the ground, rolling around, writhing, etc. The referee isn't always fooled—yesterday, for example, one gave a yellow card to an Argentine player who tried to draw a foul in the penalty box late against Germany. But often he is deceived into either inventing a foul or increasing its severity.

In France's recent victory over Spain, Thierry Henry manufactured a foul late in the second half. This led to a free kick that Zinedine Zidane punched into the box, leading to a goal that put his side up 2-1 and won them their date with Brazil. The Cup as a whole is no doubt riddled with such injustices.