Sure, but the fact that football's lines are blurred, that it contains all those ways of coming away
feeling that your team has been cheated (or that you've gleefully got away with having cheated yourself) is part of the whole football supporting experience. Football is cutthroat, amoral and largely red in tooth and claw and those things are essentially part of the attraction.
Fans like the fact that refs are clueless stooges constantly being hoodwinked by the faster and more savvy players. It's part of the pantomime. Robben's just the villain twirling his figurative moustache.
Right. A match against Bangladesh is already "fixed", by definition.
At least in the sense that you're not supposed to lose.
Or do you mean only "unofficial" match-fixing.
Actually, most non-pro tennis is played without umpires and players ref themselves.
Cheating on line calls therefore possible, in the same way as your jumpery goalpost.
Exactly. It should be more effectively policed in other words. Until it is, there's no point
castigating those who successfully get away with it. They don't care - they've usually got lots of money and medals to console them.
you get some right cheating bastards as well
It's just part of the pantomime, the soap opera. Disrepute accusations are merely the
various governing bodies trying to pay their bills and cover their costs. That's fair enough, I think.
To my mind, 'bringing the game into disrepute' erroneously presupposes that the game is 'in repute'
Balls. There are constantly fantastic, memorable matches in which flagrant diving does not occur.
There is no reason why if endemic diving was stamped out the game would suffer. In fact, it may force the media to focus more on the sport, rather than the pantomime, and encourage fans to do the same.
