The sight of Luis Suarez clearly cheating to knock Mansfield Town out of the FA Cup encouraged me to question the ethics of footballers.
Over the years we have seen players cheat and prosper, from diving to deliberate handball, they continue to try and deceive the officials.
Interestingly, when Suarez passed to himself with his right hand, to end the dreams of a Non League team, denying them a pay day at Anfield, the commentators blamed the assistant referee for missing the call. So TV pundits think the cheat isn’t at fault but rather it’s the fault of the policeman.
Isn’t this like somebody stealing from a store and blaming the cameras for the theft? Surely it’s the act of cheating that needs to be punished.
Imagine if Suarez had run to the Ref and said: “no it isn’t a goal, I handled the ball.”
What would the media have said?
The closest I saw to this was Paulo Di Canio catching a cross against Everton to stop the game when their keeper got injured. In my 48 years of watching football I’ve never seen anyone else act so sportingly.
The disease of cheating has threatened other sports from time to time. Cricket had its moments of ball tampering and betting, and Rugby has also had some difficult issues but both have insisted the sport comes before the cheating and have dealt with the causes efficiently and decisively to the benefit of the game.
Football is in the midst of trying to find a solution to the simulated foul, the dive, perfected by the likes of Ashley Young, Gareth Bale and Luis Suarez. We have seen many games decided by the attacker feigning a foul, and crashing theatrically to the ground.
The problem is that the diver weighs the risks and rewards, yellow card is the worst case, penalty is the best case. No contest, an almost certain goal vs a card. So they cheat. The rules favour the cheater.
These rules need changing! The balance needs to be restored.
Suarez has just cost Mansfield Town 1/3 of a 45,000 gate at Anfield, a game they could have won. So what if the FA fines Liverpool 50% of the notional gate receipt for cheating!
Now that’s a deterrent and the punishment actually fits the crime.
It’s absolutely clear, on TV, that this single act changed the result. So the FA should stamp it out.
Players who admit to cheating on the field, when it happens, should also be rewarded for their honesty. Isn’t that what the Fair Play awards were supposed to be for ?
Football is a game in which play is continuous and mistakes will be made, some errors on free kicks and corners are inevitable but when I see someone clearly deflect a ball out and the referee makes a mistake, I would have no problem if the offender owned up, perhaps because he knows that TV replays will result in some retribution.
There is no doubt in my mind that Luis Suarez will sit at home watching Match of the Day gloating about his ability to cheat his team into the next round of the FA Cup. But if the FA banned him from playing in the tournament this season and fined his club too, then perhaps it would all stop.
I felt so sorry for Mansfield, their dream ended in such an unfair manner, the FA Cup tainted because of it. The game brought into disrepute by a single act of cheating, and it’s not the first time for the man who did it.
Repeat offenders in life get longer, tougher sentences. That should apply here too because the rule of law is as applicable to footballers as it is to the man in the street. Try cheating the Inland Revenue and see what happens, yes it’s about money in that case but isn’t money exactly what Mansfield have been cheated out of?
Kicking racism out of football is a good thing to do, but kicking cheats out of football is also important.
A sad day for the game when we watch, see it and then accept this sort of behaviour because players are role models and which society would want a culture of cheating in the generation that follows?
That’s certainly not one I would want to live it.
Kick Cheating out of Football – let’s campaign for that!
By Steve Burrows CBE @ifollowsteve
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