The Football Thread

[Krill]

If he had a seizure he would never have been named to the team and would have been hospitalised until they had a found the probable cause.

[Ichabod]

I have no idea about what happened. That seizure thing was discussed a lot here in Brazil, but I don't remember the conclusion that was reached. My guess is that it was just headline fodder for the press; so, when people stopped caring, everyone just let the issue go.

What is certain is that we were schooled by France in that game.

Ah, I recently watched the Brazil 3 x 0 France friendly. I'll try to post some pictures.

[darrelljs]

The toughness of NFL players to their counterparts in other sports is greatly overstated. If there were more opportunities to reward faking fouls/injuries, there would be more faking fouls/injuries. Its a different kind of toughness - one game has violent collisions in uniforms that are essentially designed to be weapons, but also has a 16-game season and so many substitutions and clock-stoppages that the average player probably plays no more than 15 minutes in a game. Anyway, no reason really why they can't both be "tough."

I agree with this as well. One passing observation is that I was weaned on football by the EPL, where diving is comparatively rare. I can watch the latin leagues now, but if I had started with say Serie A I'm not sure I'd have become a fan.

Darrell

[Bigger]

I think the main reason it doesnt occur in the NFL is that players aren't generally (with some exceptions) penalized for good hits on other players, so there isn't much benefit to flopping .

[Jkaen]

Hey, if you start discussing egg shaped ball sports, I think you should be talking about the better one the rest of the world plays!

[Old Harry]

I think the main reason it doesnt occur in the NFL

Didn't you watch Gaspar's video Bigger?

Hey, if you start discussing egg shaped ball sports, I think you should be talking about the better one the rest of the world plays!

Yeah, egg and spoon is pretty hard-core!

Anyway if we're judging sport by how tough you have to be to take part then cycling has to be the winner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMjSZhXHiHo

(Both of these guys finished the tour by the way )

[Bigger]

I should say it occurs very rarely in the NFL. its certainly not an American thing, it occurs all the time in the NBA :/. just not so much in NFL, and almost never in baseball.

[Gaspar]

Yeah, I think you can really look at embellishment as a consequence of the reward. Football (kicking version) and Basketball have the highest reward for getting your opponent called for something so it encourages the behavior. Hockey is there as well, and I think it happens a good bit but not to the extent of the other two. Baseball there's virtually no place it would have reward. Football (throwing version) has more than baseball but less than the others and so on. The bottom line is that exaggeration/embellishment/flopping really has absolutely nothing to do with toughness and everything to do with a willingness to deceive to win, which pretty much every athletic competition at the top level has - for example, while baseball nobody flops, pretending you made a catch that you actually trapped occurs nightly. Likewise in the NFL, players constantly try to convince the ref they caught a ball they trapped, or recovered a fumble that they actually just got by ripping it away from the guy who actually recovered it after the whistle had blown.

There's a million examples in all of the sports. Everybody cheats. What I find amusing is how we revile certain types of cheating (Flopping, PEDs) while praising others (The aforementioned catch deceptions, etc.) Me personally, I think vicious attempts to injure are a lot worse than say, flopping. I'd much rather get all the two-footed, over-the-ball tackles out of the game than all of the diving. I mean both would be ideal of course, but just saying.

[Bigger]

good points, Gaspar.

[Merovech]

I'm not a fan of the other forms of cheating, either. I could never bring myself to try to convince a ref of something that I knew to be false. Nowadays, I don't play too many team sports or possession-based sports, but I do play tennis a lot, and very rarely with a ref, so I make my own calls, and I always try to err on the side of accidentally telling my opponent that there shot was in when it was out, as opposed to the opposite, and always call my own double bounces, etc. I'd like to think that my opponents will do the same, but I've played against some cheaters before-cheaters with talent are hard to beat.