Niasse case is so simple ...he dived, it’s cheating
EvErToN requested a personal hearing for oumar Niasse over his diving charge. Maybe that was the problem. If Niasse said to the commission what he told the media after the game with Crystal Palace, he was always going to get weighed off.
‘It was on my upper body and when I felt the contact, I was in the box, so that is it,’ Niasse explained. ‘ That is all I have to do. Go on the floor. If you watch the video, you can understand there is contact.’
That is less justification, more confession. Where does it say it is a foul if there is contact with a forward in the penalty area? Football is a contact sport. Players collide or come together all the time. So the best that can be said of Niasse is a language barrier prevented him expressing himself clearly. The worst is that he admitted he dived.
rewind that statement. ‘I felt contact. I was in the box, so that is it. All I have to do. Go on the floor.’ Nowhere does this suggest that Scott Dann’s contact, which appears minimal, sent him tumbling.
Niasse does not claim he was tripped by Dann, knocked to the floor, even pushed a little. He talks about his reaction, not as unavoidable, but as a decision he made: to go on the floor. And that’s a dive. Whichever way you slice it, that’s a dive, and that’s cheating. So Niasse deserved his two-game ban, even if there was contact.
We have come so far in our pragmatism that we have muddied our language along with our moral code. We have invented so many euphemisms for what is, at root, dark-hearted gamesmanship that we have started to believe their legitimacy. He ‘made the most of it’. No, he dived. He ‘ gave the referee a decision to make’. No, he dived. He ‘feels the contact and is entitled to go down’. No, he’s not, and that’s a dive, too.
Niasse clearly bought into all of this, to the extent he misinterpreted football’s weasel words as a genuine case for the defence.
The former professionals who talk football for a living are often very insightful, very knowledgeable, individuals. But they are, largely, products of the modern game. They were brought up as part of a culture in which ‘making the most of it’ was a legitimate act and the end justified the means. And while that is very useful in telling the public how it is at the sharp end, it is not particularly helpful in schooling future generations.
Luis Suarez said that in Uruguay, fooling the referee to win a penalty for your team was considered just another aspect of intelligent play — appreciated in much the same way as a smart pass or good match management. Thankfully, we are still conflicted by this.
The professionals may see only the bottom line, but the public do not like cheating. Everton followers will insist Niasse was harshly treated, but the rest will not give two hoots. The Football Association’s mission to retrospectively punish divers was almost universally welcomed. So Niasse is the first Premier League player to fall foul of its statutory two-match ban, but he will not be the last. Diving is too engrained in football’s character these days to be eradicated by the odd individual ban. Ultimately, Niasse’s fall helped earn a point for Everton against a rival in the relegation zone.
In their current predicament, Everton might even have sacrificed Niasse for two games for that. If four or five players were being suspended each week, or the punishment was doubled to four matches, there might be an overnight improvement in behaviour. For now, though, this is little more than a toe in the water.
Predictably, however, Everton are outraged. David Unsworth may be new to management, but his complete self-interest and failure to see the bigger picture shows he is getting the hang of it.
‘Contact or slight contact, it doesn’t matter,’ he said. Well, yes, actually, it does. That is the crux of it, in fact. Slight contact, minimal contact, whichever term we use, is not the same as a foul and does not have to initiate a fall.
There is no dispute over contact between Dann and Niasse, what is in question is whether it would cause a player to tumble. Unsworth considers this irrelevant. It isn’t. It’s a fake claim. It’s a lie.
In other areas of life, exaggeration of effect or consequence is an offence. Your house may have been burgled, but it is still fraud to invent a longer list of stolen items. And falling to amplify the impact of a collision is nothing less than a fraudulent claim.
‘It’s a dangerous precedent that could be set,’ warned Unsworth, and one must hope he is right. Now the FA have established that contact alone is no reason to go to ground, we might at last begin to see action. This is a grand opportunity and the FA should — as an old pro might say — make the most of it.