Paul Gardner
Dyche’s tackling sham
“It’s embarrassing. I see them all diving...” Here we go again. A wildly exaggerated protest from Burnley manager Sean Dyche, sounding exactly like Tony Pulis a few years back – another English manager who was consumed with the notion that widespread diving was undermining the sport.
One of the problems with the Dyche/Pulis view is that there are absolutely no statistics to back up their vision of rampant diving. How frequently does it happen? Say, 10 times in every Premier League game? Oh, come on. Five times, then? Twice? Not that I’ve noticed...
Even once per game is doubtful as so many of the diving accusations are themselves doubtful. If you’re looking for diving – and people like Dyche and Pulis are clearly relentless lookers – you will find it by inventing it.
Without an objective assessment of the number of diving incidents, Dyche’s “they’re all diving” claim can be dismissed for what it obviously is: an obsession-fuelled exaggeration.
And Dyche makes matters much worse by investing diving with the stain of being “morally wrong”. He makes sure that we understand the pure evil of diving by creating a shining image of its opposite – what he calls “good, honest tackling”.
But it was exactly this admirable tackling that drew serious criticism from Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, who recently complained to the referee that his players needed more protection from Burnley’s sliding tackles, insisting that “the injury threat was massive”.
Dyche retorted with an impassioned: “I thought some of the timing of the challenges was superb.” Nevertheless, there was a major problem for Dyche as Liverpool’s Joe Gomez, slide-tackled by Ben Mee, was stretchered off with a broken leg.
Mee insisted that his tackle was flawless, Dyche backed him up, and even Klopp agreed that the tackle was “clean”. Yet a broken leg had resulted. That was “unfortunate,” said Mee.
Dyche widened his defence of Mee and hard tackling into a bitter attack on diving, referees and authorities such as FIFA and UEFA, alleging that “no one wants to deal with it”.
Dyche’s rant is interesting because it exposes just about everything that is misguided in the traditional English “hard but fair” attitude. Specifically, he is committed to excusing the excesses of defenders, to ensuring that they be allowed to play a robust, physical game and any injury to an opponent should be accepted as part of the sport.
It is surely obvious that the slide tackle always carries a threat of injury, given that it is invariably a studs-up tackle. If it is committed at speed, or with force, the injury potential is high.
All of Dyche’s anger is directed at players who dive – “I can’t believe it, the beautiful game, cheating everywhere” – and says there should be a three-game suspension if postgame video review finds them guilty.
One would imagine, from Dyche’s analysis, that defenders are innocent of all wrongdoing and there are no clumsy, sly or late, tackles where the man, rather than the ball, is played. Yet such tackles are seen in every game, and plenty of them go unpunished.
If, as Dyche alleges, players are diving because they are not being punished, it surely is equally true that late and violent tackling is happening because players believe they can get away with it.
It’s worth emphasising that dangerous or rash tackling can result in serious injuries. I’ve never heard of a dive resulting in injury to an opponent.
Dyche’s praise of “good honest tackling” is a sham and the moral implications of “honest” have no place here. All that is needed is that players obey the rules of the sport and that referees enforce them.
The slide tackle always carries a threat of injury, given that it is invariably a studs-up tackle