Hernandez is most blatant cheater on soccer’s grand World Cup stage
Frenchman: Exaggeration is part of show and game
MOSCOW – The World Cup is wonderful but, simply put, it is full of cheaters. And Lucas Hernandez is, at least so far, the biggest cheater of the bunch.
Amid all the outstanding soccer and fascinating color of the opening week, the one glaring downside of the biggest sporting event on the planet is the same one that curses the game in general and which seems immune to attempts to stamp it out.
Diving, simulation, play-acting, faking injury — call it what you will, but it makes for unsavory viewing, from those who love the same and follow it religiously to others who dip into soccer once every four years.
If you’re wondering what all this is about, just find a highlight reel of the antics of French defender Hernandez against Australia in his team’s first game of the tournament.
It was pathetic. On several occasions he responded to the very slightest of contact, the kind of impact you might expect from a 10-year-old’s handshake or a butterfly landing on your shoulder, as if he had been mortally wounded.
If you’re going to cheat, at least be good at it, and Hernandez is. By being so over-the-top in his dramatics, he routinely fools the referees into awarding him free kicks when they are utterly undeserved.
The refs know that a certain degree of exaggeration goes on, but Hernandez has figured out if he shrieks in agony and clutches various body parts as if they are in need of amputation, the official will perhaps reason something must have happened.
But often nothing has happened at all.
At one point, Australia’s Josh Risdon appeared to breathe on Hernandez, or at least in the vicinity of him, naturally setting off a performance in which the French player screamed at the top of his lungs and then lay on the turf shielding his supposedly damaged face.
Before long he was on the ground again, both hands wrapped around his leg. Then his head, his ankle, his calf muscle and so on.
The point of this was to gain an unfair advantage. Getting a free kick where there might not otherwise be one, getting an opponent yellow- or even redcarded and, if your team is leading late, slowing down the game to make a comeback less likely.
That’s what Hernandez did, and you can forget about him showing a shred of contrition. Given that he’s a fine player who shines in Spain’s La Liga for Atletico Madrid yet not one likely to be spotlighted as one of the stars of the tournament, he is instead embracing his role as its most prolific cheater.
“You saw it,” he told reporters. “It’s true there were some moments where it was a foul and I amplified it a bit.
“That’s part of the show, part of the game. It’s true that sometimes I exaggerate a bit, but it is part of my character. I am used to doing that, especially when we are leading. The team can win, and I can save some precious seconds.”
The team might win, but soccer is the loser. Fabrication and melodramatics are a scourge on what is otherwise evolving into a superb tournament, and it’s time for steeper punishment to be introduced.