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| Drawing By Lazo |
I thought
this post from
BettingExpert.com was interesting in light of some of my recent posts about fouls suffered and committed in the Premiership. Turns out, researchers at Wake Forest University and the University of Plymouth have been hard at work trying to distinguish between real and fake fouls, and how dives affect the match. Unsurprisingly, fake fouls (dives) are quite frequent and there are ways of categorizing them based on how they occur. But as importantly (or more importantly), dealing with fake fouls adds up, so that the real length of a match is consistently less than it should be.
It's not clear whether the pattern of dives differs systematically across teams or how dives are rewarded and punished by referees, but this research gives me yet another reason to call for harsher penalties for diving. In our house, taking a dive is called "doing a Ronaldo" - I bet you know why. And speaking of dives, this
clip is pretty funny.
Links to the studies:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/k6341643l8p47720/fulltext.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20665384
Thanks to Jesper S.
