Damned Foreign Divers

March 27th, 2006 | by: Shawn |

So a particularly crude and ugly statement from Everton’s Alan Stubbs puts a new question on the table:

Do non-English players — in the Premiereship or not — dive more than English players?

The immediate occasion for the controversy is the comments from Didier Drogba who seemed to indicate that he would deliberately flop to win advantages for Chelsea (and, presumably, the Ivory Coast) and who has now come under scrutiny from the Players Association for his comments.

But Drogba is just one name in a long saga.

What do you think: Do players from other countries hit the grass for no reason more than English players do?

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[...] Drogba diving away from diver comments, while everyone knows the foreign players are to blame for the diving epidemic in England (Ivory Coast and England Blogs) [...]
http://www.bensefels.de Bense

In general, I’d say the english players are playing more “cleanly”.

But that diving statistic could be backed up by the fact that attacking players dive far more than defending players. There are many more foreign attacking players in the EPL than defending ones, so that should make those kinda statistics quite useless.
jareed

thats just plain nonsense. what has a players nationality got to do with his propensity to dive?
http://england.worldcupblog.org/1/damned-foreign-divers.html#comment-117 Pedro P

Watching a few games from the “premiership” and some others from “calcio” should answer you quite easily, Jareed… English don’t usually dive and in England the adversary is cheered when playing better. This is fair play. At least, this is what I believe to be true and also what I’ve seen so far. I’m not an expert and I didn’t see it all.

However, I find english too fond of the above mentioned stereotype (at least the ones I know), as for them if a player falls, if that player is south european, than it’s immediatelly a dive.