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Before last week’s Champions League fixture with Fiorentina, Liverpool offered the national media a chance to chat with David Ngog, the young French striker who, in the absence of Fernando Torres, has been tasked with leading the line for one of the world’s biggest clubs just over a year after leaving Paris Saint-Germain’s reserve side. The questions, though, did not centre on the sudden change in his career trajectory, or the pressures of trying to fill the boots of one of the world’s best strikers, or even his vastly-improved displays of late. No, the questions came thick and fast on the moment that has defined Ngog in British eyes. We asked him, as was our duty, what it’s like to be a diver.
He is softly-spoken, Ngog, and possessed of the shyness you would expect from a 20-year-old, not long in the country, when faced with a room of people firing questions at him. Accompanied by one of his club’s press officers, he answered each and every question as best he could, but his eyes kept flickering to the door of Anfield’s subterranean press room. Ngog, quite understandably, wanted out. After 10 minutes, just over, he was granted his fervent wish, and with a friendly goodbye he left. You may have seen the quotes: he revealed Thierry Henry was his hero, he insisted the criticism he had received was unfair, he denied his leap over Lee Carsley in Liverpool’s 2-2 draw with Birmingham was deliberate.
The damage, though, was done. Ngog has been hung, drawn and quartered by the court of public opinion. He is likely to develop into a decent, Premier League striker – he will never be a Torres, of course, but he is well on the way to becoming a Craig Bellamy, say, if not in terms of style then certainly in terms of ability – but he will have to achieve untold success if he is to wash off the stigma now attached to him. He, like Eduardo or Didier Drogba, is a diver. A cheat.
Other quotes that you may have noticed in recent years include: “I’d never dive. I’d like to think of myself as an honest player. That’s the way I play. I don’t like diving, football doesn’t need it.” Any guesses? What about this: “If I saw a team-mate doing it, I would have a word.” Ring any bells?
The first, of course, is Wayne Rooney, in October 2006. England’s Wayne Rooney, to be precise. The man who – and you may not have noticed it – decided honesty doesn’t need to apply when you’re 1-0 down at home to Aston Villa. The second comes from Steven Gerrard, in his autobiography. The same Steven Gerrard who was greeted with cries of “all you do is f****** dive” from Arsenal’s travelling support on Sunday. Blackburn and Atletico Madrid fans – plucking two examples from the ether – would no doubt agree.
Neither Gerrard nor Rooney have been excoriated, crucified by the media as Ngog, or Eduardo, were for this season’s two great diving debates. They are not particularly unique examples – most players dive when they think they can get away with it, and I have discussed in a previous piece the absurdity of condemning what is, at its best, an act of consummate skill – and I have no wish to demand they be excommunicated from Fabio Capello’s World Cup squad, strung up by their buckling knees and pelted with rotten fruit. Good luck to them. The hypocrisy rankles a little, but they probably meant what they said at the time. As Ngog, the penitent sinner, acknowledged: “Things happen very quickly on a football pitch.”
But the question remains: why were dives by Rooney and Gerrard, two players who, above all others, are role models in this country, mentioned only in passing when Ngog’s and Eduardo’s transgressions generated headlines, yellow tickers and phone-in fury demanding video replays, retrospective bans and chemical castration for days, or weeks, after the event? It may be that it is linked to how successful their deception was – Ngog and Eduardo both won penalties, whereas Rooney earned only a yellow card and Gerrard, against Arsenal at least, served simply to guarantee himself a few barbed songs. They did not profit from their dishonesty, and therefore the matter should be allowed to rest.
It is a strange logic. If a man tries to defraud a company but fails, should he be slapped on the wrist and sent on his way while a man who succeeds in running a scam is jailed? Or, mentioning no golfers, would your partner feel a lot better knowing you had only tried to cheat on them but been knocked back, rather than actually succeeding in an act of adultery? Yet even if there is no place in football for ethics, what of the discrepancy between punishments? If you dive and get away with it, have a two-game ban and your name in mud. If you dive and don’t succeed, have a yellow card. That’s it. Move along.
Or is the defining factor that we still view diving as a foreign trait, an illness brought to these shores by infected conquistadors, doing to our sense of honesty and fair play what the common cold – and syphilis – did to the Aztecs and the Incas? Most of those players held up as practitioners of the dark arts, after all, are not English, and yet there are dozens of English players who did not need to be taught anything about enjoying a quick tumble. Emile Heskey, Michael Owen, Francis Jeffers, Robbie Savage (he’s Welsh, but you take my point), even Franny Lee. Yet because they’re native, we forgive them, we insist they’re only doing it to keep up with the foreigners, we believe that, had it not been for the outsider invasion of English football, all would be pure and clean.
It is not until that hypocrisy, one far greater than the disingenuity of Rooney’s and Gerrard’s statements, is cleared up that we may be able to rid the game of this scourge. If you see it as a scourge, rather than an artform, that is.
- Quote of the week, by the way, came from Gavin and Stacey’s Ness of her nocturnal encounter with James Corden’s Smithy. “He was completely naked, I was wearing my Aston Villa strip.” It’s not relevant, but you should always end on a gag.
He is softly-spoken, Ngog, and possessed of the shyness you would expect from a 20-year-old, not long in the country, when faced with a room of people firing questions at him. Accompanied by one of his club’s press officers, he answered each and every question as best he could, but his eyes kept flickering to the door of Anfield’s subterranean press room. Ngog, quite understandably, wanted out. After 10 minutes, just over, he was granted his fervent wish, and with a friendly goodbye he left. You may have seen the quotes: he revealed Thierry Henry was his hero, he insisted the criticism he had received was unfair, he denied his leap over Lee Carsley in Liverpool’s 2-2 draw with Birmingham was deliberate.
The damage, though, was done. Ngog has been hung, drawn and quartered by the court of public opinion. He is likely to develop into a decent, Premier League striker – he will never be a Torres, of course, but he is well on the way to becoming a Craig Bellamy, say, if not in terms of style then certainly in terms of ability – but he will have to achieve untold success if he is to wash off the stigma now attached to him. He, like Eduardo or Didier Drogba, is a diver. A cheat.
Other quotes that you may have noticed in recent years include: “I’d never dive. I’d like to think of myself as an honest player. That’s the way I play. I don’t like diving, football doesn’t need it.” Any guesses? What about this: “If I saw a team-mate doing it, I would have a word.” Ring any bells?
The first, of course, is Wayne Rooney, in October 2006. England’s Wayne Rooney, to be precise. The man who – and you may not have noticed it – decided honesty doesn’t need to apply when you’re 1-0 down at home to Aston Villa. The second comes from Steven Gerrard, in his autobiography. The same Steven Gerrard who was greeted with cries of “all you do is f****** dive” from Arsenal’s travelling support on Sunday. Blackburn and Atletico Madrid fans – plucking two examples from the ether – would no doubt agree.
Neither Gerrard nor Rooney have been excoriated, crucified by the media as Ngog, or Eduardo, were for this season’s two great diving debates. They are not particularly unique examples – most players dive when they think they can get away with it, and I have discussed in a previous piece the absurdity of condemning what is, at its best, an act of consummate skill – and I have no wish to demand they be excommunicated from Fabio Capello’s World Cup squad, strung up by their buckling knees and pelted with rotten fruit. Good luck to them. The hypocrisy rankles a little, but they probably meant what they said at the time. As Ngog, the penitent sinner, acknowledged: “Things happen very quickly on a football pitch.”
But the question remains: why were dives by Rooney and Gerrard, two players who, above all others, are role models in this country, mentioned only in passing when Ngog’s and Eduardo’s transgressions generated headlines, yellow tickers and phone-in fury demanding video replays, retrospective bans and chemical castration for days, or weeks, after the event? It may be that it is linked to how successful their deception was – Ngog and Eduardo both won penalties, whereas Rooney earned only a yellow card and Gerrard, against Arsenal at least, served simply to guarantee himself a few barbed songs. They did not profit from their dishonesty, and therefore the matter should be allowed to rest.
It is a strange logic. If a man tries to defraud a company but fails, should he be slapped on the wrist and sent on his way while a man who succeeds in running a scam is jailed? Or, mentioning no golfers, would your partner feel a lot better knowing you had only tried to cheat on them but been knocked back, rather than actually succeeding in an act of adultery? Yet even if there is no place in football for ethics, what of the discrepancy between punishments? If you dive and get away with it, have a two-game ban and your name in mud. If you dive and don’t succeed, have a yellow card. That’s it. Move along.
Or is the defining factor that we still view diving as a foreign trait, an illness brought to these shores by infected conquistadors, doing to our sense of honesty and fair play what the common cold – and syphilis – did to the Aztecs and the Incas? Most of those players held up as practitioners of the dark arts, after all, are not English, and yet there are dozens of English players who did not need to be taught anything about enjoying a quick tumble. Emile Heskey, Michael Owen, Francis Jeffers, Robbie Savage (he’s Welsh, but you take my point), even Franny Lee. Yet because they’re native, we forgive them, we insist they’re only doing it to keep up with the foreigners, we believe that, had it not been for the outsider invasion of English football, all would be pure and clean.
It is not until that hypocrisy, one far greater than the disingenuity of Rooney’s and Gerrard’s statements, is cleared up that we may be able to rid the game of this scourge. If you see it as a scourge, rather than an artform, that is.
- Quote of the week, by the way, came from Gavin and Stacey’s Ness of her nocturnal encounter with James Corden’s Smithy. “He was completely naked, I was wearing my Aston Villa strip.” It’s not relevant, but you should always end on a gag.
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