BEHIND THE PLAY #22

Two things made me dig out an old post (like 2011 old) from my blog and do what’s turned out to be a pretty thorough update.

The first was the inevitable soccer vs hockey toughness chatter that always seems to hit group texts and social media when the Stanley Cup playoffs coincide with a major soccer tournament (in this case two - the Euro and Copa America). The second is an incident that happened Tuesday night in the Canada v Peru game at the Copa where Alistair Johnston was head butted by Marcos Lopez. I tweeted about it and it got some traction.

The first thing that must be noted is that Johnston did not throw himself to the ground in histrionics screaming. He got wobbled by it and fell back onto one knee. He got up well before the referee had made a decision on what to do (which turned out, stunningly, to be nothing).

The replies to the tweet though brought out both these narratives that go along with incidents like this.

1. Soccer players are wimps compared to other athletes like hockey players

2. Soccer players dive and fake injuries to get free kicks and penalties

Speaking to the first, you're always going to get this comparison from North American hockey fans and superficially, there is merit to it. Hockey players, for me, are among the physically toughest athletes in any sport. Period. The caveat being that there are many kinds of toughness and different sports provide different opportunities for those to be showcased.

And yes, speaking to the second, to the annoyance and embarrassment of almost all soccer fans, there is way too much simulation in the game still, despite measures that have been taken to curtail it.

But don’t conflate the two. Soccer players don't roll around on the ground after getting fouled, or after having pretended to have been fouled, because they're not tough. It has nothing to do with toughness. It has to do with the risk/reward ratio of being caught.

Goals are rarer in soccer than hockey and most other professional team sports. Getting a yellow card for any kind of embellishment is still relatively rare despite referees being more empowered in recent years to give cards for it. So the reward for diving in the box and rolling around is quite high (chance for a penalty kick which has an 80%+ chance of resulting in a goal and/or a yellow or red card for the defender adjudged to have committed the foul) compared to the risk. Even if a striker gets a yellow for simulation it's so much easier for them to avoid getting a second yellow than it is for a defender to avoid getting another yellow as strikers initiate contact with opponents far less often than defenders. So the downside is pretty low to throwing yourself to the ground and rolling around and that’s the real problem in a nutshell.

But even though the NHL has four officials on a surface that's about a quarter the size of a soccer field embellishment still happens in the NHL and isn’t always caught. Florida just won the Stanley Cup but some are not happy with how they did it.

Here’s another blaming an Edmonton Oiler, the team Florida just beat, with some bonus, low key xenophobia thrown in by Jari the Hutt.

The rationale for embellishment in hockey is that it leads to power plays and with top teams scoring on over 20% of man advantage opportunities and even strength goals are generally harder to come by in the playoffs so the risk/reward ratio starts to look tempting. That 20% though pales in comparison to the 80% conversion of penalty kicks in soccer that I mentioned above so the reward factor is till relatively low in hockey when it comes to simulation. That diminishes the impetus to engage in it.

But in terms of hockey gaming the system, there’s more than one way to draw a penalty and get a power play. Here’s a clever example I used in the original 2011 post from a playoff game between the Vancouver Canucks and San Jose Sharks.

The other downside, or risk, that hockey players face when caught 'faking' is the wrath of their own fans. Culturally, in North America we just don't accept that as being a legitimate means to an end. It hits too close to the part of our national psyche that prides itself on fair play (note the Tweet criticizing Draistal comes from an apparent Oilers fan). In other parts of the world, it's all fair in love, war and football and home fans see embellishment as something that has to be done because everybody else does it and if you don't...you're a sucker and a sucker who doesn't want to win badly enough.

So in soccer everybody hates it when an opposing player flies through the air having not been touched at all and then rolls around in the hopes of getting not just a free kick or penalty kick but also eliciting a yellow or red card for their opponent. But they're not doing it because they're not tough. It has nothing to do with toughness. It's about realizing they are more likely to be rewarded for this behaviour, both by refs and their own fans, than they are punished and vilified by those same arbiters of the game.

That has to change and the frustrating thing is that this is so easy to fix yet the problem persists. Here’s two ways to accomplish it.

Embellishment is already something that referees can punish with a yellow card. They just have to do it. This would be a great addition to what VAR is able to weigh in on and would give referees a great tool to justify cards given. If every player got a yellow for clear simulation, within a month you would see it reduced by 90%. If they knew their actions were going to be subject to VAR before the season started it would go down by at least a third right out the gate.

Secondly, referees have to be trained to distinguish between actions and outcomes. If two players come together and one trips the other, it’s a foul (action) regardless of whether the fouled players goes to ground, injured or not (outcome). Players feel, rightly, that they will not get a call if they are fouled unless they fall and yell as they fall. They lead the referee to that decision and make it easier for them to call rather than if they’d stayed on their feet but referees have to make calls based strictly on whether a law of the game was broken and call it regardless of whether a player was felled or not. This almost certainly played a role in Lopez not being sent off for the head butt as Johnston didn’t ‘sell’ it and roll on the ground clutching his face. If players could trus that referees would call ‘actions’ (aided by VAR) rather than ‘outcomes’ they would be more inclined to stay upright. Referees could allow play to continue to see if an advantage was gained and if not blow the whistle and give a free kick. Players would then learn that there’s not only no advantage to diving when there hasn’t been a foul committed on them but also when there has.

Conversely, not every player that falls to the ground (whether they dove or were knocked to the ground via a hard, fair tackle) has been fouled.

Personally, I don’t care what supporters of other sports think about soccer. Enjoy your game and i’ll enjoy mine while trying to make it better. Soccer doesn’t need to learn from hockey how to make it's players tougher but we do need to support measures to stamp out embellishment and not accept it from our own teams on it when they do it and not just our opponents. There’s loads that other sports, particularly North American professional leagues, can learn from soccer (particularly the non-North American leagues) but that’s another newsletter.