World Cup: Where cheaters and fakers rule

“The embarrassment has gone out of cheating” at the World Cup, said Suresh Menon in India’s Tehelka.com. Back in 1986, when Argentine player Diego Maradona scored a goal with an illegal handball that the ref failed to see, he was at least a bit sheepish about it, saying that “the hand of God” had been at work. Six World Cups later, cheating is part of the strategy. In this year’s quarterfinals, Uruguay’s Luis Suarez deliberately used his hand to block a Ghana ball headed for the goal. Ghana was eliminated, and Suarez actually bragged that “the hand of God is mine now.” In another game, Germany’s goalkeeper Manuel Neuer admitted that though a ball kicked by an England player had crossed the goal line, he “tried to continue playing quickly so that the referees wouldn’t notice.” His ploy was successful: The goal was not allowed. And then there was the infamous handball by France’s Thierry Henry that knocked Ireland out of the World Cup qualifiers. “It was necessary to exploit what was exploitable,” Henry explained. Have these men no shame? “At what point did fair play and sportsmanship ooze out of sport so thoroughly?”

We can always blame the referees, said Jihad el-Khazen in Lebanon’s Dar al-Hayat. Referees, of course, are usually former players who take up refereeing only “when their eyesight falters and they have become nearly blind.” Soccer authorities could always implement better training of refs or, as many outraged fans are now demanding, start using camera instant replays to check calls. Then again, here in the Arab world, we need unreliable refs “as a scapegoat to blame for the loss of Arab teams.” Normally, we would “accuse Israel of being behind yet another conspiracy to undermine Arab football,” but since Israel’s team “is even worse” than most Arab teams, that won’t fly. Still, even excellent referees and camera replays wouldn’t catch every infraction. “In football, just like in love and war, everybody cheats, and what matters is not getting caught.”

That’s a real pity, said ethics professor Peter Singer in the London Guardian. “Players should not be exempt from ethical criticism for what they do on the field, any more than they are exempt from ethical criticism for cheating off the field”—such as when they use steroids or bet against their own teams. Cheating during the World Cup is particularly egregious because it is seen by hundreds of millions of people. Imagine if Neuer, the German goalie who boasted of successfully duping the referees, had stopped the play and admitted the ball was a goal. He would have been “a hero, standing up for what is right.” Instead, he is “just another very skillful, cheating soccer player.”

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And let’s not forget about the most common form of cheating, said Richard Sadlier in the Irish Independent. Most of the cheating in soccer takes the form of players diving to the ground, clutching their shins or some other body part in faux pain, and trying to con referees into calling a foul on an opponent who did nothing wrong. “The sight of grown men rolling around in apparent agony, having fallen without colliding with anyone, is cringeworthy.” Before we discuss adding cameras or “goal-line sensors,” how about changing the rules so that players caught behaving in such a “deliberately dishonest” way are themselves penalized? The refs who called those penalties would truly be heroes.