Michael Owen and the Death of Fair Play

C.B. Fry, legendary English football and cricket international, on the introduction of the penalty kick in 1891:

“It’s a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to toe tip, hack and push opponents and to behave like cads of the first kidney.”

Cads of the first kidney. What a deliciously plummy phrase - and, of course, a fine description of almost every sportsman involved in modern English football.

The Anglo-Saxon self-image denies this, of course. In our eyes we are, as we always were, the gatekeepers of fair play, the last bastion of honest conduct. Perhaps that was rubbish in 1891. It certainly is now. Either way, it’s all Michael Owen’s fault.

Jesse Lingard’s dive to win a penalty against Burnley a couple of weeks ago was remarkable only in just how unremarkable it was. Harry Kane, Raheem Sterling and Dele Alli have all dived to win penalties in recent seasons. Another member of England’s attack should hardly be expected to act any differently.

At the turn of the century, it would have been a major talking point. Now, only Sean Dyche and Jonathan Pearce seem to care. The argument is over. The divers won.

Younger fans might find it hard to believe just how much opprobrium was directed at divers, real or perceived, in the first decade or so of the Premier League. Back then, staying on your feet wasn’t just a mark of honesty, it was a sign of manliness. Foreigners - and it was predominantly foreigners in the nineties - were the subject of endless hand-wringing in the media and in the stands.

When Jürgen Klinsmann arrived at Tottenham Hotspur in 1994, his reputation meant that opposing fans (and the press) were on his back before he’d kicked a ball - hence his now-legendary celebration. With memories of the Hand of God fresh in the mind, latin players were singled out for especial scepticism. Diving was abhorrent in the eyes of the football faithful - not just dishonest, but effeminate. Weak. Un-English.

So much has changed.

The worm turned on 7th June 2002 in Sapporo. When Michael Owen found an invisible stumbling block a few inches away from Mauricio Pocchetino and won England the game, we discovered something surprising - we didn’t care. It was sweet revenge for Maradona’s hand, for Simeone’s wind-up mercantilism, and maybe even for the Falklands.

We realised that when your players dived and you won, we suddenly didn’t mind so much.

We were always hypocrites, of course. Maybe the English didn’t dive or roll around in feigned agony, but they did hack, gouge and kick lumps out of their opposition at any opportunity. “Letting them know you’re there” and all that. It was deliberately breaking the rules of the game in order to gain an advantage, of course, but it was more masculine, rugged - the kind of cheating a nation of stiff-upper-lipped John Bulls could tolerate. C.B. Fry would not have been impressed.

It didn’t take long for the English to get their heads around the dark arts. Players like Cristiano Ronaldo and José Antonio Reyes arrived in the Premier League hot on Owen’s brittle heels, escalating the concept of holding your face to new and previously unimagined heights, and testing the resolve of English fair play. It snapped like a dry twig.

Now we haven’t got a leg to stand on - and if we did, we’d pretend someone had kicked it out from under us. Arsène Wenger described the English as “masters” of diving. Pocchetino, hailing from a nation where getting one over on the referee has traditionally been seen as a laudible demonstration of cunning, summed it up neatly when asked about Alli’s tendency towards theatrics.

”Don’t believe that English football is fair play always because Owen jumped like he was in a swimming pool.

“Maybe you were more pure 20, 25, 30 years ago. Now you are like us.”

Possibly an Englishman - it's hard to tell

Cheating has become a part of normal training for young players in this country. Last year I was fortunate enough to spend a few hours in the company of Eddie Leach, a youth coach with Manchester United, who trains children as young as seven - including, not so very long ago, Jesse Lingard.

He described how they taught young players to make obstructing runs across defenders from set pieces in order to create scoring opportunities. “It’s not cheating!”, he told me, palms up as if he would be offended by the mere suggestion. Of course - it is cheating to deliberately impede an opposing defender, but the fact is that bending the laws is now not only the established norm, but that an understanding of how to tiptoe around the refereeing guidelines is part of the curriculum.

Perhaps it’s all fair enough. If everyone else in the world cheats, why should we be at a disadvantage? And certainly no Burnley fan has much of a right to whinge about Lingard tricking them out of a couple of points given Ashley Barnes’ weekly masterclass in old-fashioned shithousery…

Except, of course, supporters across the board do whine - and too many have developed the habit of complaining about being cheated against without demonstrating the slightest hint of repentance when it’s one of their own digging out dubious points for the cause. The argument against diving was lost the moment Owen hit the turf - but we can at least ask of our fellow football fans that we try not to be so bleeding-heartedly hypocritical about it.

"It's telling that the media attitude towards simulation has, over the last decade, switched almost entirely from tutting disapproval to barefaced apologia."

It's the excuses that rankle the most, perhaps. Football has developed its own sheepish language for diving, just as it once did for the art of kicking centre forwards in the back of the legs - "minimal contact", "going down easily" - and we've become well versed in the art of explaining away our team's indiscretions.

Owen had a hand there, too - rather than being a little shamefaced about the whole affair, he said that he'd dived because Pierluigi Collina had told him to, claiming he'd been warned: "Michael, you know you have to go down to win the penalty".

It's fairly obvious that he didn't mean "regardless of whether there was actually a foul or not", and while Collina's alleged advice does speak to how refereeing standards have become a part of the problem, it's telling that the media's attitude towards simulation has, over the last decade, switched almost entirely from tutting disapproval to barefaced apologia.

Just doing a brief Google on the subject of diving unearths opinion pieces entitlted "Is it time for the English to accept that diving is no longer cheating?", "Why diving is a good thing" and dozens more.

Perhaps there is something else we could learn from the Argentinians - if we’re going to cheat anyway, we may as well own it.

Cads of the first kidney, the lot of us, from Michael Owen to the last man on the terraces.