I dived once and still can’t believe I did it. I dived and I hate myself for it. The memory comes to me sometimes, out of the blue, crawling into my brain and filling it with self-disgust all over again. As I get older, my recollection of some games or moments or motivations naturally blurs and fades, but this one remains as sharp and painful as a dagger. What on earth was I thinking?
I can give you some context: desperation. Some more: England stinking their way to an early exit from the European Championship in 2000, my last game, my final tournament as an international footballer. What a pathetic way for that portion of my career to end, with a sad little slow-motion tumble in the 64th minute of a miserable 3-2 defeat by Romania. The referee didn’t fall for it and I was booked. It was the group stage and we were out.
Why bring this up now? No specific reason, just another self-inflicted error, a random conversation with my boss when I happened to mention my dive and my embarrassment, he immediately found it on YouTube and then spent the rest of our chat veering between laughter and mockery. He then suggested that I write a column on football’s peculiar moral code. In other words, I have nobody to blame but myself.
I don’t know about you, but my first reaction to being attacked is to attack back. That’s probably my competitive instinct. In this instance, as colleagues sent me screenshots of my failed attempt to con the referee Urs Meier — and that’s what it was — I attempted to re-write my own shame. “Look, there’s contact!” I shouted into the silence of my own office. Did Iulian Filipescu, the Romania centre-half, brush me?
But no, I wasn’t even conning myself.
I watched the clip again and felt nauseous — again. I rewatched it and attempted to remove my own feelings as I did so, treating it as the kind of analysis I might do on Match of the Day.
For background, England had gone 2-1 up in the match — I’d scored a penalty in the first half and, yes, I do feel the need to point this out — and then were immediately pegged back at 2-2 three minutes after the break. We needed only a draw to qualify from Group A, but were caught in two minds about whether to attack or defend and Romania had momentum. We were flat and needed something to happen.
We get a throw-in on the right and Gary Neville hurls the ball down the channel. There’s a headed clearance inside and possession drops to my feet, side-on to goal. I must be about 30 yards out.
My touch and turn aren’t bad, but I’m setting off from a standing start and by the time I’ve made five yards, Filipescu and another defender are crowding in on me. Suddenly, I’m running into traffic.
What had looked like a decent position now looks anything but. I’m attempting to wriggle between my two markers but at the same time as a dreadful, hoofed touch takes the ball way beyond my control I go down like a sack of spuds, except with considerably less grace. I’m not fooling anybody. Yellow card.
The reverse camera angle compounds my self-loathing. From here, you can see Filipescu extending his leg and, if I’m being very generous, I could say that I was probably expecting to be clipped.
But he pulls back, I collapse anyway and end up looking a right prat.
That’s the best and most honest description I can give you. Prat. It’s terrible, a right shocker. Of course there’s no contact. It’s a dive, it’s embarrassing and I wish I hadn’t done it.
When pundits analyse matches we often talk about decision-making. The best and biggest players have that sixth sense of what to do in any given moment, but we’re really talking about the most fleeting of split seconds. If there was a thought process at all for me in Charleroi, perhaps there was a tiny bit of: “Well, everybody else does it, particularly at international level,” going on. “Why shouldn’t I try and gain an advantage?”
By way of caveat, I made in excess of 750 senior appearances for club and country over the course of my professional career and that was the only time I did it. I mean that and stand by it. I hated diving back then and I still hate it now, which is why writing this entire column sends a shiver up my spine. It takes me to an uncomfortable place, but it made me think again about football’s strange code of honour and what’s deemed acceptable or unacceptable.
What are the worst things you can do on the pitch as a player? Deliberately spitting at an opponent is, I guess, the biggest no-no, ahead of deliberately hurting somebody. Is that a bit weird? A broken leg could keep you out for months and a gob of phlegm can simply be wiped away, but there’s something profoundly personal, contemptuous and invasive about spitting. It’s disgusting and it strips away any notion of respect. It’s inhuman.
In terms of physicality, the game has mutated and moved on. A knee-high challenge would have been unacceptable in my day, but there was nothing wrong with taking your man along with the ball. In fact, it was seen as desirable. In the opening exchanges of matches, you would often ‘let your opponent know you were there’, a euphemism for an early, tone-setting tackle, when referees were perhaps less ready to show a card.
In my position, there were constant skirmishes with defenders, who did their utmost to put you off or gain an advantage. There would be the usual pulling or pushing or grabbing and, with far fewer cameras in grounds and no VAR, there would often be nips and scratches, stamps and kicks and worse. You could reasonably argue that this, too, was a deliberate causing of pain, but it was regarded as fair game, part of what you did and put up with.
Third on my list of don’ts would be diving, although here I accept it can be a cultural thing. In other leagues, in other countries, it prompts less anguish. We pride ourselves on the ‘honesty’ of the Premier League but what’s interesting here is how slender the margins are and how the rights and wrongs become less clear the more you think about it. I just know that I couldn’t stand it.
When I say I dived once, I’m not exaggerating. That’s my memory. But I also know that one of my strengths as a footballer, particularly as I got older and became less mobile, was winning free kicks. As a forward, you can invite contact. You can encourage it and force it. So I dived once, but I went down thousands of times and every instance was legitimate, certainly to my mind.
Let me explain. If you’re travelling at speed with the ball at your feet, the slightest touch could put you off balance or cause you to lose your footing. If a defender is diving in, you can jump out of the way and avoid him, but why should you if the result would be contact, a free kick and an advantage for your team? It’s not your job to get out of the way. And when the touch comes, you are within your rights to go down.
In other areas of the pitch, you can ease the pressure on your team by winning free kicks. This is something I’ve seen Kai Havertz do brilliantly for Arsenal this season; I went to their Champions League tie at home to Paris Saint-Germain in October and he did it two or three times. I loved it. It was really good centre-forward play.
Havertz holds off PSG defender Willian Pacho (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
If a central defender is coming in to try and win the ball, it’s not cheating for you to step in front of him and use your body, which he then runs into. If you can’t win the ball yourself, then make it as hard as possible for the other guy; don’t give him a free header. Step in front of him and let him whack you.
As a kid at Southampton, I was taught to watch Kenny Dalglish, the Liverpool and Scotland legend, because there was nobody better at using his body strength to protect the ball. The longer you do it, the more frustrated the defender becomes and the more likely they are to flick out a boot. You go down. This is a calculated ploy on your behalf. In that moment, you are actively seeking contact but it’s the contact that is crucial.
Is there a difference between cheating and gamesmanship? Maybe there is a kind of sliding scale. Game in, game out, when a ball goes out of play, you can guarantee that players on both sides will claim it as theirs and then argue the toss, even when they know fine well it is not. Every single person does it, but somehow that’s not cheating, it’s playing the game.
Then there are tactical free kicks. The opposition are breaking and suddenly your team is out of shape and out of position and soon will be out of time, so you stick out a boot somewhere benign like near the halfway line, foil an attack, hold up your hands and accept a caution. This is deliberate foul play and wholly, 100 per cent cynical. There is not the slightest intent of winning the ball, but most of the time, we shrug and accept it.
I have to admit, I can’t really explain how a deliberate dive can be cheating and a deliberate foul is not. Is it the ready acceptance of guilt? The acknowledgement that you’re doing something wrong?
What most of us loathe is exaggeration and fakery. When Rasmus Hojlund and Kyle Walker went head-to-head — barely — in the Manchester derby and then Walker crumpled to the floor clutching his face as if struck by a bus, football’s response was one of outrage. It was blatant. Walker was trying to get Hojlund sent off and so it crossed a line.
There are different facets to being crafty. In the early days under Eddie Howe’s management, Newcastle United were experts at craftiness. Nick Pope would go down for treatment he didn’t really need, the physio would come on and the game would be killed for a minute or two. They do it less now because they were found out, but timewasting has always been rife. It’s manipulation of a smaller kind.
I don’t have any great conclusion here, but I’ve done what the boss asked, relived my humiliation for him and for you, provided you with a laugh at my expense and tried to place it in a wider context. By doing so, perhaps I will have exorcised the memory of my awful dive once and for all. But, sadly, I wouldn’t bank on it. It’s a scar, a stain, a badge of dishonour and one I’ll have to wear.
Man, what on earth was I doing?
(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Eamonn Dalton)
