[Sid Lowe] Players taking advantage of good sportsmanship

Iker Casillas was going mental, shouting and swearing and waving his arms in the air. Angrily, he refused to shake hands with Dani Parejo - a former teammate and quite possibly a future one, too. The rest of the Real Madrid team shook their heads sadly, looking stunned. And the coach, Manuel Pellegrini, was furious.

"I don't think anyone can be proud of what happened," he said. "I certainly wouldn't want my team to do something like that. What Dani Parejo did was very disloyal."

What Dani Parejo did was this: he tackled Iker Casillas, played the ball to a teammate, got the return pass, and scored.

There really isn't very much more to it.

Pellegrini outraged

Only, it seems, there is. There is very, very much more to it. And that has once again revealed the ridiculousness of one the most infuriating habits that has taken hold of the Spanish league, the double standards, gamesmanship and rank hypocrisy.

Real Madrid were playing at Getafe on Thursday night. Madrid were 4-0 up - yes, four; we're not even talking about a decisive moment, a match changing play - when a ball was crossed into the box.

Casillas came flying off his line, flapped at the cross, palming the ball out of the area and chased after it like a man possessed. Parejo made the challenge (cleanly, it appears), Casillas tumbled over him, and Parejo found a teammate inside the area.

When the teammate played the ball back to Parejo, Casillas was still on the floor, rolling round and making a fuss, but Madrid had four defenders between Parejo and the goal. One or two seemed to half-stop, others didn't. Parejo curled in a clever finish.

Casillas was furious. Pellegrini, too. They expected and demanded that Parejo kick the ball out of play. But why should he?

First of all, did Parejo even see Casillas on the floor? Maybe, maybe not. Probably yes, in truth - but that's not the point. The point is this: there was no foul. And even if there had been, that's up to the referee.

There was no injury. Although Casillas made a song and dance of being hurt and Pellegrini said afterwards, "he has a knock on his ankle you should see", he carried on for the rest of the match. He won't miss training this morning or Sunday's match against Atletico Madrid.

Even if he had been injured, so what? There was no clash of heads, no terrible fall onto his neck from a great height, no blood gushing across the turf. At most there was a wallop on the ankle. So what? It happens.

Would kicking the ball out and getting the trainer on extra quick have made a major difference to his recovery? Why should anyone stop for an injury? If a full-back is struggling with cramp does the winger agree not to run at him? Of course not.

Why does Parejo owe loyalty to Casillas? Wouldn't not scoring have been disloyal to Getafe? The club he plays for. The club that pay him.

And what's to say that Casillas wasn't rolling about a bit precisely to try to force Parejo to kick the ball out and thus rescue his own stupid mistake and prevent Getafe from scoring a goal they had every right to score? 

And that is exactly the point. Kicking the ball out when a player goes down began as an act of sporting behaviour. But it has become exactly the opposite. It has been manipulated and taken advantage of. If you expect players to police themselves they will cheat. And now they cheat all the time - and yet, morally, they're the good guys; if he doesn't take the bait, the poor sod who's being cheated is the bad guy.

It may not have been the case with Casillas last night but players who invariably have absolutely nothing wrong with them have realised that going down is a great way of stopping the other side building a move, or launching a counter-attack or, like last night, scoring a goal. You can see them on the floor, eyes darting about, looking round to see if staying down and rolling about a bit is a good idea. If their team wins the ball back, magically they're ok again.

Other players then feel a kind of moral obligation to kick the ball out. But they shouldn't. It's twisted. It's upside down. It's just wrong. The moral obligation should be to carry on. The moral obligation should be to get back on your feet, there's nothing wrong with you. And even if there is, hey, tough luck, that's the way it goes sometimes.

Sportsmanship being taken advantage of

How often have you seen the player who's gone down actually need treatment? (and even if he does, so what?) It's as if the very fact of kicking the ball out is the magical cure his injury needs. And then when the other team, in a gesture of reciprocated 'goodwill', give the ball back they invariably give it back 50 yards further back and having had time to regroup. A good chance becomes a throw-in by your own by-line, right down in the corner. Hey, thanks mate! That's real sporting!

The sporting gesture was open to abuse and got abused; the sporting gesture became one of the least sporting things you could wish to see. And just another impediment to everyone's enjoyment. Game after game gets slowed, broken up, ruined - yes, even ruined - by the constant booting the ball out for no reason whatsoever. The moral pressure is too great for anyone to withstand.  

A couple of years ago, the then-Valladolid coach Jose Luis Mendilíbar, also getting pretty annoyed with the trend, announced that his side would not kick the ball out ever. And that he didn't expect any other team to kick the ball out for his players too. Before every game, he personally informed the referee of the decision and went to the opposition dressing room to tell them too.

If there's anything serious, he said, let the referee stop the game. He didn't because there wasn 't. The difference may not have been huge, but games flowed that little bit more.

Sadly, the example never caught on.

Last night, Manuel Pellegrini complained that Getafe's goal - a goal that made absolutely no difference whatsoever - was unsporting. Last week, he said nothing of the sort when Rafael Van der Vaart controlled with his hands - yes, both of them - to score the vital equaliser against Sporting Gijón.

Ah, he'd say, but that's up to the ref to see. And last night's wasn't? The player who got it wrong last night was Casillas, yet the pariah this morning is Parejo.

Last night Dani Parejo scored while Iker Casillas was on the floor.

Good.