"Did Danny Welbeck dive?". That was the question many supporters of Arsenal Football Club are being asked. Danny Welbeck plays for Arsenal. And a dive in football is when a player pretends that he was fouled by either falling over or clutching a body part and acting like he was struck on said body part. If the referee feels that a player has dived, then the player in question is given a yellow card for "simulation", the technical word for a dive.
Dives very often fool referees into thinking a foul was actually committed. There are two views on diving. One view is to consider it as "gamesmanship", where conning the referee is a part of the game and a dive well done is a skill to learn for all footballers. The other view is to consider it as sacrilege and a moral wrong, any attempted dive being a form of cheating that has no place in a game that has to be won honourably in the spirit of sportsmanship, not won at any cost.
Let me state my opinion clearly here - I find diving abhorrent and something that should be punished as harshly as possible. Such deception has absolutely no place in the game and it undermines everything that sport is supposed to teach us.
So you would think that after Danny Welbeck dived (it was a most clumsy dive, no clue how the referee bought it), I would be ashamed of such an act by a player of my beloved football club. Dear reader, you are about to learn something unthinkable and unbelievable about me. You might want to sit down for this. I, like everyone else, am a hypocrite! Shocking, no? Until now I was so sure that everyone else is a hypocrite while I'm far from one.
When the question was put to an Arsenal fan on a well known Arsenal fan interview forum, one fan said, "If an Arsenal player goes down, then I'll back him." You see, that's the attitude I take too. It's an Arsenal player, he can do no wrong. The referee is corrupt and biased obviously, the opposition players are thugs who happen to know to kick a ball. Their club is in cahoots with the authorities and always indulge in malpractice. Their sponsors commit human rights violations in third world countries. Their fans are violent and vitriolic. The city they come from and the region they come from is a den of ignorance and backwardness, the attitude clearly showing on the pitch.
Well, I most certainly exaggerate. But this is what separates my football watching from the rest of my life. For other aspects of my life, I'm forced to be more nuanced. Good people can exist outside my family, my city, my country, my religion, my language, my whatever. It is a basic requirement for decent civilised life for people to be more nuanced.
Today, the media says we're seeing an increase in "nationalism" and "xenophobia" (I never trust any broad social trend that feature in op-ed columns or TV channels). Nationalism is a large scale extension of the club fan mentality, with a country instead of a football club. I'm not here to discuss whether it's good or bad. But I'm here to say that such attitudes make our lives simpler in the immediate future.
You see, we human beings aren't the biggest fans of complex decision-making, nor are we very good at it. (Watch this Ted talk and this one). To think in a nuanced manner about our morals and by extension, our political views, is hard and something we're certainly not wired to do. If a lion pounces at you, you're better off immediately running rather than having a bout of what-is-the-meaning-of-our-existence-itis at that moment and analysing the situation. Similarly, perhaps we're wired to have a strong sense of belonging to the group we identify with. Maybe having a nuanced view of members of other tribes was foolish in the wild. The message probably was, "SEE OTHER TRIBE MAN, POKE SPEAR, RUN".
Now, I'm not for a second suggesting that we return to such a life. In fact, very little of what we do is in line with what we would do but for the constraints of civilised society. We understand that we're better off putting this side of us under wraps. Personally at least, I think this is why I enjoy football. It is one moment where my brain doesn't have to whir away in thought and think in a very nuanced fashion about things, not worry about morals. Of course, there are boundaries to not cross. But in the spirit of things, if an Arsenal (or a Bengaluru Football Club) player falls down, then he was clearly tripped over by that brutish opposition player and my player did nothing wrong. Our team is made of gems. That's my stand!
In this context, I find it hard to understand Arsenal fans who want "Wenger out". (To the non-football populace, Arsene Wenger is the coach and manager of Arsenal (name similarity just a coincidence) who was extremely successful when he began but is now failing and thus, his popularity has waned, with the majority asking for him to be sacked from the job).
Being a football fan is where you do things differently from the rest of your life, by definition. You get extremely attached to an entity, they mostly frustrate you but give you the occasional dose of ecstasy after which they revert back to kind. Since only one team wins every year, this is the experience of every single football fan, of every football club almost every year. In real life if this is true, either you're in an unhealthy marriage or you're doing a PhD.
If you invested in a share on the stock market and it only gave you losses, would you continue to buy the shares? I hope not. But that is exactly what season ticket holders at Arsenal do. They're attached to these shares, hopelessly. And this is making you do all kinds of irrational things that you would never do with a share - being incessantly positive and expecting that Arsenal will always win.
When Arsenal does "under perform", (relative to fan expectation and, I might add, relative to Mr. Wenger's previously set high standards) you have waves of people complaining that they paid good money to watch the game as fans and hence they don't deserve such appalling performances. That they are being ripped off. But that is completely their fault. Their compulsion to pay the tickets is from their own emotional attachment.
I believe (and again, for me personally), the football fan sphere is where you have a break from the constant need for nuanced thought in life. Ergo, it is also where you endure misery without complaining. It is like a throwback to long back when if a you hunted a rabbit with great difficulty, then a much much stronger person beat you up and stole it from you, you can cry, you can curse, but ultimately you have to get on with it, because there was no supreme court. There were probably tribal elders and codes of conduct, but who knows how effective those were.
So the notion of "I'm paying so much so I deserve better" is invalid. You can be the most fanatic fan, or the most passive fan. It is your choice. And the club does its own thing.
Footnote - I am not saying a football fan cannot be unhappy with his/her club. I am merely saying, when you yourself are so irrational and doing something as absurd as picking a team and becoming a fan with all that it entails, you are the last person who can demand pay-offs in the form of better performances by citing that you are paying good money. Nothing more. You can boo your players and scream and rant on facebook, don't give me these false equivalencies with money. And as for exploitation by clubs who realise that fans are fanatical and loyal, well, it's like your drug dealer exploiting you and you will not buy your drugs from any other dealer.
Footnote 2 - In the time since I first wrote this post and it lay as a draft for over a month, Arsene Wenger has announced that he will quit from the job of Arsenal manager at the end of this football season. Sad, but it had to happen one day.