Diving

With the absence of any real football over the weekend, I thought I’d give my two pence worth on all the diving talk that has been going around since the Eduardo incident against Celtic.

This diving story keeps circulating, I suspect, simply because the media (and those whiny blogs etc.) have decided this is a subject that can fill the sports pages until they find the next thing to moan about. Also England have a big game on Wednesday. Against Croatia. Which happens to be who Eduardo plays for. And the English newspapers love a villain, and its Eduardo’s turn. Cue Eduardo being jeered every time he touches the ball on Wednesday.

The truth is that diving is something that any player from any country may be guilty of. It’s something John Terry and Wayne Rooney would do well to remember after their recent comments. Terry says those pesky foreigners are to blame and Rooney saying he is an “honest” pro. A quick search of Youtube for “Rooney dive” will bring up quite a few results, and he is not alone, as F365’s Mediawatch helpfully demonstrates.

Perhaps the foreign players realised earlier than their English counterparts that conning the ref by diving was a neat trick, but Gerrard, Owen, Rooney and the rest have shown that they are not to be left behind and are now stride for stride with the overseas players when it comes to diving. But this “diving foreigners” tag seems to have stuck. Still, it was nice of Rooney to keep the debate going with his not-a-dive-in-anyway-penalty on Saturday. Look on the bright side, only 5 more days until Arsenal play again.

On the Arsenal front, Johan Djourou is our for six months after undergoing knee surgery. As I said last week our success this season could come down to how lucky we are with injuries, Add this to Cesc, Nasri and Rosicky and it’s not been a good start on that front. Let's hope we are getting them out of the way early.

This leaves us with just Silvestre and Senderos (and Song I guess) as cover for Gallas and Vermaelen. Let’s just hope the first choice pair remains fit.

Nicklas Bendtner scored a very good goal for Denmark, showing what he can do if he gets in the box.

And that's about it. A quiet day on the Arsenal front then.