Eurocheat championship

[Old Boy 0]

... and the winners are....

HOLLAND!!!!!!

Many, many congratulations on this outstanding achievement, bringing new technical finesse to this most difficult and under-developed aspect of the game. The many hours on the training pitch, where a cone is placed in the penalty area and your players have to run past it and collapse as though they had no backbone (which in a sense they don''t), paid off for you. You should hold your heads up high, even though you got your asses whupped good in the end.

[bananaman 0]

Harsh.

But totally fair. Holland deserved to go out, even if just because they dive too much. And that was compared to Portugal.

But next they have to stop SHIRT PULLING. It''s outrageous, unfair, unsportsmanlike and defeats the object of being an attacker - ie getting past your opponent.

[Old Boy 0]

Agreed about the shirt-pulling, and my tactic to counter that would be to wear lycra cycling tops, like the England rugby shirts, doesn''t stop it but it makes it more difficult. My remedy for the out-of-control diving antics that we''ve seen is to make diving in the area a red-card offence, and to reduce the ball-to-wall distance to 8 metres. Of course, that would mean that England would struggle to qualify for either of the championships...

[blacko 0]

Bring in the new rugby shirt and it would soon stop that

[bananaman 0]

Not necessarily true.

Nothing can stop some 6''4" Greek guy with both his arms around you wrestling you to the floor, or at least completely killing your momentum. As proved by the 16 stone Jan Koller last night!

If they started giving red cards and pens for this, it would soon disappear. Diving seems to have levelled off slightly, and has been controlled in part by the threat of being booked.

[Steve White 24]

Agree with the posters, esp. on giving pens for shirt pulling etc which almost seems to be acceptable. I know the refs would do it if they could, but am afraid it would be stopped as, in most cases, player/manager power rules. Perhaps the players should watch the Women´s World Cup, completely devoid of petty fouling and cynicism. As an aside, I think the refereeing in this years Euro has been rather good.

[Old Boy 0]

Don''t agree at all that diving has reduced. It leaves a really sour taste to see very talented foorballers like Van Nistelrooy resorting to it. With the lighter balls and more scientifically designed boots, it''s now possible to control the flight of the ball so that a free kick close to the goal is a real weapon. So the inducement to dive is greater, and the threat of a yellow is not enough. If a foul tackle by the last defender merits a red, surely a dive in the area also deserves a red. And moving the wall closer to the ball would reduce the potential of a goal resulting, so reducing the inducement to dive.

[bananaman 0]

Can''t argue with that. And even a foul tackle by the last defender seems to not warrant a red anymore, as Silvestre proved when chopping Rooney in half in our first game.

I think this whole subject (ie every aspect of cheating) merits a serious re-think on behalf of the governing bodies of world football, but I don''t think they''ll have the balls to do it.