Exactly my point. But in football the only consequence is likely an unfairly awarded foul and a card for the 'tackler'.
In terms of direct influence on the game, in football (which is typically lower scoring that rugby) the effect is actually more likely to be game-changing.
In rugby similar game playing is likely to be actively dangerous.
I disagree, but I do see your point. I think that, in the main, even people seeking to con the referee will still be seeking to protect themselves whilst they do so and feign injury rather that deliberately sustaining them in order to gain an advantage. There might be errors made which result in injury.
Isn't there - how on earth would you know.
Decades of watching the game at multiple levels and decades of playing the game (all at lower levels).
I'm hate this notion that somehow footballers cheat but rugby players are somehow all honourable.
I love it. It's one of the things that makes rugby the game that it is, the spirit in which it is (still) played. It's not absolutely all, and rugby has its own 'grey' areas that people will try to exploit (flankers do love to see how far they can extend the off-side line at the ruck, and the All Blacks always seem to be able to get away with a slightly flatter pass than anyone else can manage), but overwhelmingly you don't see, at any level, rugby players throwing themselves to the floor as though they've been shot trying to get a free kick or a penalty. Football, at every level, from children at school through to the professional level, is riddled with it.
Let's not forget that this is the sport where, in England, a team used fake blood to deliberately cheat.
We don't forget. It's one of the defining moments of rugby history. The fact that it's so remarked upon, so well-remembered is BECAUSE it's so significantly out of character with how rugby culture typically operates.
There has been nothing like that in football, certainly not in this country.
There's a fake injury every three minutes in every professional game, not just in this country but around the world. That rugby needing a blood-capsule to try to finesse a blood-injury substitution rule and football hasn't isn't because rugby is 'just as corrupt', but because football doesn't have a blood injury rule.
And when cheating occurs in scrums (as happens basically all the time and has always happened), it is just described as 'front row dark arts' rather than calling it out for what it is.
Feeding the scrums is one of my pet peeves, in part because it should be so easy to identify and police.
So I don't think we have any idea how regularly this is going on because it is really tricky to tell the difference between a deliberate last minute lowering of position from the ballcarrier hoping to induce a high tackle with possible contact to the head (resulting in an engineered yellow or red card for the tackler) and something that is completely accidental.
Which is amongst the reasons why world rugby polices the tackler and not the ball-carrier. If you, as the tackler, bend, wrap and drive forwards rather than lifting, there will not be a penalty. It encourages the ball-carrier to stay high, which in turn (as a by-product) encourages off-loading, free-flowing rugby.
There seems to be a huge incentive to 'coach for the card'. Currently there seems to be little risk of sanction for the ballcarrier and the worst that happens is that the tackler ends up with mitigation that means that they don't get a card or don't get a red.
Nonsense. I see no evidence of anyone being 'coached' to try and draw fouls. I see more evidence of continued leniency towards hazardous tackling (Owen Farrell's repeated no-arms tackle technique being only intermittently penalised, for instance) and 'old-guard' players bemoaning changes to the game resulting in people taking the risk with disregarding the new guidance and continuing to play as they have been.
The only way you'd know if there is a lot of coached deliberate stuff going on is to start to penalise ballcarriers and then soon enough you'll find the deliberate stuff begins to disappear.
What deliberate stuff? The bits and pieces that ball-carriers can do to cause injury are already policed - leading elbows, straight-arm fends etc.
But I think the fundamental issue here is the current rules somehow seem to assume that the tackler is the only one that can be in the wrong.
No, but the latest changes to the rules place the duty on the tackler because they are the one most likely to be able to control fully how they enter the tackle situation.
And also that the ballcarrier is the only one likely to suffer injury with a head collision.
I don't see that it's about protecting solely the ball-carrier, it's about preventing head collisions. It is, however in part, about protecting the ball-carrier, because although the latest few high-profile incidents have been head-on-head collisions, the rules are also about preventing direct contact with the ball-carrier's head from, say, the tackling players' shoulders.
O.
