{"id":2290,"date":"2010-07-03T15:14:15","date_gmt":"2010-07-03T20:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2010\/07\/03\/did-luis-suarez-cheat\/"},"modified":"2010-07-03T15:14:15","modified_gmt":"2010-07-03T20:14:15","slug":"did-luis-suarez-cheat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2010\/07\/03\/did-luis-suarez-cheat\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Luis Suarez cheat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nYes, yes he did. But hang on<\/a>, Dave Brockington disagrees:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nNo. He did the rational thing. It was perhaps not the sporting, moral, or ethical choice, and definitely the cynical choice, but given the nature of the match, he made the correct decision.\n<\/p>\n

\nIf he doesn\u2019t act, the ball goes in, and Uruguay are out. Plain and simple. If he acts, there\u2019s a small chance that he does not get spotted by the referee (again, see USA v Germany 2002). If he does get spotted and correctly sent off, there\u2019s a chance that Ghana miss the penalty. The odds of both of those events occurring in that order are slim, but as luck would have it, did indeed occur. Suarez didn\u2019t cheat, he operated within the rules of the game. Odds are Ghana would have converted the penalty, and we wouldn\u2019t be discussing this. However, they didn\u2019t, and continued to miss a couple more during the shootout.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nIn the ensuing 100+ comment thread a lot of people agree with Dave, making the comparison with basketball, where apparantly it’s accepted practise when you’re losing to start fouling a few minutes from time to break your opponent’s streak. You make the foul, you take the punishment if caught, it’s all in the rules and you’re not a cheater.\n<\/p>\n

\nIt’s the same sort of logic used by speeders everywhere. A co-worker of mine just the other day explained he was more than happy to pay the occasional fine for the priviledge of being home sooner, all part of the system and no great crime. The same again goes for tax cheats, who’d argue that fiddling the tax man is the rational thing to do and if you’re caught, pay the fines and fiddle again next year. And of course it turned out the entire financial system was populated by people who thought that the rules did not apply to them…\n<\/p>\n

\nThis sort of supposedly rational tradeoffs — where punishment is seen purely as the potential cost of a transaction rather than as a sanction — hollows out systems. If actions like Suarez’s last night are seen as understandable, even laudable or the right thing to do in the circumstances, this means more people will attempt it, rather than playing within the spirit of the game. Doing the convenient thing rather than the right thing might be endemic in basketball, but I don’t want to see it happen in football — or at least not more than it already has. What Suarez did was cheating, he didn’t make a rational tradeoff but got punished for breaking the rules and hopefully Holland will kick Uruguay out of the tournament next Tuesday…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, yes he did. But hang on, Dave Brockington disagrees: No. He did the rational thing. It was perhaps not the sporting, moral, or ethical choice, and definitely the cynical choice, but given the nature of the match, he made the correct decision. If he doesn\u2019t act, the ball goes in, and Uruguay are out. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[333],"tags":[1056],"class_list":["post-2290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","tag-luis-suarez-cheating-cheater-cheatingpants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}