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You got to be kidding m8,that penalty was newer legit.Italian are opera stars.Don't tell me that with that cheating going on in 4 clubs in Italy (i think 4) that players didn't know about any of it
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I'm not kidding. IMO that penalty was fair, even though the ref could have let is pass since it was merely an obstruction fault. As for italians beeing opera stars, this can be but I don't see anything different happening anywhere else. A couple of examples from games played by Italy:
1) I've already mentioned the penalty given to France in the world cup final. There the french player threw himself on the ground. The italian defender (Materazzi) didn't seem to be making any obstruction nor did he touch the player.
2) In the semifinal Germany Italy there was one instance which I remember pretty vivdly. It was a contrast between Ballak and Cannavaro (I think). Ballak, having lost the ball outside the penalty box, threw himself on the ground faking to have been hit in the face. The italian defender did not touch him. No yellow card was awarded.
As for the scandal, I'm not debating if the players did or did not know of the pressures on the referees. I'm simply stating that the cheats were not done by the players themselves but by the team managers who put pressure on the refs in order to obtain "special treatment". In other words the scandal is not connected to the previously stated (and apparently common) idea that italian players are divers/ballerinas/whatever.
What disturbs me is the apparently common (and IMO completely hypocritical) attitude displayed during and after the world cup towards italian players. They have been dubbed fakers and divers when everybody else behave exactly the same (BTW, having watched soccer since I was very very young, it seems to me that the tendency to dive, apart from being practiced everywhere in any soccer league in any country, is as popular today as it was 25 years ago), the italian game play has been widely judged "retrograd" because Italy plays a defensive football and scores with sudden counter-attacks (which maybe bad for the show but so far proved a good tactic to win games), without counting the racist remarks that appeared on some german press (but ok, in the mind of the authors they were probably just colorful satyr, although I fail to see the satyrical aspect of calling Italian men "a parasite lifeform" on an editorial of Der Spiegel OnLine).