Just rub some dirt in it.

December 14, 2012 7:02 AM

MTB vs. Soccer
posted by unSane (44 comments total)

So this is just another Football is full of professional divers slams?

That's definitely very original...
posted by vuron at 7:09 AM on December 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

Put helmets on the soccer players. SOLVED.
posted by orme at 7:14 AM on December 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

In my field, MTB is a common abbreviation for Mycobacterium tuberculosis, so I was hoping it wasn't going to be a bunch of soccer players ill from consumption.

But what it was was even more bewildering -- I didn't quite understand the connection between biking and soccer. That in biking, you get slapped by the earth, but in soccer you get slapped by other players?
posted by bluefly at 7:16 AM on December 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

> moto-cross

What?
posted by klanawa at 7:19 AM on December 14, 2012

Several years ago, at a previous company, I had an officemate who I worked very closely with every day.

One morning I found he had left what appeared to be his high school yearbook on his desk. Curious, I picked it up and paged through it, looking for his picture.

I didn't find it. So I looked again.

Finally I found his picture. Or rather, I found a picture of someone else with his name below it.

Squinting, I decided that in the right light it *might* be his half-brother. But regardless, the kid smiling out of that photo was in no way my coworker.

Confused, I asked him later what was up with his yearbook. Was it a prank?

No.

Turns out that in college, my coworker was heavily into MTB. One day, he was rocketing down a hill, struck a root, flew over his handlebars and did a face-plant into a boulder.

He shattered his cheekbones, nose, the orbits of his eyes, and dislocated his jaw. Over the next five years, he had several plastic surgeries to repair his face. The surgeons did an excellent job and left hardly any scars (he pointed out a long, thin one that traced his hairline that I had never noticed before).

However, the resulting rearrangement of HIS ENTIRE FACE was enough to completely throw off my brain. It was deeply disturbing and gave me a new appreciation for how sensitive evolution has made our ability to recognize people.

Also Jesus Christ I'm never going mountain biking.
posted by xthlc at 7:28 AM on December 14, 2012 [6 favorites]

Thanks for the dose of stupidity...specifically diving in "football" and planting your face in the ground.
posted by incandissonance at 7:32 AM on December 14, 2012

You don't even have to go out on a trail to have your face rearranged. I endo-ed while cutting across the USC campus on Sunday when some bro on a fixie swerved in front of me.

So... is the football diving just a natural outgrowth of how big the pitch is vs. how many refs there are out there? It looks... stupid.
posted by carsonb at 7:33 AM on December 14, 2012

That in biking, you get slapped by the earth, but in soccer you get slapped by other players?

In biking, you actually get smashed to bits and walk away as if nothing happened; in soccer, you pretend to get slapped and fall to the ground crying.

And they're both pointless wastes of time.

*continues idly surfing the internet*
posted by Sys Rq at 7:33 AM on December 14, 2012 [4 favorites]

A friend of mine - into Rugby and Football back home - maintained that the 15 top/worst divers in the Premiership should be made to play a demonstration match against the England Rugby team at the end of each season. If they scored less than half the points of the proper Rugby players, they lost 25% of their salary to charity.

Either way they get punished. They either do well and get the shite kicked out of them or they lose a bunch of their hair product and fancy car budget AND get the shite kicked out of them. After a season or two he figured you'd struggle to make up a full 15 man squad and the problem and you could start on the European teams...
posted by Brockles at 7:36 AM on December 14, 2012 [4 favorites]

And they're both pointless wastes of time.

He posted as a comment to an Internet video of bicycle crashes.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 7:38 AM on December 14, 2012

I suppose that the extraneous football clips give this mountain biking wipeout video something of a hook; a USP, if you will. But it's an annoying and disingenuous hook. In football there is a value to diving, reprehensible and illegal though the practice may be. It could result in a free kick, penalty or a card being shown to one of the opposition. There is no value to be had out of pretending to be hurt whilst mountain biking so why would anyone do it?
posted by MUD at 7:40 AM on December 14, 2012 [6 favorites]

He posted as a comment to an Internet video of bicycle crashes.

The irony of which he pointed out in the very next sentence.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:40 AM on December 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

I remember a cyclist giving me the pitch for criterium racing. Of the seven or so minutes, a good three were spent on the "miracle of Tegaderm", culminating in pulling down the waistband of her jeans to show me the tiny pink patch that was the only remaining sign of having left a hand-sized piece of skin out on the North Branch Trail two weekends ago. You see, the miracle of Tegaderm is not that this healed without a scar: it's that she was back on her bike two days later.

Endorphins are a helluva drug.
posted by d. z. wang at 7:45 AM on December 14, 2012

It could result in a free kick, penalty or a card being shown to one of the opposition.

It should also be noted the game makes few allowances for official breaks or timeouts over 90 minutes. As a contrast, in the typical NFL game the ball is actually in play for only about 11 minutes on average...
posted by jim in austin at 7:59 AM on December 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

A friend of mine - into Rugby and Football back home - maintained that the 15 top/worst divers in the Premiership should be made to play a demonstration match against the England Rugby team at the end of each season.

A footie or a rugby match? My guess is the latter.
posted by ersatz at 8:05 AM on December 14, 2012

I heard that all bicycle riders use steroids.
posted by inigo2 at 8:06 AM on December 14, 2012

I was just pleased to see that Ricardo Fuller from Stoke was in some footage.
posted by josher71 at 8:12 AM on December 14, 2012

A footie or a rugby match? My guess is the latter.

Yes, sorry that wasn't clear other than the '15' thing. A full length rugby match. In January. That'll teach them.
posted by Brockles at 8:20 AM on December 14, 2012

As MUD points out, there is often a tactical advantage to diving. You go down in the right place, you can get your team a penalty kick. You can end a counter attack. You can give your teammates a chance to catch up to you when you're outnumbered.

You can only do this so much, because once you get labeled a diver, you won't get fouls on you called even if they actually did happen (see: Luis Suarez).

Players have tuned their bodies for playing a full 90 minutes, running something like 6-8 miles over the course of the match at speeds ranging from a slow trot to a full out sprint. A simple knock can really screw up a player's ability to keep up and not stay injury free (have you seen videos of players when their hamstrings quit on them at full speed? ungh) so I can see why people would over-react to the littlest of contact. They make gobs of money a week based in a large part on their ability to run full speed. Do motocross folks make the same amount of money?

As for making diving footballers play rugby, I'm not sure how forcing gazelles to act like rhinos helps anything except quenching our need for vengeance upon that one player that did dat ting what done lost us the match.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:29 AM on December 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

You just need post-match review with fines levied on diving set at a variable rate based upon player salaries.

Otherwise you will always get elite players like Cronaldo fishing for penalties because there simply isn't a cost to them equivalent to the material advantage of being able to score a relatively easy goal or getting another player carded.

Doing it in game is always going to be problematic because you don't want to slow down the flow of the game but you could have another referee monitoring the match via replays and just relay down to the field ref that player X dove so that they get a yellow or red after the fact.
posted by vuron at 8:33 AM on December 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

The video was insane.

Then there was an advertisement, in french, of a pair of, um, "backsides" talking to each other about their jeans. As in, literally, women's backsides.
posted by andreaazure at 8:43 AM on December 14, 2012

The mountain biking depicted in that video is really at the extreme end of what's considered downhill racing. To call it mountain biking is akin to calling F1 racing a sunday drive.

With that said, the shameful degree of diving in soccer makes the whole sport look like a bunch of pansies without any comparison with dudes throwing themselves off mountains head first.
posted by photoslob at 8:43 AM on December 14, 2012

Implement a video replay-assisted review with a flagrant diving infraction punishable by an automatic penalty kick and a red card. It'll end overnight.
posted by rocket88 at 8:55 AM on December 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Is this video trying to make some kind of point?
It's not like there's no people getting *really* hurt playing football, or assholes in cycling for that matter.
posted by valdesm at 8:57 AM on December 14, 2012

With that said, the shameful degree of diving in soccer makes the whole sport look like a bunch of pansies without any comparison with dudes throwing themselves off mountains head first.

I feel like that even though diving is prevalent, if you watch a lot of soccer you'll realize that they are far from "pansies". These are some tough motherfuckers.
posted by josher71 at 9:09 AM on December 14, 2012

For crying out loud. There is a guy who is literally having the best year EVER in professional football right now. Being seriously called the best to EVER play the game. Right now! You could watch him! This has been posted to the blue before, but it's totally worth it: Messi Never Dives.

The OP video was a great compilation of what was essentially football's worst known offenders doing some really atrocious diving. It was the equivalent of watching "NFL's Football Follies" and declaring that NFLers really are a dumb bunch of uncoordinated knuckleheads.

As others have pointed out, diving is part of the game because struggling to keep your feet while losing your advantage LOSES YOUR TEAM ITS ADVANTAGE. And even if you look like a bit of a wimp by going down to slight contact, if you lost 10% of your speed or control because of that contact, why not try to get the penalty called for you?

Also, I know very little about MTB, but if the MTB clips in that video had been posted on their own I don't think I would have thought MTBers were tough, I would have thought they were insane. And I didn't see too many of those guys get up and walk away from those crashes, so should I assume they rolled around in pain like the footballers?

sorry, for some reason Mefi's usual "harhar soccer players are a bunch of wimpy divers!" really got under my skin this morning. Maybe it's because I'm so high on Messi's season. I think I'll go watch that video for the 100th time, that'll make me feel better.
posted by jermsplan at 9:11 AM on December 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

Is this video trying to make some kind of point?
It's not like there's no people getting *really* hurt playing football, or assholes in cycling for that matter.
posted by valdesm at 8:57 AM on December 14 [+] [!]



It's a joke. It's not meant to be taken seriously.
posted by Stagger Lee at 9:23 AM on December 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

To make up for all the football-hate, check out this video of an incredibly talented kid who is guaranteed to excel at the next level of football.
posted by resurrexit at 9:27 AM on December 14, 2012

I get the point the video is trying to make, but it really isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, is it? It would make more sense to juxtapose it with something like this
posted by ChipT at 9:49 AM on December 14, 2012

Hm... me thinks this guy picked the wrong clips and pics...


Ewald Lienen's sliced up leg
Puyol's elbow
Petr Chech with a piece of skull driven into his brain
Whaddaya know... here's a whole gallery of horrible soccer injuries
posted by Hairy Lobster at 9:56 AM on December 14, 2012

In football there is a value to diving, reprehensible and illegal though the practice may be.

And that's why it's so easy to satirize. Getting all butt-hurt because there is a flaw in the rules of a sport you like is pretty myopic. The outrage here from some of the soccer fans here over a silly little video is out of all proportion to the intent. The target market for the video isn't soccer fans, its mountain bikers. Its a joke, lighten up.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 10:12 AM on December 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Thanks xthlc... as a new mountain bike rider now I'm extra scared of fast downhills.
posted by letitrain at 10:15 AM on December 14, 2012

Its a joke, lighten up.

That trick never works.

But the video is typical of a minor sport like MTB; of course they're going to try to use football to get themselves a bit more attention, rather than being banished to the eeeeextreme sports channel sandwiched inbetween the independent wrestling programmes anybody ever watches them for.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:32 AM on December 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

Hairy Lobster, you're burying the lede a little bit there with the Lienen image. The best part of that story goes something like "oh hey I just had a traumatic bone-exposing leg injury... I'm going to get up and run around furiously like I'm on PCP!".
posted by jammer at 11:08 AM on December 14, 2012

Yeah, for some reason I failed to find the actual video. Thanks for digging it up. That was crazy. I remember seeing the event as a kid. Not sure if it was live or in the news.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 11:48 AM on December 14, 2012

Lolnaldo.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:23 PM on December 14, 2012

Also, isn't the point of mountain biking to stay on the bike?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:25 PM on December 14, 2012

jammer: "oh hey I just had a traumatic bone-exposing leg injury... I'm going to get up and run around furiously like I'm on PCP!".

Adrenalin is a helluva drug.
posted by brokkr at 12:36 PM on December 14, 2012

Also, isn't the point of mountain biking to stay on the bike?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:25 PM on December 14 [+] [!]

No, it's to get sponsored by RedBull and retire at 23.
posted by klanawa at 12:57 PM on December 14, 2012

Also, isn't the point of mountain biking to stay on the bike?

'round these parts, it's more important to stay on the log.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 1:30 PM on December 14, 2012

Should this have a trigger warning?

Seriously, I need to know if I'm going to be sent to a link including Ronaldo acting like a prat. Also, those are some not nice crashes.
posted by C.A.S. at 1:45 PM on December 14, 2012

Messi never dives is one of my favourite soccer clips - I think I watch it like some people look at pictures of kittens.
posted by jacalata at 3:49 PM on December 14, 2012

A surprising number of MTBers do walk away from those astounding crashes. Partly because of body armour and partly because of knowing how to wreck.

I once rode for an afternoon with Wade Simmons. I asked him how much it hurt to wreck like that and he said 'ah, you know, dirt is soft'. Later on when he was chasing me down the mountain and I was (of course) riding far beyond my ability, my bar clipped a tree and I had one of those huge crashes. I lay there for a moment thinking I was probably dead, and then slowly realized my armour and full-face had saved me. Wade congratulated me on an epic crash and we rode on.

The worst injuries in MTB tend to come from slow-speed crashes when you aren't expecting it. On the other hand, I fucked up my wrist really badly last year by going over a jump too slowly and casing it.

But anyway, anyone who MTBs with any regularity knows that sucking it up is part of the program.
posted by unSane at 7:22 PM on December 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Reminds of something I saw two years ago that contrasted the delay-of-game-I'm-hurt antics in football with road cyclists in the Tour de France. One guy crashed into a barb wire fence, got back on his bike and caught back up to the group while all manner of football players are writhing on the ground from faux contact. I'm not saying there are no hard men in football but the ethos is different from cycling.
posted by dgran at 2:01 PM on December 21, 2012