footballers, divers, and the archer's bow

An interesting study has just been published by the University of Portsmouth, which researched the ability to determine when footballers dive, or when they are legitimately fouled.

They asked a group of people to watch a set of videos of football games, and say which tackles they thought were dives, and which were legitimate falls from tackles. By analysing the results, there was agreement from the participants on the result: a significant amount agreed on which were dives, which were real, and which ones they couldn't be sure of.

The boffins then analysed the dives, and came up with 4 points of similarity on them, but it's down to biomechanics: the histrionics of the diver are actually a give-away, because their body acts in completely the opposite way to how you would expect it to behave in natural circumstances.

The tackled player will put their arms back, often they will put them back behind their head, the legs will go up behind their bodies, their chest is stuck out and often their head will go back.

What is interesting about that particular behaviour is that you don't witness that in actual natural falls. If you are losing your balance you put your hands on either side to try to regain your balance.

Biomechanically people don't stick their hands above them in the air when they are falling over. This just doesn't happen

The researches called this an Archer's bow, because: "people are bowed back like in a bow and arrow." They then set up a 2nd study, where some footballers were told to dive, and some were told not to dive, but to only fall under a fair tackle: they then showed them to the group, which got them right:

What we found was there was a perfect correspondence between the instructions to the diving or the non-diving player and the perceiver. So taking those two studies together we could show there was consistency and also there was accuracy.