I didn't see the pundits' discussion at half-time in the Germany v Portugal game the other day, but on the advice of a friend, I caught up with it last night.
Basically it consisted of ITV's Adrian Chiles complaining about Thomas Muller's (Germany) play-acting which eventually led to the sending-off of Portugal's Pepe. It was, he said, cheating to get a member of the opposition sent-off.
Yet Patrick Vieira seemed to defend Muller's actions, saying that it was all part of the professional game (attempting to belittle Chiles's complaints).
Fellow pundit Lee Dixon seemed to agree with Chiles, saying that such actions do happen, but questioning if and why they had to.
Neither Chiles nor Dixon made any attempt to defend Pepe's eventual head movement towards Muller that did result in his sending off (and, incidentally, had the effect of making Muller leap to his feet!).
Chiles added that such play-acting was putting off a potential US audience from whom he had heard many queries about the amount of play-acting in "soccer".
I watched this clip at half-time in the Brazil v Mexico, the first half of which had been blighted by ridiculous rolling around.
No, Patrick Vieira, you are wrong. We do not want this play-acting in our game. We do not want cheating of any sort. Let's all get on and play the game fairly, eh?
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