The Good Place

I’m trying not to hate. I’ve been watching The Good Place and like the main character I’ve decided to be a better person. And one of the things I have to work on about myself is how much I just hate things. That’s my default reaction: ridicule and hate.

If you haven’t seen The Good Place, you’re missing out on some great writing. The plot of the show is pretty simple: Eleanor Shellstrop dies and goes to The Good Place but in life she was a selfish, rude, mean person who really didn’t like anyone, didn’t treat anyone with respect, hurt people, and ate a lot of shrimp and chips. She doesn’t deserve to be in the Good Place and knows it. But in the afterlife, she meets up with a moral philosophy professor who promises to help her and she tries to change her ways.

The Good Place isn’t really about the afterlife. The show is about someone reflecting on their life, realizing how awful they were to people, and then trying to change that behaviour. It’s about taking an inventory of yourself, owning the misery you caused, and changing. And like Eleanor I’ve been quite a shit to people for most of my life.

But change isn’t easy and some people make it especially hard. Like Sean Dyche for example.

Have you seen the post-match interview he gave? It’s incredible. He rants about Arsenal diving, naming two players (Xhaka and Ozil) then says that he doesn’t want to name players and that he doesn’t have a problem with diving as long as it’s just gamesmanship. He also has a go at the League for making them cut their grass and make their pitch larger and says that those two rules, along with the fact that his team aren’t allowed to cheat, means that he’s basically bound for relegation.

I went back and had a look at the two (three, he throws in a third) incidents that he calls diving by Arsenal. They are Ozil being pushed out of play, Xhaka being shoulder barged in the back, and Lichtsteiner going down after Barnes pulls his arm. But while he calls those “clear dives” and claims that he’s the only manager in the world who hates diving, he also says that he wants his players to engage in gamesmanship.

“I will remind you all, we’re not talking about gamesmanship, that’s been there ever since I played and that’s a long time ago. You clip a center forward in the box and he goes down, end of story. We are not talking about that. We’re talking about blatant diving. People who have had no contact at all, people going over.”

When asked if his players dive he says “I’m sure you can find one, but not a key moment, and we’re not talking about gamesmanship. If someone pushes you in the back, you go down.”

I went back and looked at all three of the incidents he describes and if I’m trying to get into the Good Place I would just say, he’s wrong. Ozil went down when he was pushed (twice) out of play. Xhaka was shoulder barged from behind and went down. And Lichtsteiner does throw his legs out to force the referee to make a call but Barnes was pulling his arm. In each case there was contact. So, by his own standards, none of them were dives.

What was a dive, was when Hendrick fell over after Guendouzi tried to tackle the ball away. There was no contact! Guendouzi got a yellow card and to compound the call, Jack Cork ran over and stamped on Guendouzi’s ankle literally seconds later and the referee didn’t call it. It was a blatant, nasty, retributive challenge by Cork, meant to let Matteo know that Cork would protect his teammates. He folded Guendouzi’s ankle in half. In any other league, it would be a retroactive red card.

He also complained about Sokratis’ “elbow” to the head of Barnes when the two of them tumbled around on the ground. And then without a drop of shame, when he was asked about Barnes’ stamp on Guendouzi, he literally said “I haven’t seen it”. His excuse for not seeing it? He was too busy reviewing all of the Arsenal dives and didn’t want to be late for the interview because Burnley would be fined.

There’s an interesting dynamic at work here, one which he even admits to tangentially. I need to pull out his quote here first:

“This will sum it up, while I’m on a roll. A few years ago they started bringing in ‘the grass has to be cut to 30 mil’. Does everyone know that? The grass has to be cut at 30 mil. Every pitch now has to be UEFA standard size, which we all know. Now, obviously that plays into the hands of 1) the more technical teams and for 2) the teams who are every year, who are in some form of European standard event – which we have been this year – but every year. So, we’ve had to change our pitch and cut it shorter. Ok? Apparently lately we’re not allowed to tackle either. We’ve got nowhere near the finance of the other teams. We’ve got nowhere near the wage finance of the other teams. Allright? And we don’t dive. That ain’t a good start is it?

(pause, weird smile)

“So, if you look at that. We’re told them things. So, even advantages that used to be sort of real advantages have now been replaced. We can’t use any of that. And you know what they actually say? Because they want a level playing field. (laughs, nervous laughter from the journos) Ridiculous.”

The not at all subtle subtext here is that it’s “ridiculous” to Sean that his team isn’t allowed to cheat. That they can’t have a pitch in the conditions that we used to see routinely in the Premier League. That teams can’t deliberately make their pitch smaller in order to make it easier to close down on space against more technical teams. That he’s not allowed to send his players out to rough up the opposition with nasty tackles. And that he’s such a pure-heart that he refuses to allow his team to dive (though, he does like gamesmanship, a fact he stressed about 15 times).

I don’t see a moral difference between “gamesmanship” – going down easily to win a free kick so that you can get a set piece, which Dyche admits that his team does all the time “if one of my players is clever, and they get tapped and go down, that’s a whole other thing, I wouldn’t go against that, I never have done” – and no-contact diving. They are both lying. It’s just easier to punish the no-contact dives because there was no contact.

The surprise about this interview – other than him saying ‘won’t someone think of the children’ six times – was that he admitted he would like to be able to cheat. That he pines for the good old days when teams like Burnley were allowed to cheat routinely against more technical teams, like Arsenal. Normally, managers don’t admit that they want their teams to cheat. So, I applaud his honesty here.

And if I step back and look at what really got under his skin, what made him go off on this rant about dives and Arsenal cheating, was that he sent his team out to rough Arsenal up and Arsenal gave it back. It’s clear from the stamping, the elbows in the head, the tussling on the ground, the pulling, the pushing, and the leg-breaking tackles that he wanted to ruffle Arsenal. But what he found out is that Arsenal aren’t a soft touch.

Dyche is just like every bully I’ve ever met: they hate it when you fight back. They are the first people to cry foul when you stand up to them. They almost always run off to the principal, to the police, or to the referee and complain about the treatment they get. Authoritarians always want some authority figure to fix things for them. Because what hides under that tough exterior is a deep fear stemming from inadequacy.

Sean Dyche is incapable of training his football players to be more technically adept, to be better players – that is the one thing that is within his control. So he complains about the things that are out of his control: the grass, the pitch size, the referee, and the dives.

Maybe if he spent more time training his players and less time trying to work out elaborate punishments for tardiness or moaning about the height of the grass, his teams would be better prepared to play football at the highest level?

Qq

Source: youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY883tcCfbQ