The Bundesliga is the world’s best – at diving

"For me the swallow is like the rape of sport.” Honestly, according to the German tabloid Bild am Sonntag (ok, maybe I’m stretching the meaning of the word “honestly” too far) Bayern Munich’s general manager Uli Hoeneß said this. Confused? Let me explain. The German "Schwalbe" is translated into English as "swallow" and is used to describe when players dive – in other words cheat – to get a free kick, penalty or whatever. You know what I mean.

Think Christiano Ronaldo before he cleaned up his act ... a bit – then times it by ten. That’s how widespread diving is in German football. The most astonishing thing now, however (with the obvious exception of Hoeneß using the unsavoury analogy of rape, which is crass to say the least), is that after nearly five years of watching German football – from close up and from afar – and despairing about this cheating, a nascent debate about diving seems to be manifesting itself – almost from nowhere.

To my own frustration, I have on many occasions asked German football fans their opinions about the incessant desire of German footballers to every few minutes jump in the air as if molested by 500 crazed wasps, descend to the ground clutching all manner of body parts before – and this is surely the embarrassing bit – doing at least two agonised rolls while at the same time biting clumps of grass from a perfectly manicured football pitch – all in front of tens of thousands of people. The most popular reply to such an outlandish question is a simple shrug that Thierry Henry would be hard pressed to better. In short, it’s never been an issue. Never bothered them.

General manager at Werder Bremen, Klaus Allofs, gave his unswerving support to the Bayern general manager. Allofs was unlikely to publicly disagree with Hoeneß, but he revealed hitherto unknown enmity to diving every bit as passionate as his opposite number in Bavaria. Perhaps not in the Hoeneß class of analogies, but he did his best by comparing players who dive to “sly dogs” (that’s my translation, anyway). He then went on to tell his captivated audience that this behaviour is “obviously unacceptable”. Obviously!

It would be interesting to discover where Allofs was looking on the many occasions when Bremen striker Miroslav Klose was doing his best to resemble a pack of collapsing cards at the merest whiff of a sweaty defender. A case of myopia or amnesia. Probably both. And what of Werder’s Tim Borowski. A fine player, but surely he has Olympic diving medals – in at least two events: the short, quick swallow; and the long, painful and admittedly much trickier swallow, which for good measure is more often than not followed by not two but usually three grass-eating rolls.

I could fill the next five blogs with examples of dextrous, extravagant but soon-forgotten Bundesliga dives. It is the single most annoying aspect of an otherwise excellent football league.

The truth is that most players in the Bundesliga will dive, given the chance. The question now that the swallow has been let out of the bag is what are the Hoeneßes and Aloffs going to do about it? My guess is nothing.