The tactical foul is an artform in football, and no game understood that like This Is Football. For the best defenders, a yellow card is a resource – you get one per game, and it should be spent deliberately, as required. Last night, Giorgio Chiellini used his masterfully.
In stoppage time, with the Italians having committed men forward, Saka burst past Chiellini into space. There was half a pitch between him and the goal, but not much else. A Chiellini from ten years ago, in full freshness, would likely still have lost the foot race. At 36, with 90 minutes and a whole tournament on his legs, and a 19-year-old Saka only recently off the bench? There was no question of what would happen next. So, Chiellini traded his one yellow card in exchange for snuffing out the counter attack.
Related: Didier Deschamps Plays Like The Most Annoying FIFA Player Ever
I screamed at the television when it happened. It was an audacious foul. There was no attempt to harm the player – Chiellini pulled him back by his collar rather than scything him down at his kneecaps – but there was no mistaking his intentions. Chiellini cheated. He fouled him on purpose. Yet, had it been the other way around, had Insigne or Chiesa or Belotti been bursting into open space, I would have been screaming at my television again – this time demanding Stones spend his yellow card and commit the foul.
Chiellini cheated, but not really. Sterling went down easily for the penalty against Denmark, but that's not really cheating either. Football has an agreed set of rules – universal but enforced slightly differently across each league – and then an unspoken list of exceptions. Chiellini’s foul was against the rules, but it’s on the unspoken list of exceptions. Any player in Chiellini’s place would do the same. It would be bad defending to remain within the rules.
This Is Football used to have a deliberate foul button. You can foul in FIFA and PES; if someone is breaking away you can launch into a slide tackle in the hopes you trip them up or slow them down, but it isn’t the same. FIFA and PES enforce the spoken rules of football, and have no room for the unspoken ones. This Is Football, with its deliberate foul, understood the game.
It also had a deliberate dive button, allowing you to go down in the box to try and con the referee. This, however, is not as pure as the deliberate foul. To go down easily, as Sterling did against Denmark, is on this list of these unspoken rules. To go down when you have not been touched at all is not. Yet while This Is Football perhaps went too far, allowing you to throw yourself up in the air, wounded, FIFA and PES have no function like this whatsoever. You can force a deliberate foul in FIFA by using the legitimate tackle button in an attempt to foul, but no workaround exists for the dive.
Cheating – or gamesmanship, if you prefer – is a natural part of football. I have my issues with FIFA's realism, even as it gets each graphical upgrade, and this is yet another thing to add to the list. Chiellini was always going to yank Saka back on the halfway line – so we need the option to do it in FIFA.
Next: EA’s Ultimate Team Earnings Paint A Bleak Picture
