Re: Edin Dzeko (continued)
Bizarre incident when he went down 'injured'. It looked like a routine scenario where a player goes down a little hard near the end of a game and stays down to get a breather and waste a minute or two. The trainers always come right one, the player's fine and there's no drama. Instead, once the ref refused to let the trainers on, Dzeko could either get up right away and basically admit he was making a meal of it, or stay down and insist on getting the trainers on. So he went for the face-saving option, but when Probert dug his heels in, it just escalated the situation. At that point he had to stay down. It was a bit like telling a small lie and then getting called on it and backed into a corner where you have to tell bigger and bigger lies.
I think we'd see a lot of similar incidents if more refs called the players' bluff like that, but we'd also see a lot of genuinely injured players denied assistance. This would continue until someone was seriously injured and was left on the ground for 5 minutes with something broken, at which point there'd be a big outcry and refs wouldn't dare to withhold assistance after that.
Basically, Dzeko did what most players would do (not that I like the tactic, but he wasn't trying to get a penalty or even a free-kick), and Probert turned the situation into a farce, and one that ended up costing Everton at least a minute of a very close game.
