Why Do Footballers Grab The Ball When They Fall?

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This is one of the tricks or let me say cheat especially defenders, wingers or midfielders normally use in football. Yeah I remember I used to do this when I was still playing football as a teenager, when I'm being rough tackled the next thing I would do is grab the ball just to put the game to a halt. It was a street football and there was no referee but the decision ultimately lies in the hands of those watching the game. Their side talks, noises or murmuring would be the decision

Anyway let's put that aside 😉

This trick works wonder after a player is seemingly being fouled and they want to call the attention of the ref to it in case he doesn't consider it a foul. This works most of the time and even if doesn't work at least the player was able to kill the counter attack advantage of their opponent

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In a situation whereby it wasn't even a foul in the first place, a player would fall and grab the ball to kill a potential attack of the opponent so that his own players can get back to their position as ASAP

There are two things involved when doing this, it's either the referee blows his whistle for a foul which happens at least 70% of the time or the referee blows for a handball and in some cases the player receives yellow card for a handball

But then, this is a trick that works at least 70% of the time



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Oops, football players and math... ;-)
When you grab the ball you never know what would have happened if you had not. It is probably something like 50-50 the foul is called anyway. So let's correct the bold part, this is a trick that works about 40% of the time (20=success, 30=fail, 50=N/A -> 0.2/(0.2+0.3)=0.4
Now if you get booked once in three failed attempts, it is not 10% failure shooting for 70% success as it looks at first sight. It is 10% failure shooting for extra 20% of balls. Half a card per ball won. Doesn't sound it is worth the price.
Anyway, while I do not agree with the numbers but I absolutely love the article. Much better content than 95% of posts here.

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