If a player goes down when he's been touched, but not actually tripped, then this is still simulation. Football isn't non-contact; contact doesn't necessarily mean there's a foul. It has to be at least careless, and it has to have some effect on the player or the game (well, then there's the ones that do neither but need to be pulled up anyway, such as a reckless slide tackle that completely misses the player)
It gets a little trickier when you look at, say, the infamous dive in the Italy match, where the player chose to run into our defender and go down.
I don't think you can place in black and white terms how much of a responsibility the players have to try and stay on their feet; an astute referee will be able to utilise his experience to see the force of the challenge, the relative angles of the players and their limbs, the inertia of the person being tackled, the typical manner in which players go down from differing challenges, and other tell-tale signs to try and tell if the the player was foulled, is milking it, or tripped over a divot in the ground.
brett said:
By the laws of the game you could say that the furthermost atom of the toe of your boot scraping a microfibre in an opponents sock is physically impeding them
To be pedantic (forgive me; I find that most on-field complaints stem from a misunderstanding of the laws), 'impeding' is a specific foul when a player, without making contact, uses his body to deliberate block the path of another player while not within playing distance of the ball (used to be called obstruction, but obstruction covered instances of this when the body or arms are used; impeding is mainly non-contact). However, there is a foul which is described as 'tackles an opponent to gain possession of the ball, making contact
with the opponent before touching the ball'
This doesn't have to happen carelessly; it merely has to happen. So yeah, that would support that quote of yours
BUT
Referees are also instructed to ignore trifling and inconsequential offences (such as a slight touch on the player that doesn't affect him), as well as having an awareness of the 'spirit of the game' - that clause has the potential to almost make football a non-contact sport, but no referee applies it to the extreme letter because they know what the actual purpose of that law is - and it's not to make football non-contact.
Besides, for the most part the laws are written too poorly to be able to apply them to the strictest possible interpretation of the written words
That's why you can still be considered to have taken a dive even when there's contact - because if the contact wasn't severe enough for a foul, then the contact was trifling.
Of course, when a player goes down easy when there is clear contact, as opposed to extremely slight contact (in the griffiths-Danny incident), but still probably not enough to cause a foul the referee will usually give that player enough benefit of the doubt to not book him, but not enough benefit of the doubt to give him the free kick (which is why sometimes players go down in the box, from clear contact, but the referee doesn't give it - it's a gut feel sorta thing).
I hope you consider all that relevant to your discussion and not a somewhat off-topic diversion on refereeing simulating players?
