Oscar Awards 2011 for Football cheats

The 84th edition of the annual Academy Awards just one week away, it is time to share the final projections or rather nominate probable candidates for best actors. I am a football fan though, so, my interest  and this entry would be skewed to football acts. If you follow the sport on a regular basis you'd roughly know who are these football Oscar front-runners.

It is not fun to watch football with some cheap cheats added in, especially if you are a strong supporter of a particular team and you feel the team's hard done by. Not fun at all. The act of diving should  not be permitted at all and be dealt with properly; take the following examples:

• more frequent yellow-carding; make it mandatory
• football clubs owners to act hard on such players - wage-cut, etc
• shame them by showing their dark art to the paying spectators during pre-matches

Without further ado, let's meet the 2011 candidates:

Hamit Altintop

Euro qualification match with Croatia, November 2011. The midfielder latched on to a promising pass in the box, but after seeing the ball go loose took to the ground in utter desperation. It was so bad that none of his team-mates appealed and not even the opposition could be bothered to complain about his blatant act of cheating.

Not only did he fail to fool referee Felix Brych, but the slow motion replays made Altintop look silly for attempting such a stunt.

Diving Altintop. Credit: dailymail.co.uk

Dani Alves

During Champions League semifinal, April 27, 2011. The Barcelona defender acrobatically spun to ground, clutching his right calf muscle, after he and Real Madrid's Pepe went for a loose ball with raised legs. Like the Zapruder film of U.S. President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the slow-mo was scrutinized across the football world for clues: Did Pepe actually touch Alves? No way!

Alves and Pepe in action: Click to see the frame-by-frame post-mortem

Gervasio Nunez

Europa League group stage, Oct. 20, 2011. Pushed on the shoulder by Fulham's Mousa Dembele, the Argentine midfielder for Polish side Wisla Krakow pretended he had been thumped in the face and collapsed. Referee Martin Hansson bought it, Dembele trudged off, Wisla turned its one-man advantage into a 1-0 win. "Of course, we will never complain after a red card,'' said Fulham manager Martin Jol before going on to complain. "It was a push on the shoulder, after being kicked,'' he said. "You shouldn't raise your hand. He (Dembele) pushed him on the shoulder and you shouldn't do that. The referee gave us a red card, but we felt hard done by.''

Peter Wisgerhof

Johan Cruyff Shield, July 30, 2011. In this match between the Dutch Cup winners and Dutch league champions, the captain of FC Twente looked like a mountain goat skipping over a rock or a frog on takeoff as he jumped into the air and rolled onto the ground after a tickle of a tackle from Ajax defender Daley Blind. To his credit, Wisgerhof later laughed at himself. "The worst dive of the match was definitely mine,'' Dutch websites quoted him as saying. "I felt something, but fell much later. Why didn't I get a yellow card? I quickly told the ref I'm a defender and don't even know how to fall."

All of them are great candidates but The Associated Press' John Leicester says that Oscar Award should go to Bryan Carrasco. I totally agree with him.

OSCAR Award Recipient: Bryan Carrasco

South American Under-20 Championship, Feb. 12, 2011. Such ingenuity by Bryan Carrasco! The Chilean midfielder plumbed new depths by grabbing an opponent's arm and whacking himself in the face with it, and then collapsing. You'll not tire of the video, with hilarity from commentators Nicolas Nardini and Jorge Nazar

AND for Carrasco's ingenuity, here is the movie that shows why he deserve it:

It is a short 1-minute clip, so it's worth the wait. You are going to love this one!

[Disclaimer: These picks are taken from an article by John Leicester, an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at jleicester(at)ap.org or follow him at twitter.com/johnleicester]