The old saying is that soccer is a gentleman’s game played by thugs, while rugby is a thug’s game played by gentlemen. But as the World Cup is demonstrating with painful regularity, the planet’s best soccer players may not be thugs, but they are certainly no gentlemen.

To a North American, the lack of honour among players is astonishing. Compare, say, Ryan Smith of the Edmonton Oilers with any of the pampered prisses prancing about in Germany. Ryan Smith took ten years off his life (and lost half his teeth) this spring trying to win the Stanley Cup. Across the ocean, manly soccer players go down like they’ve been shot whenever they so much as get heavily breathed on. They roll around in agony, get stretchered off, and three minutes later are back at it. More often than you can possibly imagine the referee buys the act, awarding free kicks, red and yellow cards, and even penalty shots. Australia may not have deserved to win yesterday against Italy, but they certainly did not deserve to lose in the last second when the ref awarded Italy a free goal.

There is probably no hope of changing the diving culture of the game by appealing to sportsmanship, gentlemanliness, or simple manliness. It has been in place for decades — the Germans were the early masters – and the price for diving too low, the potential reward too high. And in a sense, there might even be a sort of reverse machismo at work: While North American athletes pride themselves on showing no pain, denying any injury, perhaps soccer players exaggerate their pain so as to make their imminent return to action seem that much more noble.

But if the culture can’t change, the refereeing can. It is completely mystifying how often referees buy the agony-act and award a penalty or a card. For anyone who has ever played the sport, spotting a dive is dead simple. It works like this:

When a normal human is tripped or stumbles, the automatic reaction is to thrust out a leg in the direction of the stumble, plant the foot, and allow the leg to absorb the force of the tilt and retain the body in an upright bipedal position. It’s a skill virtually every human learns by the age of four, and any professional athlete has mastered it. You simply cannot make it to the dinner table — let alone as a pro — without being able to stand up.

Countering the “staying upright” instinct is hard, and soccer players have to practice  to make themselves fall down. My friend JP, with whom I played four years of varsity soccer at McGill, had mastered it. The trick, as he showed me, was to train yourself to let your legs go limp as soon as you are tackled. It’s similar to the idea of letting your body go limp when you are about to crash your car.

As you watch the rest of the World Cup, watch for this trick. For the best practitioners, the effect is devastating to the untrained eye. By letting their legs drag over the tackle and going down limply without attempting to stay upright, it appears that a player has been tackled so viciously, so unexpectedly, that the natural human stabilizing instinct was caught unawares, and they pitch forward literally onto their face.

Here is an example:

Note the classic dive position: Legs bent back at the knee, indicating a tackle so vicious the player has suffered a complete breakdown of bipedalism, arms held back to avoid breaking the fall.  Whenever you see this, it is 100% fake. The thing is, once you know what to look for, it is impossible to be fooled. Unless, it would seem, you happen to be a world-class referee.