This seems like a very strange position. Diving is straight up a deceptive practice to gain an advantage... it's especially horrible because players get tossed out sometimes for no reason other than his opponent diving. It's probably the single most disgusting 'cheat' I've seen in any sport.
I think calling it cheating is harsh. It's not like there was any great effort to conceal what he did. Sometimes you just take a foul. You can say the guy should've been awarded a goal, but then again the ball didn't make it into the net. A better shot would've been out of reach anyway.
You mentioned that there's a goaltending rule in basketball... that is indeed a bit different. First of all, I think the rule doesn't specify that the ball was going in, as that's pretty difficult to determine... if it's fairly close and somebody snatches it on the way down, they're going to call it, so really it ends up awarding more points than otherwise would've been scored had the goaltend not occured. Actually, a soccer equivalent penalty there would probably work fine. If you didn't award the basket and instead called it a flagrant foul... gave the other team 2 free throws, and sent off a player forcing them to go 4 on 5, you'd basically never see someone goal tend again
, though I suppose it's fairly rare now already.The thing is, without the goaltending rule, no shot from any decent range would have a shot of going in, because it's trivial for an NBA player to jump up and swat a ball away at the rim.
The current rule is more than adequate. You get tossed out of the game... you miss the next game... the other team gets a PK, and unless you they it up really badly, it's gonna go in. Even if you do fuck it up and kick it into the goalie chances are it'll bounce back in your general vicinity and you'll get another crack at it, and for the rest of the game the other team is short a player. That's virtually never a good trade.
And do you really want the ref deciding what balls were going to go in? Yeah, sure, this one was fairly obvious, but that's not always the case. Just wait until they call a ball that would've gone 5 feet wide anyway a goal after it accidentally hits a guy's hand, you'd probably scream about soccer being unjust then as well!
