FOUL PLAY `FLOPPING' IS CONSIDERED AN ART FORM IN SOCCER.

Byline: BILLY WITZ Staff Writer

BERLIN - As he knelt on the grass near the goalmouth, Italy's Fabio Grosso was mobbed by his teammates, patted on the head and helped to his feet. Grosso earned his congratulations not by making a goal-saving tackle, rifling a shot into the net, or with a delicately placed pass.

His brilliance? Falling down.

As the final seconds of injury time were running out, Grosso slid the ball passed one Australian defender, then lifted it over the legs of another, a sliding Lucas Neill. But as Grosso jumped over Neill with his right leg, he dragged his left, it brushed Neill and Grosso collapsed to the turf.

Referee Luis Medina's whistle blew, Francesco Totti converted the penalty and a moment later Italy had a 1-0 victory over Australia and a trip to the quarterfinals.

``I just can't believe it, mate,'' Australian forward Tim Cahill told reporters afterward in Kiserslautern. ``We played all our lives to be honest on the pitch and to work hard, and I suppose these days you fall over on the pitch and get a penalty, free kick, whatever.''

Which is another way of saying that soccer has changed a lot since Australia was last in the World Cup in 1974.

The shorts are not so short, the hair is not so long and the actors in this play are, well, actors. A clip of the heel, a brush of the leg and ... ``Geez Doc, do you think he's gonna make it?''

They are not so much divers as divas.

``Soccer is a very theatrical game, on and off the field,'' said Alexi Lalas, the former U.S. defender and president of the Galaxy. ``You have to recognize (diving) is part of the sport.

``Have I embellished? Yeah. I have a kind of perverted sense of respect for the players that can pull it off, they created the monster. I'm choosing to embrace it.''

He is not the only one. World Cup advertisers not only acknowledge diving's role in soccer, they are using it to sell products.

One TV commercial shows a team running through a series of flopping drills, the hot-dogging coming with instructions from the coach for extra relish. Another, featuring two kids choosing the world's best players for a pick-up game on a dusty field, shows Holland's notorious flopper Arjen Robben going down and then appealing unsucessfully for a foul.

``It's a cultural thing,'' Lalas said. ``It's an art.''

The roots of embellishment are Latin, but as in the game has become more global, it's not quite common to see diving even in places like England, where soccer is officiated in line with the sport's iconic images of men's men, English captain Terry Butcher's blood-soaked bandage around his head and the raffish Vinny Jones squeezing Paul Gascoigne's testicles as if they were kumquats. (No doubt these will be joined by David Beckham losing his lunch on the field.)

This World Cup, though, may as well have been played in a flop house, with players writhing on the grass to either draw a foul, a card, or simply to gain a stoppage in play and waste time.

Granted, officials have a tough call to make, since they are legitimate and sometimes serious injuries.

But when games are officated like Portugal's 1-0 win over the Netherlands on Sunday, with 16 yellow cards and four reds, it can't help but encourage the play acting. Nobody is better at this than Italy. This is, of course, where opera divas are divine and it is the culture of Machiavelli, who wrote the book on winning by any means necessary.

Against the U.S., after been down to 10 men, Italy was able to sell the referee into sending two Americans off.

As for irony, the player who converted the penalty against Australia -- Totti -- was sent off in a 2002 second-round loss to South Korea ... for taking a dive.

Author Dave Eggers, in an essay ``the Thinking Man's Guide to the World Cup,'' pokes fun at the preponderance of flopping in soccer and calls it the biggest obstacle in the sport's existence in the U.S.

``Americans may generaly be arrogant,'' Eggers writes. ``But there is one stance, I stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers ... Flopping is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging and cheating, and these four behaviors make for an unappealing mix. The sheer theatricality of flopping is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds.''

Eggers then writes that it is possible to wash the car, do your shopping and banking, and when you return the flopper will still be moaning in agony, his mouth agape like Munch's ``The Scream,'' until the referee's whistle blows -- or doesn't -- and he is up and down the field.

``American sports, are for better or worse, built on tranparency, or the appearance of tranparency, and on a grind-it-out work ethic,'' he continues. ``This is why the most popular soccer player in American history is Sylvester Stallone.''

This is for his role as a soccer-playing allied prisoner in a Nazi war camp in the movie ``Victory.'' An actor, of course.

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(1 -- 5 -- color) Italy's Fabio Grosso gets tripped up by Australia's Lucas Neill during extra time, leading to a penalty kick for Italy, which converted for the winner.

Photos by Johannes Simon and Valery Hache/Getty Images

(6) Four red cards were awarded by referee Nikolay Golubev in Sunday's match between the Netherlands and Portugal.

Odd Anderson/Getty Images