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There are people out there who would describe diving as a skill, a sly-dog manoeuvre which is an art form in itself. They argue that there are other sports where playing the game close to the edge of the laws is considered integral to the game - rugby for instance, where a clever operator can get away with so much that he shouldn’t.
That may be true, but football is a very different game. Although football is a team sport, challenges for the ball are one-on-one: two opposing players challenge for it, and the winner takes all.
That battle becomes something of a lottery if one player is unprepared for a fair battle. It devalues the game. Players can do everything right - but still end up being penalised for textbook defending. That is not right.
It reared its ugly head again at Burnley on Saturday. Ricardo Fuller went down under ‘minimal contact’. In other words, he went down because his own skill wasn’t going to get him a goal, so he had to revert to plan B.
Then, of course, Craig Brown failed to spot it. Convenient, that. He saw Glen Little (of all people) and Graham Branch incite his players and wind them up, but he failed to spot the misdemeanours of his own team. In other words, he was prepared to turn a blind eye to the misdemeanours of his own team because it suited him, but he was prepared to castigate everyone else.
This is a big part of the problem. Until managers are prepared to rise above the fray and criticise their players for diving, then normal methods will not work. If more drastic measures are not going to be needed to stamp it out, then managers must be big enough to come out and admit the failings of their won teams.
I don’t want to make Burnley out to be perfect. Ian Moore goes down far too easily on occasions (one dive last year against Fulham was particularly embarrassing), and Dimi Papadopoulos was notorious for it. This is not a rant against Preston, or any other club in particular - it’s just that most fans are sick and tired of it.
So what measures could we adopt? One of the biggest difficulties is, it’s very difficult for a referee, in the heat of the moment, to distinguish a dive from a legitimate challenge. It takes a brave ref to book a player for diving where it is not absolutely obvious. So often, we end up with decisions in the unsatisfactory middle - neither giving the penalty, or giving a booking for diving.
The point is, it may be better dealt with retrospectively, using television replays. A panel of experts could quite easily sit down and view key decisions and review them for diving. Where the referee suspects there is the possibility of a dive, he could request that the panel look at it.
As for the consequences if something is proved to be a dive, there are a couple of possibilities. The first is to give an automatic three or four match ban. If players knew they would be named, shamed, and banned if they dived, then there would be a far more powerful deterrent than that which currently exists.
Then there is the possibility of fines - heavy fines, more than the current two weeks wages maximum fine. Hit them in the pocket. The trouble is, top players already have plenty of cash; whether this would in itself stamp out the problem is debatable. Perhaps they could be both fined and banned, and hit them both ways.
If those don’t work, then lets be more radical. Strip the team of the goal resulting from the offence. That goal could change the course of the season for both the sinner and the sinned against. By chalking it off, even retrospectively, you would remove the incentive to dive.
At first, it sounds unworkable. It would touch at the very heart of the game. But then at the moment, so does this cheating. In other sports, a cheat will very often be disqualified. Why, in a team game like football, should the team not suffer a similar fate?
I don’t advocate this except as a last resort. But serious action is needed. It makes a mockery of the game at all levels, and is getting out of hand. It is time for the authorities to act - if the players will not do so themselves.