Sadly diving s so prevalent in English football that it is ruining the game as a spectacle, unless the FA want the game to decline, they need to come up with a solution now and I have one.
Watch footage of the Premier League in 1994 and it looks very strange, its football Jim, but not as we know it, at first it's hard to make out what is different, but then it hits you, the players do not fall over everytime an opponent goes near them, they ride tackles, they do not roll over as if shot and the game flowed as a result.
I use 1994 as the example year because that is the season (94/95) that diving officially arrived in the Premier League when Tottenham Hotspur (It just had to be them) signed Jurgen Klinsmann who was considered its Prima Ballerina s such.
Of course it happened before the German forward arrived it was just a lot rarer and a diver was even lambasted by his own team mates and supporters if he did it, it was dealt with quickly and easily, the offender was handed a loaded revolver and was expected to go behind the stand and do the decent thing having shamed his Regiment I mean club.
Klinsmann though was a different matter, you couldn't say you had seen him play till you had seen him throw himself to the ground theatrically, in fact his goal celebration was a version of one of his most theatrical dives.
Back then it was seen as isolated, it was not the English thing, but like Lager, Kebabs and Curry we took it to our hearts and made it our own.
Of course we still consider that Johnny Foreigner is the chief exponent of the art and it cannot be argued that overseas players do seem to have the theatrical content down to a fine art, but the sad fact is that the British players are now just as bad,
Its not just diving though, the average penalty box at a corner or set piece resembles a cross between World Federation Wresting and American Football with the players grappling with each other to try an let the wide receiver make contact unchallended for the ball.
If we do not do something about this, it will completely ruin the game, so what is the solution ?
I have to say I'm not a fan of having instant replays as they do in Cricket or Rugby, the whole idea is to get the game flowing, not stop it even further by countless delays, if we do that then asking for a replay will become just another tactic, every decision will be queried and even if you limit the number of challenges etc it will still add on too much time to the game, supporters like the fact about football that it is a timed spectacle, they know what time to turn up and what time they will leave, they like the speed and continuous action of the game, they do not want constant stoppages.
So my solution is simple, make the act of simulation a retrospective offence, after each game analyse the controversial incidents and then punish those who have been proved to offend.
The punishment should be simple, for the first offence its a one game ban, for the second a two game ban, third a three game ans so forth, ten years ago I attended a presentation given by a then Premier League referee and he said then that he believed if this system as adopted then diving would be stamped out within weeks not months, the referees were asking for this to happen and the FA were refusing.
I believe now is the time to take this action before the game at Premier League level becomes a farce, stamp out diving and you stamp out cheating and you make life easier for referees, two decades ago a referee only had to decide whether he thought that the tackle was a deliberate foul to make a decision, now in a split second he also has to decide whether the player looking for the foul has cheated and in too many cases he has or at the very least attempted to enhance how the tackle appears.
Football supporters are sick of the divers, we are sick of the cheats and we are sick of the managers who condone the behavior whether it be passively by inexplicably missing that very moment in a game where one of the managers own players has cheated the referee or as in the latest case at Stamford Bridge where the manager of Chelsea has accused a referee of not giving one of his divers decisions where other teams cheaters would get them.
Its a farce !