Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger has had enough of fakers in football and he wants to see video evidence used so that divers can get hit with retrospective bans.
Has the mood finally turned sufficiently on diving that the powers that be might actually start to do something? Maybe it has, but it took some fairly shocking incidents to finally do it.
First we had Liverpool's Andy Carroll tumbling to the ground when clear through on goal against Newcastle a few weeks ago and then last week Manchester United’s Ashley Young hit the deck dramatically after the slightest bit of contact with QPR’s Shaun Derry.
Then, facing his old team Aston Villa yesterday, Young was at it again, flinging himself acrobatically to the ground after the slightest contact from our own Ciaran Clark. It prompted Young’s own boss, Alex Ferguson, to say: “In the last week or two, yes. I’ve never seen that in him. It’s not a habitual thing in him. He was brought down, he just made the most of it.
“It was a dramatic fall. He overdid the fall but it’s a penalty, there’s no doubt about that and I don’t think they can have any complaint because he has taken him.”
Not exactly a condemnation and Fergie is hardly going to slag off his own player in public but we reckon he has probably had a word in private to prevent the English winger’s reputation becoming even more tarnished than it already is.
And before Young’s latest tumble, Arsene Wenger was already advocating new measures were brought in to stop the wave of ‘simulation’ in football.
“I must say the English players learn quickly,” Wenger said yesterday when asked in foreign players brought cheating to England. “If an obvious dive is punished by a three-match ban, the players would not do it anymore. I would support it.”
It seems they can use video evidence to apply bans, or miss them like in the case of Mario Balotelli on Alex Song, but if the threat of retrospective action is there it may just make players think twice.
Of course, like goal-line technology, we won’t hold our breath.
