Fifa have been meeting in Manchester this weekend and when North-West managers were asked - by journalists, not Sepp Blatter - what positive changes they would like to see introduced, David Moyes came up with quite a good one. The Everton manager believes diving to be a major scourge of the modern game and would like to see offenders punished retrospectively by disciplinary panels viewing video evidence. 'We already do that for violent behaviour if the cameras have caught someone throwing a punch that the referee has missed,' Moyes argues. 'Why not simply extend that principle to cheating? If the cameras can prove something that the referee couldn't see at the time, the guilty player should receive a ban in the same way.'
That sounds fair enough and the real beauty of such a scheme, as has been suggested here before, is that it would take only a couple of test cases to act as a powerful deterrent for everyone else. Once a player has been named and shamed as a diver he will probably find referees giving defenders the benefit of the doubt over his next few penalty claims and, loudly as managers might complain, the official could simply shrug and point to the previous. Managers would be forced to take a stern view on divers within their own team, convicted players would rightly be stigmatised and the whole depressing problem could be just a bad memory within a season or two.
Except nothing in football is quite as straightforward as that. Sometimes cameras have as much difficulty as the referee in establishing whether contact was made - even after slow-motion replays from several angles - and it would be a terrible thing to brand a player a cheat if he was the innocent party all along.
There is no firm agreement on what constitutes a dive. We can all think of players who go to ground easily and perhaps a few more who don't necessarily cheat but rush at defenders trying to force them into mistakes, but the standard scenario of flying attacker launching himself into space after minimal or imaginary contact from a would-be tackler simply does not fit all situations.
This point was forcibly brought home last week when Steven Gerrard won a penalty from Sheffield United's Rob Kozluk. For anyone unfamiliar with the incident, the pair were jostling in the area in anticipation of a corner when the referee spoke to Kozluk and warned him not to link Gerrard's arm. Rather stupidly, Kozluk proceeded to do exactly that when the corner came over. Gerrard felt the pressure and fell down to win the softest of penalties. Neil Warnock had a word with the Liverpool captain at half time, expressing his disappointment that he tumbled so easily, although he did accept his own player had disobeyed explicit instructions.
Most present felt Gerrard had been guilty of gamesmanship, nothing more. Given that he had heard the referee's warning to Kozluk, what was he supposed to do when it was wilfully ignored? Plenty of readers have since been in touch, however, to suggest this was far too generous an interpretation and that Gerrard stood revealed as a diver and a cheat. Had Cristiano Ronaldo or Didier Drogba pulled such a stunt they would have been roundly and loudly condemned, it was pointed out. Some felt Gerrard was being favourably treated because he plays for England and the media reserves its contempt for cheating foreigners, while Everton fans were in touch to make the point that Andy Johnson has gained an unwanted reputation as a player who goes down too easily without doing anything half as blatant as Gerrard.
There is no categorical right and wrong to this issue, which is why even retrospective tribunals would find some incidents difficult. Gerrard made the most of a situation. Does that make him a cheat? Kozluk did not do enough to bring Gerrard down, but he did what the referee told him not to. So if he technically committed a foul, is Gerrard in the clear? Some think he is and some think he isn't. Even if a video tribunal were to take a dim view of Gerrard's actions, how would Sheffield get the penalty chalked off and the game replayed? Or would Liverpool get to keep the penalty and lose their captain?
Cameras can make a contribution in the war against diving, though until we can all agree on a definition of a dive they will continue to peer into one of football's biggest grey areas. Personally, as a starting point for discussion, I don't think Gerrard deserves being labelled a cheat because the defender was not blameless. If a diver is someone who falls over too easily in search of a free-kick or penalty, then that description might be hard but fair. But the best description of what Gerrard did does not involve emotive words like dive or cheat. He simply played the referee. There's a lot of it about.
