FURIOUS DYCHE BLASTS GAME’S ‘DIVING CHEATS’
‘The powers that be have got to sort this out’
SEAN DYCHE accused two Arsenal players of ‘blatant diving’ in a furious rant as he called upon football’s authorities to clamp down on cheating. Burnley’s boss was seething after a 3-1 defeat at the Emirates over the antics of some of Unai Emery’s players.
Dyche was upset at the performance of referee Kevin Friend anyway but a string of incidents involving Granit Xhaka, Matteo Guendouzi and Mesut Ozil came under his microscope.
And he let rip, saying: “Where do you want to start with the decisions? Shall we start with the 61 games without a penalty?
“Today there was a clear doublehanded push in the back on Kevin Long. That’s a pretty good place to
start, I think. Ashley Barnes got booked when their player clearly threw an elbow out at him. I’ve seen that one back, by the way, there was an unnatural movement towards the face. Somehow Ashley came out of that and got booked.
“Then there were two dives, one of which he (Guendouzi) doesn’t get booked for. Nothing will happen retrospectively. And if one of their players had been booked for it, then he would have been off.
“No one seems to want to do anything about diving in the game apart from me. I’m still amazed by it.
“Even at the end, Vydra goes through with Xhaka and touches him marginally on his shoulder and Xhaka goes down and gets a free-kick. It’s centre-halves now going down after hardly anything. I think Ozil was involved in another one. Incredible.
“But no one seems to want to do anything about diving. We had three the other week. It just goes away.
“Kids everywhere are watching, all copying it. No one seems to care.
“I want to see people banned because if they were, it would evaporate out of the game.
“Millions of children are watching this. You wouldn’t ruffle your kids’ hair if they came home after school and cheated in a maths test. They cheat at a game of football and it’s
OK. It’s almost like ‘Well done. We got away with that one.’
“There’s hundreds of millions of pounds at stake in this game and we have got all kinds of gadgets to view these things and hopefully VAR will make a difference but I don’t think it will make a radical difference. I’m talking about the morality of the game.
“I’m absolutely amazed at where it’s at. And nobody is bothered.
“I’m amazed more people don’t look at it factually and go ‘Do we really want to see that? Can’t we just get on with playing?’ Then alarmingly we were questioned recently about some tackles.
“It’s quite refreshing really to be asked about tackles. No one wants to do anything about diving. There were two blatant ones today.
“Nothing will be done.”
Dyche said that it would be up to the Premier League, FA and the referees’ body – the Professional Game Match Officials Limited – to get together and fix the issue.
He added: “There’s no point speaking to the referees. They haven’t got any power. It’s a bigger picture than that.
“I’m not talking about gamesmanship. That’s been there ever since I was playing and that was a long time ago. You clip a centreforward in the box and he goes down. End of story.
“I’m talking about blatant diving, cheating. Where there has been no contact at all and people are falling over.
“The powers that be, the Premier League, the FA, the PGMOL – they’ve all got to get their heads together because it’s gone too far.
“The first two were Jurgen Klinsmann and Didier Drogba.
“When they came over and started diving it was ‘We can’t have this.’ But it slowly morphed into our culture here.”