D IV E DIVE DIVE Auba top of Prem charts, but sunk boss Dyche rages at Gunners stars over theatrics
it would evaporate out of the game. Millions of children, millions of children are watching this. You wouldn’t ruffle your kids’ hair if they come 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 and we have got all kinds of gadgets to view these things. 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.”
Dyche said that it would be down to the Premier League, FA and the referees’ body – the Professional Game Match Officials Limited – to get together and fix the issue. “There’s no point speaking to the referees,” he said. “They haven’t got any power. It’s a bigger picture than that. “It’s really important to point out I’m not talking about gamesmanship. That’s been there ever since I was playing and that was a long time ago. “I’m talking about blatant diving. Cheating. Where there has been no contact and people are falling over. The powers that be – the Premier League, the FA, the PGMOL – have got to get their heads together because it’s gone too far.
“When you think about our lifetimes, the first two that were absolutely alarming in the view of the public – and they were fantastic players, so let’s clear that up for a start – were Jurgen Klinsmann and Didier Drogba.
“When they came over and started diving it was, ‘We can’t have this’. It was on Match of the Day every week. It was everywhere. It slowly morphed into our culture here. Now, it’s every week, but it hardly gets mentioned.
“People go, ‘Oh, we don’t want to see that, do we?’ Then they move on to the next match and the next clip.
“I’m the only manager who talks about this. So let’s take it out of the managers’ hands.”
I want to see people banned... if they were, diving would evaporate