Bring back 'proper diving'

Eduardo da Silva has been banned for a couple of games by Uefa for his apparent dive in Arsenal’s win over Celtic in the Champions League play-off round. And true to form Arsene Wenger branded the Uefa action as a complete disgrace.

Now I would have some sympathy for Wenger’s opinion that, ‘Eduardo was (has been) touched by the goalkeeper and we can prove that….’ if he didn’t suffer from myopia. Yes, I’m sure that supporters from right across the globe would step forward to give evidence that the Arsenal manager suffers from an inability to see distant objects clearly. And not only is he myopic but he probably knows that the word entered our language via new Latin from the Greek word ‘muops’……

But if that accounts for Arsene’s failure to say, ‘the boy dived. It was never a penalty. I have taken him to one side and had a word. He won’t do it again’, then how can one be satisfied that the Uefa President is not simply leading a ‘witch hunt’? Is the mind of Michel Platini as pure as the waters bursting from beneath the green and ancient volcanoes of the Auvergne in France?

Platini was undoubtedly a great player but even he has admitted that, ‘I know why players do it – because I’ve dived myself. I did it because I knew the referee wouldn’t see me trying it on and also because there were no cameras either. If we thought we could get away with it, we would’.


Justification for his comment is often illuminated by recalling the game between France and West Germany in the semi-final of the 1982 World Cup. The ‘artistic’ French team led by Platini lost after one of soccer history’s most shocking fouls went unpunished.

In the second half, France’s Patrick Battison was played clean through, with only West German goalkeeper Harald Schumacher to beat... Schumacher launched himself at Battison and his hips smashed into the Frenchman’s face, leaving him unconscious and with a broken jaw.


As Battison was stretchered off, to spend many months in recovery, the referee calmly awarded a goal kick.

Platini, the man who hates injustice, was determined to get his own back. ‘But I just couldn’t get into the box. If I could have dived to get a penalty and win the game I would have done it, to make up for what happened between Battison and Schumacher’.

Stevie Melledew was a great little player. Aldershot signed him from Everton in 1971 for a fee of £7500; I guess it really was quite a lot of money, when one considers that the Football League’s minimum admission charge in our promotion winning season of 1972/3 was 40p and a match day programme cost only 5p.

(£7500 is worth £80,000 today using the RPI; £140,000, average earnings or £190,000 using the growth in share of GDP.)

Steve made just over 100 appearances for the Shots, in no more than a couple of years. He was the type of player that home fans loved and the away fans loved to berate. His haircut was in celebration of the Beatles, despite their impending dissolution and his shirt was two sizes too big. A shirt that was probably Jack Howarth’s famous ‘number 9’ before he went into a brief period of exile in Rochdale. Yes, vivid memories of an impish little Beatles look-alike torturing opposition defences with his baggy shirt hanging down over his shorts.

And just like Eduardo da Silva, Melledew was a great diver. But unlike the Croatian Steve dived properly. No, not the ‘simulation’ with intent to fool the referee, because his dives were proper ones. The kind that kept his legs attached to his hips and waist. Dives that resulted in Melledew playing in every one of our 46 games in the promotion winning season of 1972/73 - and becoming our leading goal scorer with 18 goals.

Lined up against the diminutive Melledew that season were some of the game’s great hard men : Sam Ellis (Mansfield), Ray Harford (Colchester), Chris Turner (Peterborough), Graham Rathbone ( Cambridge) and the great Jimmy Giles (Exeter, but once of Shots fame), Tommy Youlden (Reading, but he ‘saw the light’ and he joined the Shots in ’76)………I shudder just typing their names.

Aldershot’s centre half in 1972/73 was Ray Dean. A wonderful player who by his own admission was slow…..in fact to be brutally honest, very slow. But as he recounted only last week, his job was to stop the opposition. And that is all he ever did. He stopped them……’quite beautifully’

So that’s it Michel and Arsene, bring back the ‘stopper’ and make ‘proper’ diving an essential part of every forwards game.