By Dave Bowler

It’s an odd time to be a Croatian, or so it seems. If the English aren’t busily trying to wreck your career – or your legs at the very least – then the European authorities are filling their time by trying to slice and dice your reputation.

You have to feel sorry for Eduardo da Silva. Not only does he have the least Croatian name in history, he also has a foot bone that’s connected to the leg bone not by the ankle bone as popular song would have you believe, but by a small piece of elastic knotted around the odd tendon or two that a late tackle from Birmingham’s Martin Taylor failed to sever some 18 months ago.

Happily, Eduardo seems to have made a full recovery since then, something of a miracle in itself, and looks ready to terrorise defences once more, not by having his foot on a hinge and shifting it up and down as a party piece, but by knocking in the goals once again. Even if he has to fall over to get the chance to do it.

The dive. It doesn’t look any better the more often you watch it, but nor did it look any different to about a dozen or more incidents that happen up and down the UK’s leagues the week before, the week after, or the week coming. And the same goes for any other league you might want to mention in Europe. He saw the ‘keeper coming, saw the ball was past him and then felt gravity’s pull, an easier option than sprinting Usainlike to catch up with a ball drifting beyond his control.

There may have been a gossamer thin touch from Artur Boruc on his way, probably not. You may argue that the very fact the ‘keeper was bearing down upon him forced him to take evasive action, by instinct as much as anything.

If he was on your side, you’d probably be able to convince yourself it was a penalty. If he was on the opposition, you’d be foaming at the mouth. As a neutral, your reaction was probably… meh. So what?

And yet the diving furore ran on, reached the UEFA Court of Human Rights and ended with da Silva collecting a two game ban, taking him out of the first two Champions League group games, Arsenal raging at such injustice.. And, though “injustice” seems an odd word in such circumstances, perhaps it’s the right one.

Had the referee on the night concluded it was a dive, the likelihood is that he would simply have waved play on. Possibly, just possibly, he would have administered a yellow card to Eduardo, the punishment prescribed for diving. There would have been a few histrionics from Eduardo and his colleagues and the game would have gone on. That would have been pretty much it.

Instead, he has been a cause celebre and will forever more be tainted as a diver, rather over the top for a man who has done nothing more than what Ronaldo has made an £80million career out of doing.

Was there a need for it?
The answer to that little conundrum will arise in the course of the coming few weeks and months, especially when it comes to the biggest games. Will players be willing to risk going down easy or will there be a momentary lapse of reason where they decide to spurn a possible spot kick and stay on their feet instead?Interesting times, and controversial ones, for referees will never have been under more pressure to punish any and every transgression with a card.

More than that, they’ll be ever less keen to award penalties – will we soon be witnessing a club taking the authorities to court to get a game replayed after a ref has turned down a stonewall penalty because he feared it was a dive? Don’t you think that given events elsewhere in recent days, Chelsea now have every incentive to explore every avenue to knock the authorities off their perch, and no remaining concern over any repercussions?

The impact of it all is very predictable – flashpoints by the score. In the perpetually mad world of professional football, there is no booking more guaranteed to stoke a player’s sense of self righteous anger one for diving. To say a player dived is to call him a cheat and in the odd honour code that exists in the game, that is just about the worst thing you can do.

Diving to handle the ball on the goal line, chopping down a striker who is clean through, these are all good, clean parts of sport. But diving, cheating, that’s beyond the pale, something you shouldn’t be accused of.. It’s an odd state of affairs but one which explains some of the sound and the fury that’s followed the Eduardo saga.

But where do we go from here? Are we a step closer to ridding the game of diving or have we simply stoked the media machine for a couple of weeks? The jury is out.