Young stepped on Ciaran Clark's foot as Clark pulled out of the challenge and flung himself to the floor. Mark Halsey's view was not obscured and if I can call it as a dive watching in real-time on television then there is no reason he should be giving anything other than a yellow card to Young for, ahem, simulation.
What makes this stick in the craw is that Young got away with the same thing one week ago. Shaun Derry committed an offence but the exaggeration of his fall was ridiculous when you consider the treatment meted out to Lionel Messi on a weekly basis. Stan Collymore is an acquired taste but he got it right yesterday on twitter: "No deterrent for Young for Derry incident, so it says.... Keep diving and carry on."
Milos Krasic was banned for diving last season. In Italy. Where everyone thinks cheating is institutionalised and encouraged. It's time for someone to set a precedent and if the FA won't do it then the Premier League need to think about how the competition is going to be viewed in future. But until journalists all come under one banner, instead of this outdated notion that we'd have nothing to talk about after games without these controversies. Wouldn't they rather talk about Frank Lampard's free-kick than Juan Mata's 'goal'?
I'm not sure when everyone (the media) became so blinkered to English players diving, cheating and generally spoiling things. Was it thanks to Michael Owen against Argentina in Sapporo, or, as Raphael Honigstein suggested in Englischer Fussball, the same player against the same team four years before in Saint-Etienne? Or is this just how we want to define the game, with an 'Us and Them' mentality.
Never mind the FIFA deadline for goal-line technology, we have video technology right now. It's used to ban players for (unseen) violent conduct, why can't we use it to ban players for diving? Or will the argument be that the referee has seen Young's dive and acted on it, as was the case with Nigel de Jong and Mario Balotelli's horror tackles?
It's time to move the goalposts.
