Sean Dyche believes football authorities no longer care about stopping diving and revealed he has been told to stop talking about players cheating.
Burnley’s victory over Cardiff last weekend focused attention on the amount of time the ball is in play during games.
But Clarets boss Dyche believes tackling time-wasting should be a much lower priority than penalising diving and other forms of gamesmanship and despairs at an apparent lack of interest within the game.
In an impassioned polemic, Dyche said: “If you are going to sort the game out, stop cheating. End of story. Does everyone agree that the World Cup was a farce for cheating? Everyone must agree that.
“I don’t care where you come from in the world, you must have sat there and thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this has gone crazy’.
“Now in the Premier League, (players) dive and they don’t give anything. There’s no retribution afterwards, no FA charge, nothing.
“More and more people are going down again. But there’s less noise about it because the referee doesn’t book anyone. It’s just happening because no-one wants to deal with it.
“If you blank it, eventually they think it will go away, but it won’t go away because it’s a free shot. Players think, ‘Even better, I’ll go every time because what’s the worst that will happen?’ The worst that can happen is no card, no sanction, no players bother anymore, no fans bother anymore.
“I can’t believe it, the beautiful game, cheating everywhere. How can this be right and no-one wants to change it?
“A kid cheats in his maths exam and you would go mental, yet you let them cheat on a football pitch, which could cost someone their livelihood. It’s at a farcical level.
“FIFA don’t want to touch it, UEFA don’t want to touch it, the Premier League don’t want to touch it because of the shiny product – ‘Oh no, we don’t want that word cheating in the Premier League’.
“I got told to stop using the word and I said absolutely not. Because that’s what it is.
“The irony is you could turn it into a real positive if they said, ‘We’re the Premier League and we’re not having it’. That’s a brilliant, positive statement to millions of children around the world.
“There was one the other night, I nearly lost it. I nearly texted (referees chief) Mike Riley because it was that bad. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Four yards from the referee. I thought if you’re not going to do anything about that, then this will never end.”
Dyche believes his side suffer for their honest approach, adding: “The irony is we’ve not had a penalty in the Premier League for 16 months. The referee is now looking for the dive to pre-suppose he’s been fouled.
“I would never say our team is whiter than white because I can never guarantee one of our team wouldn’t do something like that. But on a scale of one to 100, we would be quite near the bottom of the scale of people falling over.”
The Premier League declined to comment.
