One thing that really gets on my nerves is when I see players diving - it seems to be happening more and more and somebody has to do something about it.

I saw the highlights of the Albion game against Wimbledon on Tuesday night and Gary Hart's sending off was a disgrace.

You have to question how much contact was made and only the player himself, Trond Andersen, knows how hard he was hit.

The points lost in that game could make a huge difference whether Brighton stay up or not and just because of one decision by a referee which I thought was very poor. He is not the only one though, players diving or feigning injury is something which is happening in every league in the world.

Players are now more likely to go down than stay on their feet. In my day I stayed on my feet all the time unless it really hurt, but nowadays players want to go down if there is the slightest contact.

It happens in Spain and Italy all the time. I watched a match recently between Torino and Inter Milan and the amount of diving was untrue. You only have to raise your hands and if it comes anywhere near their mouth or chest they grab their face and fall to the ground.

It was not as bad when I played in Spain because as the game has developed so has the diving and players are getting to be very good actors.

The problem is the foreign players have brought it over to the English game and we are now seeing it here. There used to be a lot of honesty in our game, but I'm not so sure now as it's starting to creep in more and more.

Every year there seems to be more incidents of it and in four or five years it has risen by about 50 per cent and that's a lot.

There is no doubt the foreign players have brought a lot of quality to the English game but with it comes this other side of the game.

I hate it because I think it spoils the game and I don't want football to become a non-contact sport.

FIFA have to do something to stamp it out. In the summer they clamped down on what they called assimilation in the World Cup but as soon as it was over it was back to square one again.

I think the only way they can stop it is for referees to automatically book players they think have dived. Even if they get it wrong once in a while at least we will see less players trying to con the officials.

Saturday February 8