Celtic were leading 2-1 in added time at Ross County this afternoon when Alex Schalk fell to the floor in dramatic fashion and the referee awarded a penalty which enabled the home side get a point in their fight to avoid relegation. The fall out from the incident saw Celtic captain Scott Brown given a straight red card for a bad foul on Schalk, presumably stemming from the fact that he knew what the television replays confirmed - Schalk had clearly dived.
In his interview after the match Ross County manager Jim McIntyre was honest enough to say his player had dived and while saying that his team had suffered from a series of poor penalty this season, refused to condone what Schalk had done.
I don't know enough about McIntyre to say for sure that he was lying when he implied that he didn't like to see his players diving, but I'm pretty sure that the large majority of managers both north and south of the border do very little to stop their players doing so.
Schalk is Dutch and so the old line that diving only started appearing in this country with the influx of foreign players in the 90s on these shores will no doubt be trotted out again. However, although I can't say for sure there were divers about in the sixties when I started watching the game, there definitely were in the early 70s (e.g. Francis Lee) and this at a time when there was barely a non British player appearing in this country.
If a side needed a win on the last day of the season to stay up and they were drawing in the last minute, a player who didn't go down in the penalty area because he knew he hadn't been fouled, but instead stayed on his feet and tried to score would be read the riot act by most managers if he failed to do so - I'm 99.9% sure of that and I think many fans would agree with me.
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