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Falling more gracefully than Tom Daley is now part of any Premier League player’s game but Jamie Cutteridge argues that far from ruining the sport we all love, we should cherish and embrace diving in modern football.

If you believe the papers after your average weekend of Premiership football you would be inclined to believe that diving is the biggest blight on our wonderful game of football - that if diving where somehow eradicated the game would return to the game of the 1950’s played by gentlemen, one where money took a backseat and where England competed.

Bollocks, diving is part of the game, it is here to stay. And you know what? I think that it is all right, that it should not be criticised, and maybe, possibly, a little bit, coached a little bit more. (NB Yes I am exactly the problem with the internet.)

“COACHING??!?!?!”, I hear you type, in capitals, in the comments section like Daily Mail readers. Why should we coach an aspect of the game that is, in reality, cheating, and yes, as much as I may seek to defend, diving is cheating but is it any more cheating than those sneaky fouls at corners, the ones that defenders get praised for managing to pull off away from the referee’s eye.

Because there is something impressive about a good dive; about managing to go down in such a way that, with no or minimal contact, convinces the referee that you had no choice but to go to ground.

This is not just cheating, but an art form, the contortion of one’s body in order to conceive a touch that never happened.

It is the alchemy of the 21st century, changing nothing into something, something game-winning from a fair tackle. Yes, it is not fair, but for the sheer work that has gone into it, they deserve some kind of reward.

And let us not convince ourselves that it is foreigners that are the best exponents. Our own Steven Gerrard consistently performs miracles in order to procure himself set pieces, condemned whilst doing it for Liverpool, and yet never mentioned when in an England shirt.

Herein lies the inherent hypocrisy of the debate, in that we love to chastise opposition players whenever they go to ground (whether there is contact or not) whilst we defend our own players to the hilt.

Admittedly, on rare occasions we may criticise our players for going down to easily, but only when they fail to con the ref. In the event of a foul being awarded we search for any sign of contact in order to appease our worried collective conscience.

In short, our view on diving is similar to the average football fan’s view on every single issue, very much specific to the context in which it occurs.

Yes we can get irate about it and TYPE WITH SUCH FURVOUR when it goes against our team, but does any set of supporters really feel as if they are on the end of far more successful dives than any other team, and if so, well your team need to learn to dive better, there’s no point practising set pieces if you don’t practise winning them.

In reality football is all about winning, as trendy as it may be to appreciate teams for aesthetic reason. When it comes down to it a successful team is the one that puts the round thing through the sticky-uppy things, the most times wins, and is remembered in history (except in stupid places like Brazil where a team that didn’t even make the semis in ’82 is held in higher esteem than world champions in 1994).

The problem is, in this instant society we want to be able to watch five minutes of a game to sum it up, ideally one with a couple of nice goals, football however is not that simple. It is a game played over 90 minutes in which there is as much to be impressed by in a clean sheet as there is in a Wayne Rooney bicycle kick.

It won’t sell as many DVDs (except maybe in the Spurs shop) but the art of the 1-0 will never get as much credit as it deserves.

Yes, sometimes we may watch football purely as a spectator and have no interest, and then, possibly, diving may be nuisance, but just endeavour to find the skill behind it and I’m sure you can just about make yourself better, perhaps you can even find a neat little compilation of good dives on the internet.

To celebrate only the brand of football that Barcelona exhibit is to be sucked in to the largest collective blind spot that football has ever seen.

Yes, Messi is a neat little player, but if I were a fan of the Catalan club there are times I’d wish he would just go down and win the foul rather than stick to his misguided notion of the way football should be played.

This is where diving comes in. If the game is about winning, then at times diving is essential to reach that aim.

During those moments where we cave in to our natural partisan instincts we realise the importance of victory and can see that in the wider footballing picture diving is going to remain a fabric of our game as long as teams continue to want to win games.

If a player sees the opportunity to go down in order to win a penalty, with the pressure put on them from fans and managers, of course they are going to take it.

It is worth noting at this point that so much of the debate around diving is framed around situations where there is contact. In the game at Stamford Bridge this week, there was clear contact between Yuri Zhirkov and Chris Smalling, hence Zhirkov’s descent was inevitable, in a similar instance to the penalty won by Dimitar Berbatov in the third round of the FA Cup against Liverpool.

The moment an attacker sees the opportunity for contact within the area, they will go down and, in most instances, the penalty will be given. The referee knows this to be the case, the defenders know this to be the case, and it is their responsibility to avoid that contact at all costs.

Sometimes the foul is there, but not immediately obvious to the ref, often the striker’s fall is merely helping to ref to see it.

Rather than chastising the players perhaps we should thank them for their assistance - a silly way of phrasing it but in reality, if the foul is there it is the attacker’s prerogative to point it out.

Perhaps it is a shame that the prevalence of diving has led to children mimicking it at a young age, but at least perhaps we will create a generation of players who can at least perform dives without it being as embarrassing as some that we currently see where players appear to go down in more stages than the Tour de France.

It is up to individual coaches to decide how to address the issue, but personally the sight of a child diving is far less upsetting than that of them shouting at and pressuring referees after every single decision, an occurrence far more commonplace.

The money at stake in the upper echelons of the game means that victory is everything and players facing so much pressure to create results means that any ability to give them an edge will be taken.

Want to get rid of diving? Then stop paying your Sky subscription, cancel your season ticket and merely read the reports through the windows of Dixons because as long as money remains, the game will be a results driven business, and whilst it remains a money driven business, diving will be here to stay.

Diving is not the problem with football. Perhaps it is a symptom of the win-centred games that the sport has become, but equally our distain for diving epitomises the yearning for ‘perfect football’ modelled by just a couple of teams, a notion well out of reach.

Instead we should value the skill in the ordinary, the clean sheets, the sneaky fouls, and yes, the dives.