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Off-balance striker committed no crime
By Alan Hansen

Amid the furore that surrounded Manchester United's penalty at the Riverside Stadium, my sympathies were with Cristiano Ronaldo.

From the moment he pushed the ball past Mark Schwarzer he was in a position of total threat. True, Ronaldo was looking for the Middlesbrough keeper to hit him, and he would not have been the first centre forward in the last 30 years to have done that. There is a thin dividing line between looking for someone to hit you and diving but although Schwarzer was starting to take his hand away, Ronaldo was already off balance because of the goalkeeper's approach. Under the laws that a centre forward lives by, he was guilty of no crime. The only hope Schwarzer had was that the referee or his assistant would have spotted the absence of any contact.

There does not have to be contact for a penalty to be given. On the opening day of the season at Bramall Lane, Sheffield United defender Chris Morgan went to tackle Steven Gerrard and as the Liverpool captain acted instinctively to get out of the way of a late challenge, he fell to the floor. Was there contact? No. Was it a penalty? Yes.

As a penalty the incident at the Riverside was a far more reasonable award than the one Graham Poll gave Arsenal after Pascal Chimbonda's challenge in the north London derby. From where he was, Poll could not possibly have seen if contact was made.

There is no doubt that a referee's task has been made considerably more difficult since the first wave of foreign players began arriving in the Premiership. When I began playing in the European Cup in my first season at Liverpool in 1977, I was told to never go near a centre forward inside the box.

But if you had to nominate a moment when diving began to get seriously out of control, it would be the 1994 World Cup, and with the rewards for success and the penalties for failure growing steadily in the Premiership, it has become almost accepted as a legitimate way to win.

No manager is going to complain if his side win a penalty with a dive. They will intervene if he gets a reputation for going down too easily, as Andy Johnson has done at Everton. Then, they are likely to take the player to one side and say they are not getting penalties simply because he is looked on, whether unfairly on not, as a diver.

Managers will intervene for the good of their club or the good of the individual. This is 2006. Football managers stopped thinking about the good of the game some time around 1956. I would love to see that kind of attitude come back into football but I am a realist. It would be touching to think that the players and the managers would take responsibility and stamp it out from within the dressing room. But I am laughing almost as I think about it. They will cling on to the familiar view that these things even themselves out over the course of a season.

When Arsene Wenger was likening the Premiership's refusal to sanction video replays as continuing to light a football stadium with torches, he was pursuing a familiar argument but one I cannot accept. You can see a replay nine or 10 times and still not be convinced whether it is a foul or not – and you would have the same quandary if you insisted that diving was punishable by a red card.

How long are you going to stop a match and how will it affect a product which has just signed a foreign rights television deal for £500 million largely because the speed of the game makes it so distinctive from any other European league?

It was not just the win on Teesside that would have buoyed Manchester United. Henrik Larsson is not going to win the championship for Sir Alex Ferguson – he is available for only seven Premiership matches – but he can certainly be a big help to them.

He may be 35 but Larsson is supremely fit and he will always be a natural predator who, as we have seen for Barcelona in the European Cup final, is adept at coming off the bench and changing games.

Manchester United may not be able to match the quality and depth of Chelsea's squad but they are now six points ahead and the signing of Larsson, if only for three months, will step up the pressure by another notch.