What do we hate most about the game today? Cheating, as identified by John Terry recently? I don’t think so. What we hate most is that awful habit that foreign players have brought in — honesty.

So step forward, Robin van Persie, and take a boo for admitting that he has exaggerated the impact of fouls. “Sometimes,” the Arsenal forward said, “when you are in the middle of an action and you get a little push and you know there’s nothing more to take. Then you are in the right to show in a way to the ref that you are pushed. That’s not really diving. It’s just showing ... ‘Come on, he just pushed me, so I can’t score now.’ ”

Of course players do this, and quite rightly. And not just when they are pushed. Take the case of Hugo Rodallega on Saturday. Impeded by Petr Cech’s left foot with the goal gaping, the Wigan Athletic striker could possibly have stayed on his feet, stumbling on and eventually making reacquaintance with the ball near the corner flag, by which time the Chelsea goalkeeper and his defenders would have recovered their positions and composure. Would that make for a better, fairer game?

Then there are the various methods by which defenders routinely cheat: leaning in, use of a stiff arm, shirt-tugging and so on. Defenders do infinitely more cheating than forwards (I’d love to read a good thesis on why there is less revulsion towards it) and, until referees start detecting and punishing it, a forward’s duty to the game will be to draw attention to it. Only three categories of people would disagree: those with no understanding of football; those who yearn for all matches to end 0-0; and hypocrites.

There are a lot of all categories about, but at least Van Persie gets a hearing and is fairly reported, notably by The Sun, whose Charlie Wyett observed that the Dutchman was merely being honest in describing “standard practice — only most strikers have not had the guts to admit it”. Michael Owen has explained his attitude towards falling under a challenge with great eloquence, but, not being foreign, received less publicity.

It is a truth that certainly dared not speak its name in the England camp about 12 years ago, when an Arsenal precursor of Van Persie’s, Ian Wright, blithely admitted that he would take a tumble in the penalty area if it helped the national team.

Wright spoke with refreshing candour and, as part of a group of Sunday-paper journalists who had interviewed him after training at Bisham Abbey, I looked forward to publishing his views. That was until my colleagues were approached by the FA press department and agreed, after a near-unanimous vote, to suppress the supposedly explosive material.

In such circumstances, you don’t break ranks, but to this day I feel guilty about selling the readers short. Or, as you might say, cheating them.

Chelsea get in another fine mess

When it comes to breach-of-contract cases, Chelsea have encountered mixed fortunes of late. On the one hand, they have been banned from transfer activity by Fifa for supposedly inducing Gaël Kakuta to break an agreement with Lens. On the other, they have been awarded £15 million by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which says that Adrian Mutu must compensate the club to this hair-raising tune for having rendered himself sackable by taking cocaine in 2004.

Mutu, who has rebuilt his career in Italy and is expected to play for Fiorentina against Liverpool in the Champions League tomorrow night, does not have £15 million to spare. The Romania forward is reckoned to have earned quite a bit less than that in the five years since he was abandoned by Chelsea and both the court verdict and the club’s continuing demand for full payment seem almost vindictive. Until, that is, you take into account that Chelsea had paid at least £15 million when they signed Mutu from Parma in 2003 — and note what happened after his return to Italy.

Having served a seven-month suspension, Mutu was engaged by Juventus as a free agent and, under Fabio Capello, recovered such form that, when the club were relegated for match-fixing, he fetched a £7 million fee from Fiorentina. That money has since been spent by Juventus, but morally it is Chelsea’s and Fifa should make that clear.

For the world body and the Turin club to stick to legalities is unattractive. There is no complaint with a low tolerance of cocaine use by footballers or Chelsea’s initial determination to make an example of Mutu, who had been warned about his behaviour by José Mourinho and others. But they should accept, as countless clubs have done, that they made a bad buy.

Compensation should therefore be partial. It should be taken out of Juventus’s dubiously gotten gains. And Mutu should make substantial donations to drug-education charities, as he has suggested.

For a man to be fined, in effect, £15 million for hurting no one but himself is unacceptably rough justice and a serious question mark against the humanity of the game.

FA deserves no public help

Football reacted with predictable hostility to last week’s demand by Gerry Sutcliffe, the Sports Minister, that the FA implements the Burns report, which was rapturously received so long ago that most of us have forgotten what it suggested. “Get lost, politician,” was the gist of most comments. “It’s none of your business.”

Fine. Now that we know where football stands on government intervention, the FA and its allies will be withdrawing their request for £5 million from the public purse towards the bid for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup. It is not as if they cannot afford to fund the bid in its entirety themselves; they are always bragging about how much they still get from television despite the generally hard times that mean we, the poor taxpayers, are going to be digging deep for a decade or more.

So here is football’s chance to show that, far from living in a greedy little world of its own, it listens to the news. There are lots of better ways in which the Govern-ment can dispose of £5 million. And that it pales next to the vividly inappropriate profligacy of the London Olympics is no argument. We must all do our bit.

Red cards given green light

There was such a mixed reception for a piece on Saturday about why Sepp Blatter was wrong to call England the “motherland” of football that I asked Jonathan Wilson, author of Inverting The Pyramid, that peerless and riveting chronicle of the game’s tactical history, if it was unfair to the old country. He replied: “Not especially.”

He pointed out that Herbert Chapman had been “the world leader on tactics” in the 1920s (not to mention the thinker behind numbers on shirts and much, much more) but, asked if England’s main contribution to the game’s development had not been enthusiasm, Wilson did emit a cognitive chuckle. Then he added: “Don’t forget the yellow and red card.”

These, Wilson explained, had been the brainchild of Ken Aston, the English referee obliged to help when Antonio Rattin, of Argentina, refused to leave the Wembley pitch in 1966, later claiming that, because he spoke no English, he did not know that he had been ordered off.

On the drive back to his Midlands home, Aston was troubled and tried to work out ways of clarifying sanctions in international matches. Vainly — until he reached a set of traffic lights. Eureka!