Let us play a little game of spot the difference...

There were plenty of talking points to come out of another highly charged Premier League weekend.

Is Carlo Ancelotti just Phil Scolari in a silly hat? After Jermain Defoe and Frank Lampard both cracked from 12 yards, is it worth England bothering to compete in a penalty shootout next summer should any of their matches go the full distance? When did Birmingham become any good?

All of these matters have been given more than a passing mention in the national press, or by the shiny suited men in the respective comfy studios of the BBC and SKY.

Steven Gerrard's blatant act of cheating, however, up at Ewood Park - why it's as if it never happened.

Consider the following two video clips and let us compare and contrast...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulMtA-gYNXg
http://www.101greatgoals.com/videodisplay/4119353/

Both were dives designed to con a referee, both were accompanied by torturous backing music, one dive was by an honourable Englishman and ambassador for the game, the other by a nasty oily foreign type, responsible for stinking out the domestic game with his mastery of the dark arts.

Eduardo's dive - though at least he can point to Artur Boruc's tummy flab making the slightest contact with is trailing leg - resulted in a national vendetta against him, a UEFA ban, which was subsequently rescinded, and sparked a Daily Mail campaign against diving.

Gerrard, a man who has aired some very public and forthright musings on the subject of diving, however, has escaped any semblance of a media backlash whatsoever. So sycophantic is Andy Gray's last word show, that I can't ever bring my self to watch it, but I'd be willing to bet my bottom dollar he didn't feel the need to mention it, while the BBC had two opportunities to highlight it, and chose not to.

Meanwhile, the newspaper reports I've seen on Saturday's match centre on Alberto Aquilani's full-debut in a meaningless Champions League game, rather than what should have been the main talking point of the Blackburn stalemate

Now diving doesn't bother me to the extent that it upsets the majority of football fans. Like shirt tugging at corners, haranguing of fourth officials and that stupid active / inactive off-side bollocks, it has become part of the game.

What does irk me, however, is hypocrisy and xenophobia. All of England's leading lights who will be at the forefront of our challenge for World Cup glory have all taken a tumble under zero pressure before, and you don't have to trawl the internet for very long to find examples.

That Eduardo should have been made a scapegoat - he's booed at every away ground he's visited since the Celtic farce having previously had the weight of public sympathy firmly behind him - stinks to high heaven.

So the next time we castigate Johnny Foreigner for attempting to deceive our upstanding referees, remember, despite what the powers that be want you to think, our lads aren't the clean cut, law abiding gentlefolk Messrs Lineker, Chiles, Redknapp and Keys and the lads in the TV editing booths would have you believe.