Crackdown a welcome initiative

The AFL's decision to finally crack down on 'stagers' is long overdue but in many ways could not have been better-timed.

In a year in which the FIFA World Cup in South Africa will command much of the football attention in Australia and with the AFL set to launch its biggest ever push into the rugby league heartlands of New South Wales and Queensland in the next two years, the AFL is keen to highlight the positive side of its game.

And if there is one thing your average footy fan - regardless of the code they follow - can't stand it is the sight of players faking for free-kicks and/or penalties.

While the AFL and the NRL continue to battle to conquer the hearts and minds of those fans outside their traditional heartlands, soccer is the one football code with universal appeal across the country.

With Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania generally regarded as AFL states and New South Wales and Queensland as the rugby league states, it has always been difficult for these two sports to gain traction in their rival states.

But soccer is not restricted in its potential growth by such boundaries.

And in a World Cup year - with the Socceroos set to dominate the news throughout June after qualifying for the world's biggest sporting event for the second time in a row - the world game has the potential to make enormous inroads this year in the ongoing battle to become Australia's premier football code.

But the one thing that AFL and NRL fans always criticise the round-ball game for is the tendency for players to feign injury at every opportunity as well as dive for penalties - particularly after Australia's last World Cup campaign in Germany in 2006 was ended after Italy was awarded a controversial last-minute penalty for an apparent dive.

However the AFL in particular has not been as squeaky clean in this area as its fans would like to believe in recent years.

The growing tendency of players staging for free kicks and trying to 'milk' 50-metre penalties has become a blight on the game.

It has not been helped by the way the game is often over-umpired these days with players continually getting soft free kicks directly in front of goal for the most minor of contact from an opposition player - the sort of which would have been ignored in the game's golden era of the