Lightning may never strike twice, but cheating scumbags certainly do.

It beggars belief that less than a week after Gareth Bale pulled off a forward pike with tuck to win a penalty against us, Luis Suarez went and did exactly the same thing with the same effect.

Both executed perfect examples of what’s known in coaching circles as “The Rooney.”

It works like this:

You’re closing on goal but the opposition ‘keeper has come out and spread himself to narrow the angle.

You have slightly overrun it, or you’ve taken a touch too many, so now you’re too close to the goalkeeper to chip it over him.

You’re going to have to try and go round him, but at the speed you’re running, and with the touchline looming, it’s virtually impossible to round the ‘keeper and still be in control of the ball with a shooting angle.

You try it anyway, but the touch is too heavy and the ball is heading out for a goal kick.

However, the goalkeeper has had to commit himself and here, if you happen to be of a dishonest persuasion (medical term: gerraditis), is where you seize your chance.

Following behind the now wayward ball, you trail your foot to try and effect a contact with the ‘keeper’s arm or leg, depending on which way he has gone down.

As you trail the foot, you start falling forward like a tree that’s just been felled. Whether or not you actually make contact with the ‘keeper is irrelevant now because momentum and gravity have taken their course.

TIMBER!!!!!!

Over you go… and as you lie prone, the extent of your appeals for a penalty depends only on the extent of your shamelessness.

The two penalties against us in the last two weeks have certain things in common and certain differences.

Let’s take the Tottenham one first (although before we do, does anyone have the time? Oh yes, thanks – five-to).

Primatologists have managed to get monkeys and great apes to do many remarkable things in recent decades: reasoning, reading, doing maths puzzles, even speaking. But full credit to the trainers at Tottenham for producing the world’s first ever diving monkey.

As monkeyboy bore down on our goal there was a coming together between him and Gibbs. Ironically, if Bale had chosen (note the use of the word ‘chosen’) to go down then, he might have had a more justified penalty shout because there was some upper body contact between the two.

Instead he kept going, pushed it too far past Szczesny and went for the Rooney. As the replays seemed to prove, there was either no contact or negligible contact between our young Pole and the primate, even though the latter went down as if pole-axed.

The ball was going away from goal, which probably helped keep Szczesny on the pitch once Mike Dean had bought the dive.

Bale’s appeal for a penalty was a little half-hearted, as if he knew he was trying to pull a fast one. He just sat on the turf and raised one paw in the air in mute appeal. In fact, given that he has been booked for diving twice already this season, he must have been worried about a third yellow coming his way.

Dean, it should be noted, was a good 30 yards behind the incident and could not possibly have been able to see clearly what happened. He did consult his linesman, who was theoretically better positioned, but according to one account I read all the lino wanted to do was moan about something having been thrown from the crowd.

And so to Saturday’s penalty for Liverpool. Suarez, a man with more baggage than Victoria Beckham on a world tour, hared in towards our goal from the left of the penalty area.

When Szczesny narrowed the angle Suarez took a concrete-boot touch with his right foot, sending the ball straight towards the touchline and a goal kick.

Realising this, he too switched immediately to Plan B – the Rooney, dragging his feet and falling as if he’d just been hit in the back by a sniper.

Once again the referee, this time Mike Halsey, had no clear view of the incident. He was closer than Dean had been but his line of sight was obscured by a cluster of three players.

Suarez compounded his initial act of dishonesty (the dive) by putting on an elaborate show of having been badly injured. It was pure theatre, but perhaps helped convince Halsey that there had been genuine contact.

Similarities between the two dives: both players had lost control of the ball; both went for the Rooney; in both cases the referee could not possibly have seen the incident properly.

Dissimilarities: Bale had had some upper body contact from Gibbs, whereas no-one touched Suarez; Suarez showed his out-and-out dishonesty by putting on some real theatrics.

Both were pretty awful, but the Uruguayan racist’s was particularly heinous.

So what do we do about this?

For a start, some players are now so good at this sort of fakery that the referees’ association needs to aggressively counter it. I always thought that if a ref had not clearly seen an incident he could not act on it. That certainly wasn’t the case with either Bale’s or Suarez’s penalties, where Dean and Halsey seem to have made their decision based on probability or instinct.

If refs get together to try to clamp down on this sort of cheating, the net effect will probably be fewer penalties given in these sort of circumstances (including some genuine pens which will be missed because the ref cannot be certain there was contact).

It’s not perfect, but the consequences of not awarding the occasional genuine penalty are not as great as those of giving too many fake penalties (which usually means a goal for the cheating side and often a red card for the victims).

But refs aside, the real answer to the problem is retrospective video analysis by the FA, followed by severe punishment (bans) for cheating.

Then, and only then, will cheats like Bale and Suarez know that the consequences of doing what they do will outweigh the possible benefits.

The FA already hands out retrospective punishment for serious foul play when the referee ‘did not see the incident’. So they would not need to stretch the rules too far to also come down hard on cheating in circumstances where the ref could not possibly have had a 100% view and where the offender’s play-acting has been deliberately aimed at misleading the officials.

RockyLives