Football must make it less attractive for players to cheat - by allowing teams a chance to appeal to a television match official, suggests Alan Good

WITHOUT delving too far into the ins and outs of the Hand of Frog, there's no escaping that the incident has once more brought that ugliest of issues in sport, cheating, to a head once again.

It has been suggested outside Ireland that it's a bit rich of us to be crying foul now, when we've been happy as a nation to laugh and point at England in the 23 years since Maradona's use of the fist became one of sport's iconic moments.

Indeed, Munster rugby fans will remember that once the furore over the 'Hand of Back' in the 2002 Heineken Cup final had died down, there was a general consensus that had Alan Quinlan tried the same thing, he'd have been carried down O'Connell Street and handed the freedom of Limerick.

Therein lies the rub: a sports fan's view of cheating, like everything else to do with their team, tends to be tinted by which side their bread is buttered on.

What's more interesting is why it happens at all; yet, rarely do we look beyond the moral outrage that ensues whenever gamesmanship comes across our radar.

Economics does a good job of explaining this, however. Artisans of the dismal science are, by their own admission, obsessed with incentives, and they are at the root of the problem here.

Simply put, cheating in sport is like crime: it occurs because the reward often outweighs the risk, and football is not doing enough to mamimise that risk.

Just as placing a spike on a steering wheel, aimed at a driver's heart, will encourage him to drive more carefully, a footballer will be less likely to cheat when it is not just the officials he has to con.

Video technology has long been mooted as the way forward here, but I'd go a step further and give the players some power to demand its use, as well as the referee.

Football is inherently weakened when the stakes are highest by its stubborn determination to have the game arbited the same way at all levels, whether it's a World Cup final or a Sunday league match with jumpers for goalposts.

As the Republic of Ireland players' incredulous reaction in Paris on Wednesday night demonstrated, there are some occasions where they are in a better position to judge what has happened.

There is no perfect solution, but here's a suggestion  - and one that goes against the boss man's rhetoric on this issue yesterday, so I'm pretty sure my P45 is in the post.

Borrowing from tennis (as well as rugby union, which is the popular parallel drawn in these arguments), try giving each team a single appeal to a TMO per match. If their appeal is successful, they get another one.

You mightn't catch every offender, but the increased threat of being nabbed would at least make players think twice, and ensure football is doing what it can to prevent cheating.