Danny Welbeck has ‘escaped’ punishment for his ‘dive’ against AC Milan prompting Arsenal fans the world over to ask just why, exactly, was he even at risk?

Welbeck went down in the box. That is a fact. Whether he dived or lost control of his limbs is hard to say given that it’s Danny Welbeck. For going down, he won a penalty.

Now I know my Arsenal-tinted glasses can be a bit hard to see through at times, but I’m going to go out on a wobbly limb and say that Welbeck isn’t exactly the first player you think of if you were to answer the question ‘name me an English player who dives’.

That honour, of course, would go to Dele Alli if you were keeping things modern. Harry Kane, Ashley Young, Wayne Rooney, Jamie Vardy, or Raheem Sterling would all make the list before you’d even think of Danny Welbeck, if you ever got to him at all.

Yet, somehow, Welbeck’s fight with gravity was deemed bad enough to outrage the press and that it should go before UEFA. But we rarely hear calls for others to be punished in a similar way (or if we do the calls are so quiet as to be missed by most people). Why?

I decided to search on Google to see if there had been any incidents when an unpunished dive from either Alli or Kane had prompted a statement from UEFA declaring they wouldn’t take any further action. I wasn’t even looking for an example of the Spurs’ men being charged retroactively. Just that it as being considered.

While I can’t remember any specific instances, I know those two players enough to know they’ve managed to get away with a few dives each in the competition.

Where was the call from the media for them to be banned?

Where was the UEFA statement that they were even considering punishing them?

Nowhere. That’s where.

I found nothing.

I’m not saying this is an anti-Arsenal agenda. More, it seems another weird case of the media getting their briefs in a knot about something they ignore at other times.

Of course, this one incident has changed how people view Welbeck outside of Arsenal.

He will now be branded a diver and a cheat for the rest of his career, in the same way Eduardo, who went over easily once was.

Seems fair, right?