From the first game I saw here in the UAE, I was astonished by how often players here flop and dive.

I have seen Mexican soccer. I have been to Azteca. And I thought diving and flopping could not be worse than that practiced in Mexico.

Then I came here, and discovered that Mexican floppers are amateurs compared to those in this region.

I wrote about the topic for the Thursday editions of The National. I’ll be interested to see if I get any reaction on it.

It helped my column quite a bit that one of the most prominent coaches in the country, the Austrian Josef Hickersberger, agreed so whole-heartedly with my suggestion — that the worst diving and flopping in the world is in this region.

And it was amusing when he got to the part about how he and other coaches at Al Wahda, the defending league champions, are sitting there saying exactly what I am saying up in the press box when another guy hurls himself to the ground and rolls and clutches at a knee or an ankle.

“Oh, that guy’s career is probably over. I’m sure he’s very badly hurt. Just look at him writhing!”

When, inevitably, said injured player will be back up and running with no ill effects moments later. Which we all know will happen.

How this works is … if you’re really selling your fake injury/hard foul, you shout, and pound the turf with your fist, and thrash about. Maybe you get a yellow card on an opponent. The thing is, if you sell an injury hard, you almost have to wait for medical help to come out, and you’ve got to stay down for a bit. Otherwise the referee will know you are faking (just as the rest of us do).

The medicos almost always put the “magic spray” on the wound, and give the felled hero some water, and then everyone else on the team gets some water, too, as one minute, two minutes, three minutes tick away. But when you’ve faked an injury so intensely, you can’t just jump up.

So the players are carefully put on a stretcher and then onto the cart, and driven to the side of the field, and 95 percent of the time the player bounces right up once he’s on the sideline and is waving at the referee, asking to come back on — and he almost always is allowed to do so. Immediately.

It’s all a sham, and it’s quite annoying to watch, again and again and again.

It’s not just UAE players. It’s the whole region. At the Asian Cup in Doha, any game involving two west Asian teams (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, the UAE) was sure to degenerate into a flopfest. The east Asian teams, especially Japan and South Korea and Australia, were not nearly so bad. And neither was the central Asian team from Uzbekistan.

We have a flopping and diving culture here, and as Josef Hickersberger noted, it will not change until referees do something about it. By handing out red cards to guys who dive in the box, to showing yellows for “time wastage” of guys who were not touched before flying to the ground in the middle of the pitch, to making a guy who has been carted off wait, say, a full minute before he is allowed back into the game, making his team play with 10 for a possession or three.

Less diving will make for a better and more honest game in the region. I’d love to see it happen. I don’t know that it will.