SEAN Dyche admits he's given up on asking the authorities to clamp down on cheating, despite the diving epidemic reaching 'farcical' levels.

The Burnley boss even revealed that he'd been asked to stop using the word 'cheating', but insisted his complaints would go on, even if nobody in a position of power was listening.

Dyche has always been a vocal critic of diving and hoped that a clampdown was on its way when retrospective action was introduced at the start of last season.

But he now fears that the authorities have lost all desire to try and eradicate diving from the game.

“Now in the Premier League they dive and they don’t give anything. There’s no retribution afterwards, no FA charge, nothing," Dyche said.

“It’s worse because now players will dive even more because they’re thinking they won’t get a free-kick against them or a yellow card, no charge from the FA, nothing.

“Hence, have you noticed more and more people are going down again? But there’s less noise about it because the referee doesn’t book anyone.”

Rather than confront the problem head on, Dyche believes the Premier League and the FA are just hoping it will go away.

"If you blank it, eventually they think it will go away, but it won’t go away because it’s a free shot," he said.

"Players think ‘even better, I’ll go every time because what’s the worst that will happen?’ The worst that can happen is no card, no sanction, no players bother anymore, no fans bother anymore.

“I can’t believe it, the beautiful game, cheating everywhere. How can this be right and no-one wants to change it?

“It’s at a farcical level and the World Cup was unbelievably bad. No-one does anything.

“FIFA don’t want to touch it, UEFA don’t want to touch it, the Premier League don’t want to touch it because of the shiny product, ‘oh no, we don’t want that word cheating in the Premier League’.

“I got told to stop using the word and I said absolutely not. I said because that’s what it is."

Asked if he had raised the issue of diving again recently with the authorities, Dyche added: “There’s no point. The media don’t care either. I’ve been talking about it for four years, but they don’t care, so there’s no point.

“No-one wants to touch it. The irony is you could turn it into a real positive if they said ‘we’re the Premier League and we’re not having it’. That’s a brilliant, positive statement to millions of children around the world."

Burnley have now gone 50 Premier League games without getting a penalty, which Dyche partly attributes to his players not making the most of contact.

And the Turf boss said he saw one dive recently that was so bad he almost reached for his phone to text referees' chief Mike Riley.

“I would never say our team is whiter than white because I can never guarantee one of our team wouldn’t do something like that," Dyche said. "But on a scale of one to 100 we would be quite near the bottom of scale of people falling over.

"There was one the other night, I nearly lost it. I nearly texted Mike Riley because it was that bad. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Four yards from the referee. I thought it you’re not going to do anything about that, then this will never end."