THE integrity of footballers was thrown into the spotlight once again this week.

That is if a random tweet late at night that just happened to get a reply from a footballer can pass as the spotlight.

A journalist posted something to the effect that someone once said footballers spend 90 minutes pretending to be hurt while rugby league players spend 80 pretending not to be.

To which former Bolton Wanderers never-pretended-to-be-hurt-ever star Kevin Davies replied: “Who said that?”

Now, to get a frame of reference to all this you have to know two things: rugby league looks down on football as a play actors’ paradise, and Kevin Davies was rather hard.

There are two things I remember most about Davies, and both reflected that toughness.

Away at Arsenal and their keeper Jens Lehmann got a bit physical with little Matt Jansen.

Davies appeared (or it may have been my imagination) to make it his business to make Lehmann pick on someone his own size a bit later in the game and the Gunners man clearly didn’t want to know.

The other thing I remember was after a Wanderers-Man United game in which Davies’s physicality had United manager Alex Ferguson steaming in the after-match TV interview. Davies’s smiling, water-off-a-duck’s back response to the effect “he seems to be upset” was a classic.

Davies was tough on the inside and outside.

Which got me thinking: how many more footballers are there out there who don’t fall into this diving, soft-lad stereotype?

John Hartson for one. For those too young to have seen him play, Hartson is the Welsh accented pundit on Match of the Day who fills your screen so much he almost blocks out the light from the lamp on top of your telly.

And there’s more. Vincent Kompany is hard, fast and physical enough to have played rugby league had he wanted and hasn’t ever pretended to be injured, hurt or slightly distracted by an opponent.

Bert Trautmann played with a broken neck, Stuart Pearce wanted to continue playing with a broken leg, Bryan Robson rarely took to the field without something broken or about to break and Norman Hunter and Francis Lee had a fight on the field the equal of anything any sport with the word rugby in it has to offer – and unlike in rugby league’s showpiece game recently it didn’t involve one player punching another when he was on the ground and helpless.

I’m as cynical as anyone about the ridiculous diving and simulation that goes on in football and I would love to see it stamped out with appropriate punishment.

But those who partake in it – of whom there appears to be a great majority – do a great disservice to those tough guys who would never do what the aforementioned tweeting journalist said footballers do and pretend to be hurt.

Just to illustrate the point that football is, and always has been, a sport tough guys can play, here’s a team of players from today and yesteryear who wouldn’t spend a second, never mind 90 minutes, pretending they were hurt.

(Kids, you’re probably going to have to ask your dads):

Bert Trautmann; Pablo Zabaleta, Terry Butcher, Nemanja Vidic, Stuart Pearce; Bryan Robson, Vinny Jones, Roy Keane; Duncan Ferguson, Kevin Davies, Mark Hughes.