Neville Dalton is a journalist with the BBC News website and a Portsmouth fan of 40 years. His expressed views are his and not necessarily those of the BBC.

No draws? I'd rather be knickerless

I know it's a few years since we've played in the Football League, but was it really so bad?

I mean, was the way the league was run so weird, eccentric and out of touch with the essence of the beautiful game?

What do you mean yes? No, of course it wasn't. No more so than the hyper-commercial Premiership anyway.

So what's with all this extraordinary talk of banning draws and insisting on a "positive" result, come what may?

Maybe Lord Mawhinney and his Football League working party felt they had to do or say something that would make this country's football fans look up from their Premiership-soaked world and notice what was going on farther down the football food chain.

No need - the challenge for promotion from the Championship at least is the closest and most exciting for years, with a host of clubs hosting 20,000-plus crowds every week.

Maybe they really believed it was a good idea. No, sorry. Surely no one outside Soccer USA is capable of thinking that.

I'm only glad that the majority of responses on phone-ins, e-mails and internet message boards from proper fans has been along the same lines as mine.

What folly. What ridicule.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Mawhinney reportedly declared: "Managers may hate shoot-outs, but fans love them."

Well, they certainly create drama and are a novel way of deciding tied games in knockout competitions.

Personally, I could do without them, even in the cups. Call me old-fashioned, but the winner is the team that scores more goals, whether over 90, 180 or 210 minutes.

I accept the arguments about fixture congestion - and that just about makes it acceptable in the cup.

But not in the leagues, where there is a perfectly decent points system in place which enables teams to accumulate them in a variety of ways over the season - whether snatching one with a last-minute equaliser or throwing away two in much the same fashion.

Most importantly, far from deterring teams from playing for a draw, the shootout plan would actively encourage football philistines to do just that.

The rewards for shutting up shop and denying the more adventurous team a potentially deserved victory would then be greater than ever - not just a scrambled point but potentially two.

I never thought I'd say this (and I doubt you'll hear me say it again), but I agree with Neil Warnock.

If football administrators really want to do something radical to improve the sport, they could clean up the game by weeding out those insidious cheats who dive and feign injury or clumsily "fall" into opponents in what in my day was called fouling.

Punish shirt-pulling and those obnoxious bear-hugs which professionals of only a dozen years ago wouldn't even have contemplated for fear of being ridiculed for fouling so brazenly.

Nowadays you see them in penalty areas at every free-kick or corner.

Shirt-pulling, bear hugs, trips, climbing, leaning - they're all fouls, the punishment for which is a direct free-kick, or if it's in the area, a penalty.

Yes, I know we could be seeing half a dozen penalties a game, but that's down to managers and players to address.

The more annoying the team, the more they would be punished - and the more likely that the "right" result would ensue.

If Lord Mawhinney and co feel the Football League is a bit short of excitement, a few 6-5 wins should have the desired effect.

And at least the penalty kicks - awarded during the game rather than after it - would be for the right reasons.

Closing the stability door

I welcome the news that assistant manager Tony Adams would now like to stay with Pompey for another season at least.

While it's always hard to measure an individual member of the backroom staff's effect on a team and its performances, Pompey's excellent start to the season - particularly defensively - following Adams' appointment must surely have been more than a coincidence.

In fact, I read with pride and excitement some of the things he was reported to have said - about passion, pride, commitment and refusing to rest on laurels.

I can remember him saying something after Pompey had beaten Reading 3-1 at home in one of their best performances of the season to the effect that there was still a lot of work to do.

His approach to the game, which served him so well at Arsenal and for England, seemed to fit in perfectly with the new Pompey set-up - the likes of Campbell, Johnson, Lauren and James were signed because they were winners and had a winners' mentality.

They knew what it took and they knew how steely hard you had to be psychologically as well as physically.

So Adams' announcement towards the end of last year that he planned to be off at the end of the season to pursue other personal goals was alarming, worrying and crucially, dispiriting.

If I felt disappointed, suspecting his heart was not in the club, what must the players he coached every day think?

I can understand his frustration at being an assistant, where his word was not necessarily the last, and where the buck passed him by.

But surely it's not too much to ask that the apprentice continue to learn at his master's table, benefiting his own career but also rewarding his employers for their faith in him?

I feared after his announcement that the players might no longer hang on his every word and feel less need to obey his commands to the letter.

Who knows whether it happened, but certainly Pompey's results since - and often their performances - have seemed to lack that gritty something they contained earlier in the season.

I hope Adams' announcement this week that he plans to spend another year at Fratton Park will help spark Pompey's season back into life after a run that has severely dented our hopes of a place in Europe (and in my view even a top-half finish).

I only hope it's not too late.