Yet still we hear about “those footballers”, as if there were something intrinsic that simultaneously binds and defines them, beyond being very good at playing an 11-a-side ball game within a marked area. There are two problems with this approach. (Actually there are lots, foremost of which is that it’s stupid, but we can elide that.) First of all, it actually becomes a self-fulfilling term. If people are going to treat footballers as some separate, gilded, morally bankrupt class, they’re sure as dammit going to act that way.
The second problem is that treating footballers as if they were all a bunch of t***s, to use Cole's own choice phrase, blinds us to the few genuine, unimpeachable, bona fide, 24-carat ones that exist among them. And let there be no doubt that Ashley Cole falls in to that category.
Obviously, that’s not a terribly nice thing to say. And some of you will no doubt point out that there is not a chance I would ever call Cole that to his face. Then again, it is fairly unlikely that I ever would encounter him anyway, given his extreme reluctance to give interviews. It is telling, for example, that ahead of his 100th England cap tonight, he chose to hold a sanitised tête-à-tête with an FA in-house reporter rather than submit himself to the bear-pit of the pre-match press conference.
But there would probably be little harm in it. Cole isn’t bothered about what other people think of him, after all. He’s had far worse shouted at him for the last seven years. Haters gon’ hate and all that.
Many of the game’s great enigmas demand further study. What fuels their passion, their anger? What turbulent emotional hinterland lurks within? With Balotelli, it is the troubled, multipolar youth. With Maradona, it was ‘bronca’, that haze of permanent revenge that stems from a deprived Fiorito uprbringing, to which was added just a dash of short-man syndrome. Lionel Messi, grasps for a childlike simplicity on the pitch that has long been denied to him in life. Sometimes, though, you just have to hold your hands up and admit that cod psychoanalysis will only get you so far. Sorry to disappoint you, Dr Freud; this one’s just a bit of a t***.
The list of misdemeanours that clearly mark Cole out as such has been recited so often that it scarcely requires another airing here. But his fiercely-negotiated riches are not what is most objectionable about him. Nor is shooting a kid with an air rifle, as idiotic as that is.
Instead, it is that stinking concoction of hypocrisy and wilful indifference to the plight of others. The publicity was fine when OK magazine were paying £1 million to carry pictures of his wedding; once he had feathered his nest, it became a nuisance. Of terrace racism in Spain, he said in a 2005 interview: “Over there it is normal, so you just have to deal with it.” Perhaps this explains why he decided to rally to the side of his friend John Terry during the Anton Ferdinand affair, to the point where his evidence to the FA’s independent panel was deemed defective.
Of course, this piece does not exactly chime with the current national mood. The back pages this morning are full of tributes and eulogies to Cole. And rightly so. What a player he was – one of England’s greats, to be sure. None of the above changes any of that. Perhaps there needs to be a recognition that great players can sometimes be less so as human beings, and that the one fact need not necessarily detract from the other.
So when the eulogies come to be written, let them write thus. Ashley Cole: a great player. And a t***. But nonetheless, a great player. But still...
