An important question of etiquette. Is it ever permissible to boo, barrack or hurl abuse at an English sportsman when he is representing his country in some battle against wily and devious foreigners? This is what happened to Ashley Cole, an England defender, who was playing at Wembley for his country against the might of Kazakhstan last week. ‘Booooo!’ the crowd went when he touched the ball. ‘Booooo!’ According to everybody after the game — and I mean everybody, apart from the English public — this was disgraceful, crass, boorish and unforgiveable behaviour. The booing was condemned in every morning newspaper by the broadsheets’ boring football reporters and condemned once more by the manager of England, Fabio Capello, and the captain of England (and part-time professor of Lucasian mathematics at Cambridge University), Rio Ferdinand. ‘I hope they will feel ashamed when they get home,’ said Rio, keeping a straight face. A very straight, long face. The truth is, they should have booed Rio too, but we’ll come to that.
It has never occurred to me not to boo Ashley Cole, regardless of what activity he is engaged in. Even by the standards of our age, he is a magnificently horrid fellow; apparently rather dense but possessed of an extraordinarily high opinion of himself, while being some way short of truly adept at football. He felt, as an Arsenal player, grotesquely undervalued at £60,000 per week, so he moved to that whore’s paradise, Chelsea, where they agreed to pay him a few thousand more. There may have been some in the crowd booing him simply for that. Later, he cheated on his missus, Cheryl Cole, with some woman he met in a club and whom he later vomited over, as you do. There may have been some gallants in the crowd at Wembley still booing him for that. But most were booing him for what he did in that game against Kazakhstan, while maybe taking previous offences into consideration.
What Cole did, when England were (by extreme good fortune) two nil ahead, was this: under no pressure whatsoever he lofted the ball back vaguely in the direction of England’s goalkeeper, David James, where an opposing forward seized upon it and, having recovered from surprise at his good fortune, scored a goal. ‘Anyone can make a mistake,’ said the former England defender Graham Le Saux after the game. Le Saux once made a bad mistake in a far more important World Cup game and nobody booed him. The thing is, by and large football fans do not boo players who make mistakes and last week it was Cole’s monumental arrogance which was being booed, not the ‘mistake’ per se. Like a good many of his team-mates, he had afforded the lowly opposition no respect whatsoever; he seemed to think that merely by his gilded presence on the pitch, these ghastly camel-chasing Borat people would succumb, without anybody needing to try too hard. This is why England trooped off at half-time drawing nil-nil with a country nestled below New Caledonia and Kuwait in the world football rankings.
Cole’s insouciant pass was the almost perfect expression of this fashionable contempt for the fans and for the people against whom he was playing; whether or not it is an unconscious contempt is a moot point. Football has become a singularly unlikeable game, at the top end, devoid of the stuff which was once attractive and even compelling to the supporters: loyalty to a team, hard work, commitment and so on. It is defined by money and money alone. I suppose if you pay someone 60,000 quid or more every week, then they are bound, in the end, to suffer some sort of mental delusion and believe that they are worth that sort of money. Especially if they have the IQ of a meat-and-potato pie. Booing Ashley Cole, then, was a considered and even compassionate attempt to redress the balance a little, to inject some reality into his strange and rarefied life. He should consider it as a form of psychotherapy, handed out free of charge by people who had just paid three or four times the amount of their weekly shopping bill on a ticket to watch the idiot play.
There is evidence, at last, that Premier League football is reaching the end of its golden tether. The wages paid to players and the sums expended to acquire them were always colloquially regarded as ‘obscene’; now, though, they may also be regarded as unsustainable. English football clubs are in debt to the tune of £3 billion right now and both the chairman of the Football Association, Lord Triesman, and the boss of Uefa, Michel Platini, have insisted that this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue. Platini is accused of being anti- English because his venom has been directed, in the past, largely at Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea. Triesman has also been attacked in the British press, most usually by football experts who could happily out-Pangloss Dr Pangloss. The disaffection or scepticism, call it what you will, in which the national team is regarded by its usually ultra-loyal supporters is, likewise, evidence of a bottom-up revolt against the way the game is.
Below the Premier League a succession of clubs have traipsed towards bankruptcy and administration, strangled by their ambition to join the elite when they do not remotely have the money to do so. Famous and semi-famous names have hovered before the brink: Leeds United, Coventry City, Cardiff City, Swindon Town, Bournemouth, Luton Town. Good-sized towns or cities which, in most cases, have been easily able to support a club providing it is run along the sort of economic lines that apply to the rest of the world. It is not inconceivable that this season might see the near collapse of one or two of the biggest clubs, the credit crunch having suddenly reminded their billionaire owners that a fortune can easily be wiped out overnight and that the best thing to do might be to sell up and get the hell out. And meanwhile, in the stands, the fans who have seen their ticket prices rise exponentially year on year have decided that they have had enough. We should all boo along with them.
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