The final victory of middle-class football

John Terry — the gift that keeps on giving. It is not enough that this stoic and rat-faced footballer should have provoked the most absurd and hilarious court case I have yet seen. Now it looks like there’ll be another one, perhaps even funnier, predicated upon a reaction to the fact that he wasn’t convicted of racially abusing another footballer, Anton Ferdinand, as everybody seemed to wish. Some chap ‘tweeted’ that Ashley Cole, who gave evidence on behalf of Terry, was a ‘choc ice’ — and of course now the police are involved. They had to be: it is deeply racist to liken black people to items of confectionery or popular snacks.

Interestingly, in a semantic sense, it is the ‘ice’ bit of the description which is considered offensive, not the ‘choc’ bit. It is a term which implies that Ashley is black on the outside, which I think is OK, but white on the inside, which is definitely not. In other words he is a traitor to his race. There are many similar terms — Oreo, Bounty, coconut and so on — all of which suggest the same thing, that the subject is an ‘Uncle Tom’. I must say, ‘choc ice’ would not be the comestible I would choose to represent Mr Cole, if asked to do so. I’ve always thought of him as more of a Double Decker — a crisp layer of biscuit topped by a moist and sultry nougat. I am not sure if this is racist or not, but I daresay I will find out soon enough.

Aside from demanding that John Terry be further persecuted, this time by the Football Association, the middle-class sections of the media and the commentariat have also got it into their heads that football in general needs to change, too.