Saturday, July 24, 2010

Ashley Cole event reeks of stand in standards

Matthew Syed, Sports Journalist of the Year & , : {}

Ashley Cole, if you ask me, is rather vain and self-obsessed, even compared with his associate footballers. He is also, according to reports over new days, a sequence adulterer, an claim that has caused Cheryl Tweedy to make well known their separation. But because on Earth any of this entitles Chelsea to wallop the defender with a excellent of �400,000 is over those of us who thought that a mans passionate poise was a make a difference for him and his family rather than his employer.

Of course, the bar are spinning the line that it is not illicit love affair per se that is the genuine problem, but that the purported meeting took place on bar time, whilst the group were on a pre-season debate to the United States.

If zero else, you have to admire Chelseas ingenuity. Are we severely to hold that players are and regularly have been taboo from carrying sex on unfamiliar trips? Or could it be that the Chelsea spinners were desperately scrambling around for a justification, however tenuous, for their shameful stand in standards?

After all, when John Terry, the Chelsea captain, was purported to have had extramarital sex (with the ex-girlfriend of a former team-mate, no less), not usually did the bar suggest him full support, they additionally gave him special management to cocktail off to Dubai in an try to rescue his marriage.

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As a consequence, Terry longed for an FA Cup fifth-round tie, to illustrate compromising his teams prospects (assuming, as I suspect we must, that Terry is a improved centre half than any intensity replacement).

But usually a dope or a part of of the Chelsea house would disagree that Coles antics have shop-worn his team, since that he is carrying the majority appropriate deteriorate of his career and is regarded as one of the majority achieved defenders on the planet.

It all raises the subject of what happened to the honest avowal of Carlo Ancelotti, the manager, when he pronounced that the usually thing that counts is what happens on the pitch.

Chelsea gave us nonetheless an additional precious e.g. of pomposity this week when they purported that Cole had told Steve Atkins that he had not had sex with the lady in question, to illustrate causing the clubs head of communications to suggest the lady recommendation on how to understanding with the media. Chelsea have let it be well known that they are confounded at Coles eagerness to trick a valued worker in to orchestrating a cover-up.

But this is nonsense, too. Even if Cole corroborates this version of events (which is doubtful), he is entitled to ask because the indeterminate of bar officials was not of any good regard when Terry personally took 3 businessmen essentially clandestine reporters on a debate of the precision belligerent (on bar time and on bar property) in lapse for �10,000. If the bar finds out, the a small bit . . . you know, Terry told them.

Later, when some-more trips were discussed, Terry said: Yeah, but you short them that they dont verbalise to no one. Cos if any one finds out, afterwards we cant do it no more.

Terry has claimed that the money was dictated for a childrens charity, nonetheless a little might consternation because he was so penetrating to keep the total thing hush-hush when his intentions were so noble.

Perhaps the majority fascinating, not to contend ironical, growth came when it was suggested that it is Roman Abramovich who is at the back of the remarkable enterprise to levy a sold prophesy of passionate probity on the club. It was pronounced that the eighth month oligarch is endangered about how pale headlines are impinging on the clubs code and was austere that the players had to be brought in to line. Nobody is on top of the rules, it was pronounced with roughly biblical portentousness.

May we infer that the board, that is obliged for implementing the new reliable regime, is additionally to confront these difficult standards? That nothing of them is going to have or has had passionate dalliances, quite not on unfamiliar trips (club time and all that)? That the owners is additionally over scolding when it comes to passionate morality? If so, it is usually right and correct to point out that Abramovich has had dual divorces, carrying left Irina, mother No 2, and their five young kids for a 25-year-old socialite.

The usually fragment of legitimacy for Abramovichs position resides in the thought that implicitly indeterminate poise is erosive of the clubs brand. But does he severely suppose that a passionate confront in between consenting adults is some-more deleterious to Chelseas repute than the complete bar being bankrolled by a man who done his billions in one of the shadiest privatisations of the Boris Yeltsin era? Who has certified in justice to essential outrageous bribes to get his hands on his assets? Who increased his shareholding in Sibneft, an oil company, by allegedly utilizing salary payments to take over worker-controlled batch and conducting a sealed share issue in one of Sibnefts majority essential subsidiaries?

Quite how Russians (millions of whom live underneath the misery line) feel about their emperor resources being recycled in the form of multimillion-pound annual subsidies to a football bar in West London has never entirely been explored. But that Abramovich around his minions at Chelsea can float a dignified high equine over an employees in isolation poise but inspiring a staggering recoil shows the border to that we have lost the dignified bearings.

Even as we are perturbed by Coles purported passionate doubt or disloyalty and feel magnetism for his wife, we contingency certainly admit that this is a make a difference for them, and not for any employer, however rich and powerful. Ultimately, it is not Coles poise that should appal us as most as the truth of the bar that, until now, he was unapproachable to represent.

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