Ashley Cole - An Appreciation

Many professional footballers are decent people.

Some are buckets of shit.

Amongst the latter, Ashley Cole has clambered to the top of the septic tank with repeated demonstrations of ignorance, arrogance, petulance, avarice, foul play and yobbery (these remarks are confined to his football career - I make no comment on the allegations of adultery and gay orgies etc which attend his private life, since I know nothing about any of that).

He is quite possibly the most disgusting specimen in the football zoo. A bling-laden knob, with a massive cavity where other people have brain matter.

All of this on the back of a sharply limited quasi-talent.

These comments are only partly inspired by his performance against Spurs the other night, when not only did he perform a potential leg-breaker tackle on Alan Hutton, he then denied his wrong-doing in a prolonged episode of utterly disgraceful dissent directed towards the referee.

I wasn’t surprised to witness that display since I’ve always thought Cole was a totally ignorant bastard par excellence, and his behaviour was so typical of him that it barely merited a mention on this blog. May I also observe here that dissent on that scale has been a permanently disfiguring feature of Chelsea’s football for several years, and is part of the reason why everyone hates them. The words ‘Chelsea’ and ’sport’ can barely be used in the same sentence.

No, the reason I’ve leapt into print now is that I have just read a quite unbelievable quote from the Chelsea manager, Avram Grant, in which he says, in a quite stunning example of doublethink, “Personally I give great credit to Ashley. He behaved like a mature guy. He saw he did something wrong and he apologised. No one pushed him to apologise. He took responsibility. We need to give him a lot of credit for this“.

Apparently this recognises that a couple of days after the game Cole apologised to Hutton for his tackle and to the referee for his dissent. This is his apology -

“I’d like to apologise to anyone I offended and of course Alan Hutton who I tackled,” Cole said. “I didn’t mean to go in hard that way. It was high but I tried to read the ball and get the ball first, but he was a little bit too quick for me. It wasn’t malicious and I’m a little disappointed with what people are saying, that I meant it.

“Of course it was a bad tackle at the time but in the heat of the moment you want to win the game and win every tackle, and as I said I’m sorry for Alan, but it was never meant.”

“I’m an emotional person,” said Cole, “things can happen on the pitch very quickly but I didn’t mean to disrespect the referee.

“I recognise this is a part of my game that I need to work on and control.”

And for that, we’re supposed to applaud this prick.

Count me out.

I would ban him for life.

My Favourite Books

No 71 - The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson

This is a squib, but the most elegant squib imaginable. The delightful Dover Thrift Edition which you see here contains three related short stories totalling a mere 59 pages. But how intriguing, exciting and amusing these pages are!

I first read these stories about 40 years ago, and I am reviewing them from memory. They are set in the gas-lit streets of Victorian London with the odd excursion to Paris and they concern the activities and practices of ‘the Suicide Club’.

As soon as the phrase ‘the Suicide Club’ enters your consciousness, your brain almost immediately creates the story for you in advance. If you imagine that it’s a club where the members wish to do away with themselves, but for one reason or another, haven’t been able to summon the courage to perform the dreadful act, then you are correct - if you further imagine that they play cards for the ‘honour’ of being ‘victim’ and ‘deliverer’ then you are right again. And if you finally divine that before the next meeting of the club the victim will meet with ‘accidental’ death at the hands of the deliverer, then you are Robert Louis Stevenson.

The main character in the stories is Prince Florizel of Bohemia (the playful nature of Stevenson’s approach evident from the fact that this is also the name of a character in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale) and his sidekick, Colonel Geraldine. Readers of Viz may detect a striking similarity between Florizel and Geraldine on the one hand and Raffles, Gentleman Thug and his companion, Bunny, on the other.

This is a book that you can very easily read in less than one hour. Perhaps a delight to be enjoyed in full on the delayed Edinburgh to Glasgow train in the middle of some lazy, sunny afternoon when you’ve got a compartment to yourself.

RLS has been long overdue in making an appearance here, though this is going to be the first of many.

Cricket News

All the pundits said the 3rd Test would be a runs-fest draw on the flat as a pancake pitch at Napier.

Explain to me please why England are currently 37-4?

And even that is a considerable recovery from 4-3 earlier.

Good grief.

Blasphemy for Easter

We’ve previously featured some alternative last suppers - now here’s Mickey Mouse and the Simpsons - these and many more feature on

http://culturepopped.blogspot.com/2007/04/suddenly-last-supper.html