Betrayed by men behaving badly

The last time football faced screaming headlines like one today - "Soccer out of control" - was 20 years ago when football hooliganism was all the rage. And the then Football Association secretary Ted Croker was summoned to No 10 to be carpeted by Margaret Thatcher - who also believed all of Britain's ills could be blamed on the game - only to tell her: "Prime Minister, we want your thugs out of our game."

And there was a grain of truth in it. Violence was widespread then, and football merely a convenient focus for it, just as ferocious bingedrinking is an epidemic among young people today and young British footballers are merely reflecting their peer group. And the anger of many commentators, some of them hard-drinking themselves, is merely the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass.

Nevertheless, football can't take much more of these drunken rampages, not least because these men are professional athletes and are paid a king's ransom to set a better example. And the bad news flows in like a tide of sewage. West Ham players vomiting and urinating over a bar and an Oldham striker getting arrested for allegedly assaulting three people while drunk. And that's just Wednesday night's revels.

Some key questions have to be asked. Why don't they get drunk on private premises? Why do they have to make such a public exhibition of themselves? Above all, why don't the clubs who pay them so handsomely insist on good-behaviour clauses? And why, when someone needs to be made an example of - as Lee Bowyer certainly does - don't the clubs all stand together?

It is sickeningly predictable that on Wednesday two Premiership clubs rang Leeds to enquire about Bowyer. So dear old Bowyer's punishment could be an even bigger and better deal somewhere else. Do these cretins really think that trying to buy him is a suitable response to all the muck Bowyer, not for the first time, has chucked over the game? And did not his initial rejection of a club fine not indicate that this is a young man too thick even to learn from experiences as ghastly as those he's been through these past two years, and is highly likely to do it, or something like it, again?

Anyway, I suspect so far as buying Bowyer is concerned, chance would be a fine thing. Leeds don't seriously want to sell him, and even as you read this the chances are some stomach-churning kiss-and-makeup session at Elland Road will already be underway in good time for tomorrow's match.