Ashley Cole, last Saturday, was booed by England fans due a howler that presented Kazakhstan with their single goal in their 5-1 defeat. Some people (the deluded cretins on Sky’s Football Supplement) would have you believe that the reason was due to most of Wembley’s crowd being made up of Spurs and Arsenal fans. Yes, the journalists of England are truly champions of the truth gently stabbing you in the back of the head with their truthness fork.
Cole is, at a basic fundamentally level, a personification of the modern game. Arrogant, greedy and a cheat. The very epitome. Any other England player would not have got that level of abuse for a single mistake (especially in a game we won so comfortably), but Ashley is a special case.
You might argue that a minority booed, and the majority actually tried to drown out the booing with cheers. And that the people who did boo are not ‘proper fans’ but day trippers who see football as a pantomime rather than what it should be (in its purest traditional form). Anyone else would not have been on the receiving end of the booing and its harsh. But the media shouldn’t be making it back page news. They should save it for when we lose a game due to a howler and then crucify the player who is considered at fault (as long as that player is not a Big Four© player).