Monday 28 February 2011

Wow, what does a footballer have to do to get fired?

If I had an air rifle, I'd bring it to work tomorrow and go on a spree, tracking down the plagiarists and chatterboxes.*

Then I'd get arrested and fired.

Unlike Ashley Cole, the footballer. He brought a .22 air rifle to work and shot a work-experience student with it, from close range (at least he's capable of being on target occasionally). The Guardian's report is using the word 'inadvertently', though I fail to see how you can inadvertently put pellets in a gun, inadvertently point it at someone, then inadvertently pull the trigger. This must be some legally-mandated technical meaning of the word.

He hasn't been fired or arrested. Nor is he suspended - he's playing tomorrow.

His manager says:
"[There was] never any chance [Cole being sacked]. He's our player. He's always put in very good behaviour here. When a player says 'sorry, I made a mistake', it's difficult to do different. We're not out of control. If players step over the line, we take a decision."
Hm. What else 'good behaviour' should we take into account?


  • Fined £75,000 for sneaking behind Arsenal's back to get a lucrative transfer to Chelsea: he later declared he 'forgave' Arsenal for… er… making him very rich and selling him to Chelsea.
  • Repeated disrespect for referees
  • Arrested and fined for being drunk and disorderly.
  • Declared in a text that he 'hates England and all the fucking people in it' after public opinion on his England performance wasn't entirely up to snuff.
  • Wooed his various mistresses with text-pics of his tackle. Not the footballing kind either.
  • Most delightfully of all, one of his conquests claims that he took a moment out of their horizontal athletics to vomit over the side of the bed, before resuming matters. To be fair though, he was gentlemanly enough to swig some mouthwash first. 

What a paragon!

I liked the manager's declaration that:

"No one can say we're out of control… It's not true that there's a lack of discipline here. You can judge the players on the pitch, and they show fair play, respect for the referees, respect for the fans. This is what we have to judge, not other things"
No, things are going swimmingly when your star players are coming to work armed. Firing guns at students is obviously in the unimportant 'other things' category to be ignored.

*This is a joke, by the way.

3 comments:

Benjamin Judge said...

So Chelsea don't discipline their players eh? Tell that to Adrian Mutu.

The Plashing Vole said...

Oh Ben, I wasn't making a wider point about Chelsea in general. Just this case, with this manager.

Mutu took coke and arguably damaged himself more than anyone else, but his drug tests could have invalidated the team's results, which is perhaps why he received the punishment he did. Cole hasn't endangered Chelsea's performance, so maybe they don't care so much?

Benjamin Judge said...

It was a joke!

(my comment was a joke, not Cole's bringing a gun to work was a joke)