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Cole hits out at 'selfish, lazy' Arsenal youngsters
By Matt Hughes
ASHLEY COLE provides a damning indictment of Arsenal’s problems today as his old club prepare for another difficult test against SV Hamburg in the Champions League without the injured Thierry Henry.
In the final extract from his new book, the Chelsea defender, who made his first start for his new club in their 2-0 Champions League victory over Werder Bremen at Stamford Bridge last night, launches a scathing attack on his former team-mates, particularly the younger players, accusing them of being lazy, selfish and arrogant before dismissing them as having “big heads on young shoulders”.
After losing 11 Barclays Premiership matches last season, Arsène Wenger’s team have yet to win in the league this time around and Cole, who spent much of the 2005-06 campaign injured, thinks that he knows why. “The brutal truth is that too many people played for themselves,” he says. “I saw too much rubbish, lazy players who didn’t pull their weight and schoolboy errors.
“Some players were letting us get kicked and allowing team-mates to get bullied. Too many people took constructive criticism too personally and wouldn’t talk to you for a week. So I learnt to say nothing.”
Cole is particularly critical of Philippe Senderos and reveals tension between Robin van Persie and Fredrik Ljungberg. “I was stunned when I saw Martin Keown, an Arsenal legend, speaking to Philippe Senderos, advising him to get tough, do this and that,” Cole says. “Senderos just looked at him, blew his cheeks out and walked off.
“I remember feeling how fragmented we’d all become when Robin van Persie spoke up at training about Freddie Ljungberg, saying: ‘Why doesn’t he talk to me?’ Social occasions used to be a big thing, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about Kolo [Touré], [Emmanuel] Eboué, José Antonio Reyes, Cesc [Fàbregas] or Senderos.”
Cole also condemns Francesc Fàbregas as an “unproven featherweight” compared with the “heavyweight champion” that is Patrick Vieira, criticism unfortunately timed given that Fàbregas is on the brink of signing a new eight-year contract.
In the most detailed account of the infamous Battle of the Buffet at Old Trafford two years ago, Cole hints that it was the Spanish midfield player who threw the pizza at Sir Alex Ferguson. Cole confirms that the culprit was not English or French and is believed to be referring to Fàbregas.
“This slice of pizza came flying over my head and hit Fergie straight in the mush,” Cole says. “All I’ll say is that the culprit wasn’t English or French, so that should narrow it down.”
In a renewed attack on the Arsenal board, Cole says: “I can’t remember a time when they have counted the pennies so carefully. It’s got to the point where the finance men want to know who ate what, who ordered this, who ordered that after the team’s visits to hotels. We had to start writing down our orders like children on a school trip.”
Despite Chelsea’s victory last night, José Mourinho could not resist another dig at officialdom after bookings for John Terry, Didier Drogba, Lampard and Joe Cole. “”I shouldn’t say anything,” he said, before listing all the other clubs in the Champions League who had picked up one or no cautions
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Tickled pink by scenes from a hotel room. Does Cole think anyone will go for his tale of events? BY MARTIN SAMUEL, SPORTS WRITER OF THE YEAR
“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it”— Groucho Marx
SO WHAT is your favourite bit? Oh, come on, you must have one. We all do. OK, I’ll tell you mine. It is the moment when Ashley is giving evidence to the FA Premier League (FAPL) inquiry. “A brief meeting with Pini Zahavi was interrupted by a knock on the door,” he told them. “In walked the Chelsea manager and chief executive, there was general chit-chat and then we left.” Beautiful, isn’t it? General chit-chat: football’s equivalent of the yada, yada, yada. You don’t know the yada, yada, yada? Oh, sit down. You’ll like this. There is an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza is dating a girl called Marcy, who edits every story with the catch-all phrase “yada, yada, yada”. “So I’m on Third Avenue, minding my own business and, yada, yada, yada, I get a free massage and a facial . . .” At first, George finds this liberating because it allows him to gloss over uncomfortable events in his own life. “We were engaged to be married, we bought the wedding invitations and yada, yada, yada, I’m still single . . .” (In fact, he accidentally killed his fiancée, poisoning her with toxic adhesive after buying cheap invitation envelopes.) “What’s she doing now?” Marcy asks. “Yada,” George says. Then this happens. Marcy: “My old boyfriend came over last night and yada, yada, yada, I’m really tired today . . .” See where we are now? It is much the same with Cole. He yada-ed his illegal meeting with Chelsea to such an extent that compilers of the official FAPL report admitted grave difficulty in giving credence to his account, or that of his agent, Jonathan Barnett. There is a more detailed version of it in his book “Ashley Cole: My Dear God, Does He Really Think Anyone Will Go For This Nonsense”, sorry, Ashley Cole: My Defence, but the reason Chelsea officials are happy to have it out there, in contradiction to their evidence to the FAPL is because Cole’s yada, yada, yada description of the meeting is so incredible that no one will believe it. Cole is not so much a loose cannon as one with the shell stuck in the breach. He only hurts the firer. At one stage, he bizarrely adopts the language of the courtroom to point the finger at Arsenal over the acquisition of Gilberto Silva. He draws comparisons to his own predicament after meeting Chelsea, even though Arsenal sounded out Gilberto’s availability with those close to the player, not the player personally, and did not mention the name of their club. “By definition, Arsenal must be up to the same tricks as everyone else,” Cole concludes. Don’t you love that “by definition”? I wonder if he speaks like that at home. He probably tones it down for the book, actually. He wanted to use “ergo”, but the publishers wouldn’t let him. Still, it does not pay to get too po-faced about this because then we miss the fun. This is Cole on Arsenal: “I was naive to think my years of loyalty counted for anything . . .” Now we can get all high and mighty, but the fact is you’d pay good money over the West End for a line such as that placed in the mouth of a character who had just walked out of a clandestine meeting with his employers’ biggest rivals. Cole’s view of morality is also touching, his precedent-setting “previous good behaviour” defence revealing a brilliant legal mind sadly wasted patrolling the left flank at Stamford Bridge.
Cole is a radical thinker in this area because most of us see previous good behaviour only as a factor in misdemeanours: the employee with an otherwise unblemished record who comes back drunk after lunch with an old friend; the driver caught making an illegal turn when late for work after 20 years with a clean licence. Cole has widened the parameters to include previous good behaviour as an applicable defence in the case of significant transgressions, perhaps even capital offences.
Imagine Cole’s passionate plea on behalf of Jack the Ripper. “Your honour, I know it looks bad, what with the surgical instruments and the bloody entrails, but think of all the times my client took to the streets of London and didn’t eviscerate any prostitutes . . .”
In Cole’s world, what he sadly fails to understand is that loyalty is not something from which one can take a break. A person is either loyal, or he is not. No half-measures. All the days when Cole did not shack up with Chelsea ceased to matter the moment he did, just as the phrase “yes, but think of all the times I didn’t sleep with your sister” is unlikely to get a marriage back on track.
And if logic takes a time-out in certain chapters, things are not looking too good for advanced mathematics, either. Those turning to the book for advice on how to get ahead in business are likely to be disappointed. Cole believes that because he wanted £60,000 a week to play for Arsenal and was offered only £55,000, the fallout between player and club was over the sum of five grand. Maybe he thinks his first mortgage payment settled that debt, too.
In reality, the discrepancy on his wage works out at £260,000 annually, which over the course of a five-year contract equates to £1.3 million. And what can you get for £1.3 million these days (apart from Kolo Touré, with Emmanuel Eboué thrown in, if you are Arsène Wenger)?
Throughout his Arsenal ordeal, Cole is accompanied by his trusty sidekick, Barnett, chairman of the Stellar Group, a global sports management consultancy business that has 273 English footballers on its books, some of whom you will even have heard of. Barnett is there to offer sound professional advice and cool judgment, which is unfortunate because, when it matters most, counsel and client are inadvertently depicted as a pair of screaming ninnies.
“One telephone call changed everything about how I viewed and felt about Arsenal,” Cole writes. “ ‘Ash! Are you listening?’ said a virtually hyperventilating Barnett. ‘I’m here in the office and David Dein is saying they aren’t going to give you £60k a week. They’ve agreed £55k and this is their best and final offer. Are you happy with that?’ I nearly swerved off the road. ‘He is taking the piss, Jonathan!’ I yelled down the phone. I was so incensed, I was trembling with anger. I couldn’t believe what I’d heard’. ”
Just the pair for a crisis, these two. Barnett is an adviser whose reaction to the cut and thrust of contract negotiation is to reach for a brown paper bag and inhale for ten minutes, while Cole nearly causes a pile-up the moment anybody says “no” to him.
It could be argued that, because Cole claims that his wish was to remain at Arsenal, Barnett’s duty was to facilitate that desire, by emphasising the positives of the offer or by viewing it as a work in progress. He could have told Arsenal to go away and think again, without the drama; for that matter, so could Cole.
Arsenal did finally agree a £60,000-a-week contract, so it was not their best and final offer, after all. What would be truly fascinating would be to discover what Barnett received as his percentage of the deal that took Cole to Chelsea and what his fee to re-sign him at Arsenal would have been. Maybe Cole could ask him and include his answer in the paperback version, just to clear things up.
Having suffered appalling innuendo about his own objectives, the suggestion that his adviser may also have been financially motivated must hurt him deeply.
It becomes apparent in Cole’s meanderings that Barnett has a chauffeur-driven Bentley, which may or may not be one of the signs of the apocalypse, but it is certainly proof that it does not take the brains of Lloyd George to make a few quid out of football.
Cole seems to be under the impression that Arsenal reneged on a deal, when all his representative had was a handshake from Dein, the Arsenal vice-chairman. Now there are those who might joke that after getting a handshake from certain Premiership chairmen, it is usually a good time to check the whereabouts of your jewellery, but even if Barnett’s trust in Dein was total, he must have known that the Arsenal director would need his recommendations ratified by the board.
Does Barnett represent all his clients on a handshake, or is it more the fact of the matter that Cole did not have anything that could be considered a formal offer and the deal had yet to be done? Anyway, there is, no doubt, more to come and I would hate to spoil it for you. This is a work that contains something for everyone. The thrilling story of a boy and his agent, how they grow together and, yada, yada, yada, end up acting like a pair of chiselling money-grabbers. George Costanza would have loved it. Not to mention Groucho.
By Matt Hughes
ASHLEY COLE provides a damning indictment of Arsenal’s problems today as his old club prepare for another difficult test against SV Hamburg in the Champions League without the injured Thierry Henry.
In the final extract from his new book, the Chelsea defender, who made his first start for his new club in their 2-0 Champions League victory over Werder Bremen at Stamford Bridge last night, launches a scathing attack on his former team-mates, particularly the younger players, accusing them of being lazy, selfish and arrogant before dismissing them as having “big heads on young shoulders”.
After losing 11 Barclays Premiership matches last season, Arsène Wenger’s team have yet to win in the league this time around and Cole, who spent much of the 2005-06 campaign injured, thinks that he knows why. “The brutal truth is that too many people played for themselves,” he says. “I saw too much rubbish, lazy players who didn’t pull their weight and schoolboy errors.
“Some players were letting us get kicked and allowing team-mates to get bullied. Too many people took constructive criticism too personally and wouldn’t talk to you for a week. So I learnt to say nothing.”
Cole is particularly critical of Philippe Senderos and reveals tension between Robin van Persie and Fredrik Ljungberg. “I was stunned when I saw Martin Keown, an Arsenal legend, speaking to Philippe Senderos, advising him to get tough, do this and that,” Cole says. “Senderos just looked at him, blew his cheeks out and walked off.
“I remember feeling how fragmented we’d all become when Robin van Persie spoke up at training about Freddie Ljungberg, saying: ‘Why doesn’t he talk to me?’ Social occasions used to be a big thing, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about Kolo [Touré], [Emmanuel] Eboué, José Antonio Reyes, Cesc [Fàbregas] or Senderos.”
Cole also condemns Francesc Fàbregas as an “unproven featherweight” compared with the “heavyweight champion” that is Patrick Vieira, criticism unfortunately timed given that Fàbregas is on the brink of signing a new eight-year contract.
In the most detailed account of the infamous Battle of the Buffet at Old Trafford two years ago, Cole hints that it was the Spanish midfield player who threw the pizza at Sir Alex Ferguson. Cole confirms that the culprit was not English or French and is believed to be referring to Fàbregas.
“This slice of pizza came flying over my head and hit Fergie straight in the mush,” Cole says. “All I’ll say is that the culprit wasn’t English or French, so that should narrow it down.”
In a renewed attack on the Arsenal board, Cole says: “I can’t remember a time when they have counted the pennies so carefully. It’s got to the point where the finance men want to know who ate what, who ordered this, who ordered that after the team’s visits to hotels. We had to start writing down our orders like children on a school trip.”
Despite Chelsea’s victory last night, José Mourinho could not resist another dig at officialdom after bookings for John Terry, Didier Drogba, Lampard and Joe Cole. “”I shouldn’t say anything,” he said, before listing all the other clubs in the Champions League who had picked up one or no cautions
--------------------------------------------
Tickled pink by scenes from a hotel room. Does Cole think anyone will go for his tale of events? BY MARTIN SAMUEL, SPORTS WRITER OF THE YEAR
“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it”— Groucho Marx
SO WHAT is your favourite bit? Oh, come on, you must have one. We all do. OK, I’ll tell you mine. It is the moment when Ashley is giving evidence to the FA Premier League (FAPL) inquiry. “A brief meeting with Pini Zahavi was interrupted by a knock on the door,” he told them. “In walked the Chelsea manager and chief executive, there was general chit-chat and then we left.” Beautiful, isn’t it? General chit-chat: football’s equivalent of the yada, yada, yada. You don’t know the yada, yada, yada? Oh, sit down. You’ll like this. There is an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza is dating a girl called Marcy, who edits every story with the catch-all phrase “yada, yada, yada”. “So I’m on Third Avenue, minding my own business and, yada, yada, yada, I get a free massage and a facial . . .” At first, George finds this liberating because it allows him to gloss over uncomfortable events in his own life. “We were engaged to be married, we bought the wedding invitations and yada, yada, yada, I’m still single . . .” (In fact, he accidentally killed his fiancée, poisoning her with toxic adhesive after buying cheap invitation envelopes.) “What’s she doing now?” Marcy asks. “Yada,” George says. Then this happens. Marcy: “My old boyfriend came over last night and yada, yada, yada, I’m really tired today . . .” See where we are now? It is much the same with Cole. He yada-ed his illegal meeting with Chelsea to such an extent that compilers of the official FAPL report admitted grave difficulty in giving credence to his account, or that of his agent, Jonathan Barnett. There is a more detailed version of it in his book “Ashley Cole: My Dear God, Does He Really Think Anyone Will Go For This Nonsense”, sorry, Ashley Cole: My Defence, but the reason Chelsea officials are happy to have it out there, in contradiction to their evidence to the FAPL is because Cole’s yada, yada, yada description of the meeting is so incredible that no one will believe it. Cole is not so much a loose cannon as one with the shell stuck in the breach. He only hurts the firer. At one stage, he bizarrely adopts the language of the courtroom to point the finger at Arsenal over the acquisition of Gilberto Silva. He draws comparisons to his own predicament after meeting Chelsea, even though Arsenal sounded out Gilberto’s availability with those close to the player, not the player personally, and did not mention the name of their club. “By definition, Arsenal must be up to the same tricks as everyone else,” Cole concludes. Don’t you love that “by definition”? I wonder if he speaks like that at home. He probably tones it down for the book, actually. He wanted to use “ergo”, but the publishers wouldn’t let him. Still, it does not pay to get too po-faced about this because then we miss the fun. This is Cole on Arsenal: “I was naive to think my years of loyalty counted for anything . . .” Now we can get all high and mighty, but the fact is you’d pay good money over the West End for a line such as that placed in the mouth of a character who had just walked out of a clandestine meeting with his employers’ biggest rivals. Cole’s view of morality is also touching, his precedent-setting “previous good behaviour” defence revealing a brilliant legal mind sadly wasted patrolling the left flank at Stamford Bridge.
Cole is a radical thinker in this area because most of us see previous good behaviour only as a factor in misdemeanours: the employee with an otherwise unblemished record who comes back drunk after lunch with an old friend; the driver caught making an illegal turn when late for work after 20 years with a clean licence. Cole has widened the parameters to include previous good behaviour as an applicable defence in the case of significant transgressions, perhaps even capital offences.
Imagine Cole’s passionate plea on behalf of Jack the Ripper. “Your honour, I know it looks bad, what with the surgical instruments and the bloody entrails, but think of all the times my client took to the streets of London and didn’t eviscerate any prostitutes . . .”
In Cole’s world, what he sadly fails to understand is that loyalty is not something from which one can take a break. A person is either loyal, or he is not. No half-measures. All the days when Cole did not shack up with Chelsea ceased to matter the moment he did, just as the phrase “yes, but think of all the times I didn’t sleep with your sister” is unlikely to get a marriage back on track.
And if logic takes a time-out in certain chapters, things are not looking too good for advanced mathematics, either. Those turning to the book for advice on how to get ahead in business are likely to be disappointed. Cole believes that because he wanted £60,000 a week to play for Arsenal and was offered only £55,000, the fallout between player and club was over the sum of five grand. Maybe he thinks his first mortgage payment settled that debt, too.
In reality, the discrepancy on his wage works out at £260,000 annually, which over the course of a five-year contract equates to £1.3 million. And what can you get for £1.3 million these days (apart from Kolo Touré, with Emmanuel Eboué thrown in, if you are Arsène Wenger)?
Throughout his Arsenal ordeal, Cole is accompanied by his trusty sidekick, Barnett, chairman of the Stellar Group, a global sports management consultancy business that has 273 English footballers on its books, some of whom you will even have heard of. Barnett is there to offer sound professional advice and cool judgment, which is unfortunate because, when it matters most, counsel and client are inadvertently depicted as a pair of screaming ninnies.
“One telephone call changed everything about how I viewed and felt about Arsenal,” Cole writes. “ ‘Ash! Are you listening?’ said a virtually hyperventilating Barnett. ‘I’m here in the office and David Dein is saying they aren’t going to give you £60k a week. They’ve agreed £55k and this is their best and final offer. Are you happy with that?’ I nearly swerved off the road. ‘He is taking the piss, Jonathan!’ I yelled down the phone. I was so incensed, I was trembling with anger. I couldn’t believe what I’d heard’. ”
Just the pair for a crisis, these two. Barnett is an adviser whose reaction to the cut and thrust of contract negotiation is to reach for a brown paper bag and inhale for ten minutes, while Cole nearly causes a pile-up the moment anybody says “no” to him.
It could be argued that, because Cole claims that his wish was to remain at Arsenal, Barnett’s duty was to facilitate that desire, by emphasising the positives of the offer or by viewing it as a work in progress. He could have told Arsenal to go away and think again, without the drama; for that matter, so could Cole.
Arsenal did finally agree a £60,000-a-week contract, so it was not their best and final offer, after all. What would be truly fascinating would be to discover what Barnett received as his percentage of the deal that took Cole to Chelsea and what his fee to re-sign him at Arsenal would have been. Maybe Cole could ask him and include his answer in the paperback version, just to clear things up.
Having suffered appalling innuendo about his own objectives, the suggestion that his adviser may also have been financially motivated must hurt him deeply.
It becomes apparent in Cole’s meanderings that Barnett has a chauffeur-driven Bentley, which may or may not be one of the signs of the apocalypse, but it is certainly proof that it does not take the brains of Lloyd George to make a few quid out of football.
Cole seems to be under the impression that Arsenal reneged on a deal, when all his representative had was a handshake from Dein, the Arsenal vice-chairman. Now there are those who might joke that after getting a handshake from certain Premiership chairmen, it is usually a good time to check the whereabouts of your jewellery, but even if Barnett’s trust in Dein was total, he must have known that the Arsenal director would need his recommendations ratified by the board.
Does Barnett represent all his clients on a handshake, or is it more the fact of the matter that Cole did not have anything that could be considered a formal offer and the deal had yet to be done? Anyway, there is, no doubt, more to come and I would hate to spoil it for you. This is a work that contains something for everyone. The thrilling story of a boy and his agent, how they grow together and, yada, yada, yada, end up acting like a pair of chiselling money-grabbers. George Costanza would have loved it. Not to mention Groucho.
WHat's the world coming to.