Mutu

So another over-paid professional falls victim to the lure of cocaine. He doesn't get caught in Stringfellows chopping one out on the cistern, no, much better to ingest your drug from the flat stomach of your porno star girlfriend and get caught by a cameraman in a flat over the road with a long lens. If you are going to go down (pun intended) then best to go down in flames. He gets sacked by his football club who terminate his contract and kiss goodbye to a £16,000,000 asset (not to worry though, the owner of the club drops that down the back of his sofa). They think that he will not see the green of a football pitch for a good year or so and visualise a very large, very hefty book being thrown at their former charge by the FA. He gets seven months and his former club issue a statement saying the punishment is to lenient. Maybe they were ruing the decision to tear up his contract so quickly. The swiftness with which the club claimed the moral high ground made me a little suspicious. They had called for Mutu to be target-tested by the FA because they thought he was using recreational drugs. I would like to know how long they sat on their suspicions before grassing him up to the authorities and the dope-testers? Does this make them guilty also. He must have played some games, even for the reserves, whilst under suspicion? Should they have not acted immediately on the suspicions they had and got him tested pronto?
So we have the radio phone-ins and there is always one who will ring up and trot out the old "role-model" chesnut. I find this staggering. If footballers are role-models to the youth of today then we will be in a sorry state in about twenty years. Even the most literate of footballers, for example Michael Owen, cannot string a sentence together without every sentence being littered with "you know...eeer...you know" and the England captain is a mumbling, semi-illiterate who throws the usual cliches out of the side of his mouth. I think that the players are role-models whilst they are on the pitch. As soon as they are off it I don't think kids are interested. They can aspire to do a few Joe Cole tricks or a Thierry Henry back heel and even a Robert Pires tumble in the box. The more impressionable kids may even aspire to the flash car, Prada suit and stupid haircut but developing an interest in drugs because one or two footballers have been caught at it?? Don't make me laugh. I reckon you could interview every under-12 going to a game at Stamford Bridge and ask them what they think of Mr Mutu's nocturnal habits and I reckon 99% will tell you that taking drugs is a bad thing if you want to be a footballer. I believe the other 1% will be future candidates for the England captaincy.