Go forth and sow though royal oats

Ashley Cole and John Terry are two Chelsea players working to save their marriages following allegations of affairs. There are any number of reasons why someone would stray and Ian Wright in the Sun has come up with a cracker: It’s the clubs’ fault for encouraging players to settle down too early. I remember Eddie Murphy in Coming To America being encouraged to ‘sow his royal oats’ before settling down and it seems Wrighty is a big believer in that philosophy.

Football clubs have always encouraged their players to settle down. Most managers like them to marry and have kids in their early 20s, as it has generally been accepted that a happy home life makes a player more focused at work.

Yet I am now giving the opposite advice to mates of mine who are professional footballers and single.

What is happening to both Ashley Cole and John Terry proves the modern-day footballer should settle down only when he is totally ready for commitment.

Obviously, there are exceptions. It is widely accepted that Wayne Rooney has become a better player since he settled down at a relatively young age.

In general, people now marry and have kids far later than they used to. In football, though, nothing much has changed. A lot of lads are still getting hitched early. I don't see why the rush to walk down the aisle, even if the club manager says he would rather see his team all playing happy families.

I have also told my mates not to make the mistakes I made, which I regret to this day. It is better to go out and date plenty of women, providing they, of course, are also single.

We can’t get away from Ashley Cole and Kevin Garside in the Daily Telegraph points out that people’s desire for lurid headlines will ensure non-sporting antics will feature more prominently than what goes on in the sporting arena.

It is a measure of these enlightened times that, among the myriad selections on which one may place a bet in football, the list includes divorce. The bookies have closed the account on Ashley Cole. Reports from the Cheryl corner in Los Angeles seem conclusive. They say: “It’s over.

The willingness of William Hill to quote on the disintegration of a marriage says as much about us as it does the happy couple. We roll the dice on private grief. You can hedge your bets by following the text traffic between the warring parties. Who has lost their moral compass, Cole for his extramarital indulgence, or the public for gorging on the detail?

The following question was posed by a Mr Colin Smith on a newspaper website. “A very boring man who plays a very boring game gets very rich and has sex with lots of beautiful women. His wife doesn’t like it. Where’s the story; and why is it top of the news, even before the real crises in the world?”

Smith’s post hit the bull’s-eye. It reduced our prurient interest in the life of one famous figure to the tawdry fundamentals with which we appear besotted. It related to Tiger Woods, but its application is universal. For Woods, copy and paste football’s ritual sinners Cole and John Terry. They are all at it.

This stuff consumes us. We have become a nation of voyeurs, training the long lens at the curtains of the rich and famous in the hope of glimpsing a quick grope. When we catch them out we throw the moral book at them with the force of a medieval legate on the lookout for heretics in the attic.