In fact it should be compulsory to boo certain footballers. Robbie Savage (the most ludicrous example of the riches available to players of limited ability), Dennis Wise, Dai Davies, Craig Bellamy, Gary Cooper and anyone in a Leeds shirt should always cop some verbal flak.

And so should Cole, as soon as we've stopped laughing at the sort of schoolboy error he delivered at Wembley. Amazingly Cole was described as 'the best left-back in the world' by his short-sighted team-mate Frank Lampard, a comment that should ensure he is also jeered at every opportunity in the future.

We should all remember Cole's hysterical autobiography when he revealed he became so incensed that Arsenal only offered him £60,000 per week that he almost crashed his car.

We should also remember the clandestine meetings when certain people were attempting to break his contract at the club that discovered and nurtured him so he could join his perfect club, the equally unlovely Chelsea.

And we should remember that this apparently sensitive footballer thought nothing of betraying his gorgeous wife with some barmaid/groupie/slapper.

Remember all that and boo him with even greater vigour next time you see him as players like him need to be brought back down to earth.

England won't win the World Cup because they're not good enough, not because their egotistical, prima-donna players have some abuse hurled at them.



AMAZINGLY the non-stop twittering of those awful radio and TV commentators about the 'disgrace' of fans booing Cole wasn't the most irritating part of England's boring win over Kazakhstan.

Just how the BBC continue to justify the presence of Graham Taylor as their 'expert' England pundit is beyond me. Taylor was the man who played top centre-half Gary Pallister at right-back in a World Cup qualifier in Norway (we lost), failed to take England to the World Cup Finals in 1994, capped Carlton Palmer, and embarrassed himself and the nation by allowing TV cameras to shadow him in that failed World Cup bid (he didn't have the decency to tell the players).

But none of that was Taylor's fault according to the man himself, someone with an ego out of all proportion to his ability, in his latest TV offering. The media was to blame.

Taylor was a one-trick pony, a disciple of the long-ball game which made football unwatchable in his successful years at Vicarage Road, unless you were a Watford fan.

To hear him pontificate about the tactics a sophisticated Italian should be employing is really quite ridiculous.

But then one of his sidekicks is Mark Lawrenson, a man with so many great insights and ideas about football, it's staggering to think he was such a God awful manager at London Road.



THE absence of any Premier League football matches at the weekend gave rugby union the chance to take centre stage, on Sky Sports at least.

But of course a whole series of boring, forward-dominated matches was overshadowed by Josh Lewsey chinning Danny Cipriani in a pre-match Wasps training session.

Now as Cipriani appears to be in love with himself even more than he's in love with the limelight, there is an amusing angle to the story, but on a serious note doesn't the incident expose rugby union once more as a sport that tolerates, and even glamourises, violence?

Can you imagine the furore if a footballer did what Lewsey did? Indeed Joey Barton is currently serving a lengthy ban for assaulting a team-mate at Manchester City.

But Lewsey gets off scot free as rugby passes off an act of violence 'as something that always happens in the build-up to a European game', according to Wasps and Wales coach Shaun Edwards before confirming that no disciplinary action would be taken.

I assume that's also the view of the rugby authorities, but if they have condemned the incident they've done it in private.

Continues on next page, plus Swanny's fanmail: