Too many big heads on young shoulders

It’s like I told Sol [Campbell] one day, I wouldn’t go to war with these guys because they’re not fighting for one another, not tackling enough, not being verbal enough, not being physical enough. Some players were letting us get kicked and allowing team-mates to get bullied.

In the old days, I’d have been able to speak about it and get it off my chest, but in the new era, too many people took constructive criticism way too personally and wouldn’t talk to you for a week. So I learnt to say nothing, to keep the peace in the dressing-room.

“The young guns”, in my opinion, were not prepared to listen or learn.

Another thing was the silence in games. I think back to my time playing alongside a screaming and shouting Tony Adams. But last season, senior players started to notice how the atmosphere within the team was “dead”. There was nowhere near as much talking going on. Even training was quiet, and that’s weird. London Colney don’t have the same atmosphere no more, which means it don’t have enough people pulling together.

One of Arsenal’s big problems last season was too many big heads on young shoulders. Take, for example, when Martin Keown, now 40 years old, was invited down to spend some time with the lads at training. The boss wanted someone who was a winner to spend time with the younger players, to push them through and work quietly with them. The man is a legend and a player’s worst nightmare to come up against — no wonder the boss felt his experience was needed on the training pitch.

But I was stunned when I saw him speaking to Philippe Senderos, advising him to get tough, do this and do that. And Senderos just looked at him, blew his cheeks and walked off. That showed disrespect, in my book, to an Arsenal legend from an Arsenal player with one season under his belt.

Success has so much to do with attitude and how a team gels and everywhere I looked last season I saw a well-oiled, proven winning machine breaking down.

In 2005-06, we became just a team, no longer a family. When training finished at 12.30pm, some players were up and out the door by 12.40pm. The old Arsenal would hang around until 2 or 3.

In hotels, on the eve of matches, players had their meal and went straight to bed. With the old Arsenal, there’d be a gang of us playing cards, having a coffee, sharing a laugh. Last season, out of an entire squad, it’d be only me, Thierry, Sol and [Robert] Pires sat around after dinner.

I remember feeling how fragmented we’d all become when Robin van Persie spoke up at training about Freddie Ljungberg. “He doesn’t even talk to me. Why doesn’t he talk to me?”

Social occasions used to be a big thing, but last season we stopped going out as a team. I couldn’t tell you a thing about Kolo [Touré], [Emmanuel] Eboué, [José Antonio] Reyes, Cesc Fàbregas or Senderos. I don’t know whether they have girlfriends, a family, what they do or where they go in their spare time.

The days of card games at a player’s house or going round to Patrick Vieira’s to play snooker tournaments disappeared when he went to Juventus. It’s sad because last season the team felt detached from one another and I felt like a stranger in the Arsenal dressing-room. There was many a time when I didn’t feel a part of it any more. This wasn’t the “all for one and one for all” philosophy that had made us such a tight unit in the past.

There was another contributing factor. The purse-strings were being tightened, the effects of those cutbacks also affected team morale and we felt the Arsenal lifestyle was being constricted perhaps as another knock-on of the new stadium. I can’t remember a time when Arsenal have counted their pennies so carefully and I’ve wondered if that’s why the team have not seen much investment.

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. An extra coffee or a cappuccino is now duly noted.

I swear, if it was down to some of them we probably wouldn’t have stayed in hotels before games. We’d be on the coach on the morning of the match and travel back the same night. Thankfully, the boss digs in his heels because he is a big believer in players being relaxed, comfortable and treated well in the run-up to games. But it’s another sign of how life changed for the worse at Arsenal.

Of course, then there was the decisive Vieira factor. The impact his loss has made cannot be overstated. I think the boss and the board tried, at first, to shrug off his departure and deflect attention on to the emergence of Cesc Fàbregas. But, with all due respect to Cesc, he’s no Patrick. It’s like putting the gloves of a heavyweight champion on the hands of an unproven featherweight and telling him to go out there and knock out the opposition.

When they let Patrick go and didn’t reinvest in the team, the club didn’t die, but our chances of supremacy did because football is like that. We weren’t going to win and senior players had predicted that much in the last few months of 2005.

For things to turn round at the Emirates Stadium, in my view the board will need to put its money where its mouth is and invest in the team, just like it promised Thierry it would do.

I’ve not seen much evidence of what I think is needed by way of investment in the recent transfer window and, however shrewd Arsène Wenger is, Arsenal need to build a new team and a new future, not just a new stadium, or they will be letting down their players and fans.

Contiued on page 2...()

We gawped as pizza slipped down that famous puce face

IT STILL sticks in my throat that we lost our 49-match unbeaten run to Manchester United the season before. You don’t mind losing if it’s fair and square, but that October match was anything but, in my view. It was a joke. Alex Ferguson seemed to have resorted to tactics straight from the Hackney Marshes and tackle after tackle went flying in.

We’d had the “Battle of Old Trafford” in the 1990-91 season. This was about to turn into the sequel: the “Battle of the Pizza”. Or “Battle of the Buffet”, as the media described it.

It started to kick off before we’d even left the pitch. Thierry [Henry] was berating their keeper, Roy Carroll. He had been taking the piss out of his French accent throughout the match — rolling his tongue and speaking deliberate jibberish — and Thierry’s patience, aggravated by the injustice we’d all suffered, snapped.

By the time we were walking down that extendable plastic tunnel, everyone was having a go at each other. There were shouts of “you f***ing cheats!” and players were running into a jostling huddle where the narrow tunnel opens into a wider mouth with the dressing-rooms on the right.

I was jammed in the middle, Arsenal in front of me, Arsenal behind. I heard the boss hammering Ferguson; incandescent French verbally sparring with bullish Scottish.

They started arguing and we started yelling in support of our manager and their players started yelling in support of their manager. The more we shouted, the more threatening it became. The lads at the front were eyeball to eyeball when one of the United security [personnel] lashed out and smacked our travel manager, Paul Johnson, on the nose. Then it kicked off, turning into a mass wrestling bout.

I looked up and saw Ferguson, swamped by his players, being pushed further and further away from the front, but still jostling and yelling, his face beetroot red.

Then it happened. This slice of pizza came flying over my head and hit Fergie straight in the mush. The slap echoed down that tunnel and everything stopped — the fighting, the yelling, everything. It was as if all movement and sound stopped in that instant as all eyes turned and all mouths gawped to see this pizza slip off that famous, puce face and roll down his nice black suit.

Ferguson was steaming. I thought he was going to explode, but then he stormed off into the dressing-room, cursing and grunting, brushing the crumbs and stains off his collar. That pizza took the sting out of the situation and both sides knew it had gone too far.

We all went back into the dressing-room and fell about laughing. I was lying on the treatment bed, holding ice on to my swollen knee, but doubled up with laughter. We may have lost 2-0, and our unbeaten run was at an end, but the sound of hooting laughter filled our dressing-room for a few minutes. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen: to see this guy, a legend in the game, splatted like that. I almost wet myself, as did the rest of the Arsenal team.

Arsène Wenger’s serious frown even struggled to maintain its composure while the United boys did their best not to laugh. The missile had come from the food tray in our dressing-room. I’ve got a fair idea who launched it, and his aim with a pizza is just as good as his skills with a ball, but I’m no grass and won’t name names. All I’ll say is that the culprit wasn’t English or French, so that should narrow it down.

What made me laugh was that my name was in the frame, even though I was stuck in the middle of the action. So, for the record, despite what the papers reported, it wasn’t me. Not guilty to the pizza charge.

Friends called me up in hysterics and said ‘Coley, it’s you!’

I WAS in North London in February and had just got out of the car when this complete stranger came right up to my face and said, “You’re gay, you are!” and went away laughing.

It takes a lot to get under my skin, but that got to me. A wild rumour had become a newspaper innuendo, had become a Chinese whisper, had become gossip in internet chat-rooms, leading to me being identified as a gay Premiership footballer. I was angry. Angry for me, angry for Cheryl in the year of my marriage, and angry for Mum.

This ugly episode began on the weekend before Valentine’s Day. “GAY AS YOU GO!” was the page seven headline of the News of the World between two silhouettes of two anonymous footballers, each one with a question mark plastered on their blacked-out faces.

“Premiership stars romp with mobile . . .” added the headline. The story said that “Player A” and “Player B” had been “caught on camera cavorting with a pal well known in the music industry in a homosexual gay orgy”.

I’ve since learnt I was being wrongly identified as “Player B” and my mate DJ Masterstepz, who works for Choice FM, was supposed to be the man in the music industry.

Word filtered down to The Sun reporters that “Ashley Cole was Player B” and the next day they tried to be clever. My lawyer calls it “innuendo by juxtaposition” — two stories side by side which drop hints, nudges and winks to the identity of the player without actually naming him.

The Sun repeated the story with the headline “SO WHO BUMIT? Riddle of gay soccer stars”. That article was printed next to a photo of me and Cheryl leaving the Embassy nightclub; my image side by side with the “gay soccer riddle”.

My phone didn’t stop ringing. One mate rang up in hysterics, saying: “S***, Coley, it’s YOU!” And he started p***ing himself laughing.

Cheryl was brilliant, but we both knew that we couldn’t sit back and let it lie. What straight man could take being ridiculed — and that’s what they were doing — for being gay, knowing that thousands of people were talking about it in the year of your marriage? Not that being gay is a bad thing. But the story suggested I was dishonest about my sexuality and, therefore, my marriage to Cheryl was going to be a sham. I weren’t having that.

My legal team issued legal proceedings on February 20 against the News of the World and The Sun. Taking legal action meant I was bringing it all out into the open, but that was the risk I had to take.

Fall of The Invincibles

2005-06 season



‘He showed disrespect to an Arsenal legend — from a player with one season under his belt’ Cole on Senderos



‘Cesc, he’s no Patrick. It’s like putting the gloves of a heavyweight champ on an unproven featherweight’ Cole on Fàbregas

INVINCIBLES TO BEATABLES

Cole says Arsenal declined from the Invincibles of 2003-04 to the Beatables of last season because they did not tackle enough or impose themselves physically and the facts bear him out. Arsène Wenger’s team managed 23 points fewer last term than they had totalled two years earlier and much can perhaps be attributed to their fall from fourth highest tacklers to fifteenth. Many last season claimed that Francesc Fàbregas was proving a good replacement for Patrick Vieira in the Arsenal midfield after the Frenchman’s departure to Juventus but, for all his fine passing, the Spaniard has been unable to reproduce his predecessor’s tackling. The fact that Vieira committed more than twice as many fouls in 2003-04 as Fàbregas did last season also underlines Cole’s point about his lack of aggression

BILL EDGAR



INVINCIBLES

(2003-04)



Games: 38

Attempted tackles ranking in Premiership: Fourth highest (74% were successful

Points: 90

Finishing position: First

Patrick Viera



Minutes on pitch: 2,535

Attempted tackles: 79% were successful

Fouls: 97



BEATABLES

(2005-06)

Games: 38

Attempted tackles ranking in Premiership: Fifteenth highest (72% were successful)

Points: 67

Finishing position: Fourth

Francesc Fàbregas

Minutes on pitch: 2,652

Attempted tackles: 69% were successful

Fouls: 44

© Ashley Cole 2006. Extracted from Ashley Cole: My Defence, to be published by Headline on September 21 at £18.99

My Defence, by Ashley Cole, is available at the Times Books First price of £16.99 (including p&p) on 0870 160 8080, or you can order online at timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst