Increasingly this week the top layer of English football has had the air of a rather raucous cliff‑top Viking funeral for André Villas-Boas, who seems set to go the way of all things flesh on the Chelsea touchline. It has been a fast-paced journey to obsolescence for a man who arrived in a fluster of excitement like some skinny‑tied, two-week teen sensation of the 1950s. But who these days seems glazed with a dawning awareness of peripheral mockery, wincing and twirling on the touchline with the wounded dignity of a small Edwardian dog dressed up in britches and waistcoat, and only now working out what all the laughter is about.
Villas-Boas will, I'm sure, be back to haunt English football, because this is what always happens. Older, raggedly bouffant, popping the seams of his dog-eared skinny-tailoring, he will eventually have his moment: eliminating England from some quarter‑final, mugging the Premier League champions, and performing his own lambada of revenge on some fevered foreign touchline.
For now, though, one of the most interesting parts of this saga of revolt and disappearance is the emergence of Ashley Cole as a significant actor. One of Cole's chief gripes with his manager is that he feels "like a robot" belted tightly within the Villas-Boas tactical blouson. It is a profound and even moving objection, relating not so much to personal advancement as to the basic texture and vitality of his game. It also reflects something I have felt about Cole for some time: that he is an undervalued and largely unexamined component of English football's central furniture. And that while he remains in his scampering pomp, this may just be the moment to appreciate him a little more.
Cole has perhaps been misread: or at least unevenly read. There is plenty that is dismal in English football, but it seems unfair that Cole – summoned reflexively as an epitome of monied gracelessness – should have become short-hand for so much of it. Google the words "Ashley Cole" and the three top search terms that come up are "gay Twitter shooting", which not only makes him sound more interesting than he is (Cole is neither gay nor on Twitter), but demonstrates how closely off-field farragos have defined his persona.
Chiefly there was the Cashley affair, the departure from Arsenal as detailed in his own wretched autobiography. It is perhaps a good moment to revisit this. Mainly because in retrospect Cole may have actually been on to something. The fact remains that since Arsenal refused to spend that little bit more than already-ridiculous on Cole – and others too – they have stopped being a team that win things. Perhaps it was in fact Arsenal rather than Cole who were swerving off the road at this point, the first jolt in a tectonic breaking-free from the disagreeable overspend of the boorishly successful. Perhaps some will even feel those wodges of faux Cashley banknotes should instead have borne the face of stingy Arsène, hunkered within his trophy-less mansion, heatedly fondling his balance sheet.
More than this, though, to object to Ashley's hang-up over an extra £5,000 a week is to misunderstand top-level footballers. Personally if I had the talent I'd play a single year and spend the rest of my life eating Doritos on a mattress made entirely from kitten throat. But elite modern athletes are not like this. Their lives are already financially meaningless. Instead they thrive on tiny margins of personal affront, obsessional – and sometimes laughable – details. This is why Ashley is still there: still furiously centre stage, still fording the twice-weekly agony of competition.
There have been other bits and bobs. There was the story about vomiting on a hairdresser in a car, the kind of shameful male behaviour that is, frankly, yet another a symptom of the universal shameful male behaviour gene. Perhaps the weirdest thing about this event is simply its widespread currency, the gossip-hunger that makes it so noteworthy in the first place. Search your heart. Let he who hasn't at some stage vomited on a hairdresser (or similar) cast the first stone. Plus, Cole did also shoot a student with an air rifle while engaged in harmless training-ground banter. This is a little harder to explain away. All I can think is perhaps he didn't mean to shoot a student. That perhaps he meant to do something else entirely, like opening up a direct debit to Amnesty International or reciting a poem, but instead got a little distracted and then, oh no, he'd accidentally shot a student instead.
Either way it still feels like a gathering irrelevance in the face of the undimmed, and even austere, majesty of Cole the footballer. The most important thing about Cole is that he is perhaps the only member of English football's recent slew of celebrity headliners to have fulfilled entirely his potential as a player, apparently undistracted by glitz, debauchery or physical frailty. Cole is a remorselessly fine left-back, a two-club man who at the end of his career will have left nothing behind in his calfskin man-bag, no cobwebbed corner of his personal talent unexplored.
It is Cole who has given me hope, periodically, that this England team might yet amount to something. Mainly because of the nature of his talent, which aspires not to grand explosions of the old school – the snorting box‑to‑box warrior, the foreigner-squashing aerial Tarzan – but is instead scurryingly insistent, relentlessly high class. This is the kind of player who turns up, rather quietly, in teams that win things.
Cole will also be remembered for moments of rare footballing excellence. The duel with Cristiano Ronaldo at the 2006 World Cup was up there with Paolo Maldini and Andrei Kanchelskis at Euro 96. Even the moment Ronaldinho left Cole in a jumble of twitching limbs at the 2002 World Cup before Brazil's equaliser had a wonderful substance to it, a recognition, in Cole's befuddlement, of a wound inflicted by pure, high-ceilinged football talent.
Strip away the periphery and this is a strangely old-fashioned, ultra-modern footballer, a refined and thrummingly well-conditioned talent that we might once have blithely admired from the stand. But who has beneath football's unblinking compound eye become a convenient shared repository for those lingering feelings of disdain for the captive princes of the Premier League. At 31 Cole will not be with us that much longer. Perhaps at the tapering edge of his prime it is the ideal moment to start appreciating a grand, understated and often undervalued excellence.