UK Edition
Who knows what Ashley Cole made of his return to Brexit Britain after more than four years away but it is tempting to think that what once qualified you as a divisive figure has changed a lot since he last departed the national debate in the summer of 2014.
Back in Cole’s day getting booed for a simple mistake in a routine Wembley qualifier against Kazakhstan was seen as the extreme end of public opinion, but the needle has moved on that too.
When he surveys the whole discordant show perhaps Cole will recognise that it was less about him and more about something brewing in the national psyche. Will the nastiness still be there the first time he steps on the pitch for Derby County and can old wounds ever be healed?
Hard to tell at this point, with Cole still very much of the mind that he has closed the door forever on trying to explain himself, a policy he keeps to fanatically.
He may well find a game where attitudes have shifted from those days when hunting Cole was regarded as a kind of sport in itself and no-one took much trouble to ask themselves why.
When England’s most capped black footballer made a rare appearance in the “Out Of Their Skin” documentary about black footballers in November, Cole considered Raheem Sterling’s situation and said that he recognised in the treatment of the younger man much that he had experienced years previously.
“There's a different agenda, I feel,” Cole said. “There's nothing else left [to explain it] apart from his skin colour.” Certainly the understanding of how wealthy young black footballers can be misrepresented has shifted since Cole’s autobiography My Defence was published in 2006 to general derision. It belongs to that category of books from which most people know only a single line but there is a lot more to it than the infamous moment when he almost swerves off the North Circular in disbelief at a lowball Arsenal contract offer.
What stands out now reading the pages of My Defence is the fear of a young footballer caught in a spiral of events from a chance meeting in a hotel with senior figures at a rival club, and unable to assert any control over his life. He went to the Royal Park Hotel on Jan 25, 2005, with his agent Jonathan Barnett to meet Pini Zahavi to discuss a potential move to a European club but when the meeting overruns, Jose Mourinho and Peter Kenyon enter the room and the rest is history.
Or rather it came at a unique point in history when the battle between old and new money in English football was at its most bitter, and also when the influence of the now-defunct News of the World, which broke the story of the meeting, was strong. Fourteen years on, in the social media age, the same series of events would play out completely differently, and Cole would have had a much better chance of communicating his own position, as Sterling has his in recent months.
Parts of the book stand the test of time better than expected, not least when Cole, as he leaves Arsenal in the summer of 2006, sounds a note of caution about what he sees as the lack of investment in players. The team have just lost the Champions League final to Barcelona, and Cole hints at what we now know came to be true: that this was a high-water mark. “However shrewd Arsene Wenger is, Arsenal need to build a new team and a new future, not just a new stadium,” he says. “Or it will be letting down its players and its fans.”
Not that he was always blameless and a bit less hostility towards the world would have served him better. He was on the wrong side of the argument when he lambasted the Football Association for questioning his evidence during John Terry’s trial for racial abuse in 2012. #BUNCHOFT---- remains a hashtag that has still only been used by one high-profile international in his public dealings with the governing body.
At Derby County, owner Mel Morris came up with an offer for the last four months of the season although it will be not much more than the £10,000 a week he earned at Los Angeles Galaxy. Cole has had an offer from Newcastle United at the behest of Rafael Benitez which he has shelved in the hope that he can join up with Lampard at Derby.
Although he was out of contract in Major League Soccer, there were discussions to explore him staying for a fourth season at LA, where despite his age – 38 last month – he was still an influential figure in the team. The arrival of Zlatan Ibrahimovic at Galaxy had a knock-on effect for other contracts.
Cole’s chief reason for returning to England now is so that he would be back on the European season schedule and potentially in a position to try to win another contract at Derby or another English club in the summer. He believed that he could play as many as three more years in MLS but felt that this was the right time to come back. He has become a father, a son and daughter with his partner Sharon Canu whom he met in Italy during the first two years away.
That spell at Roma nearly finished him, of course, particularly his part in a 7-1 defeat to Bayern Munich in October 2014 when Arjen Robben took him to pieces. Yet more than four years on and Cole is still going. He must love the game to be the last man standing from the original golden generation still playing, having outlasted even the baby of the class, Joe Cole, almost a year his junior. In the meantime – there might just be a better understanding of what he faced all those years ago, and that mistakes were made on both sides.
German B-teams the route to a job in England
There is a lesson for British managers in the putative appointment of Jan Siewert as manager of Huddersfield Town and it seems to be that if you want to make your CV stand-out then coach in Germany’s B-team structure. If Siewert does join Huddersfield this week then he will be the third successive manager of Borussia Dortmund II to gain a job in English football, starting with David Wagner, and then Daniel Farke at Norwich City.
For their last game before the winter break, Siewert’s Dortmund II were watched by 206 supporters at home to Wattenscheid 09 in the regionalised fourth tier of German football, so it is not his experience of high-pressure big-match situations Huddersfield are counting on. What clubs look for in a coach changes all the time but at the moment there seems to be an appetite for Germans whom they can recruit cheaply and will adapt quickly. Until the next trend comes along they will never be so employable.
Nothing remains the same as Ashley Cole comes back to an angry nation