A uniquely insensitive display

The most depressing aspect of the affair of the Chelsea four is that nobody is surprised by it.

Nobody is surprised that four young footballers should go on an appalling bender at a time when decent people were utterly stunned by the terrorist attacks on America.

Nobody is surprised that they should produce yet another episode of footballers behaving badly in front of frightened Americans waiting for news from home.

Sadly, nobody is surprised that Jody Morris was one of the four. In July last year, Morris was sentenced to 150 hours of community service and ordered to pay £500 compensation to his victim after admitting causing actual bodily harm. A court in Surrey heard that he chased and beat up a man in the street. The man had complained that one of Morris?s companions was urinating in the street.

Six months earlier, Chelsea chairman Ken Bates had publicly rebuked Morris for his off-field behaviour, writing in the Chelsea matchday programme: ?Forget your flash cars and the nightclubs.?

Now we wait to see what Bates will say about Morris and the other three this time. Chelsea managing director Colin Hutchinson and manager Claudio Ranieri issued abject apologies for the four, but then agreed to select all four of them for yesterday?s match against Middlesbrough. They felt that fining the four men two weeks wages each was sufficient punishment.

The message sent out by picking the players as normal was that the pursuit of three Premiership points was more important, that football was more important, than making an example of the four miscreants.

There was a message sent out by the apologies issued by the players as well. Frank Lampard?s statement included the phrase: ?We have gone out and had a drink. We have gone too far.? Eidur Gudjohnsen said: ?Our behaviour, being loud and drunken, was not directed at anybody else. It was just being loud among ourselves.?

In other words, being drunken louts is all right, but the timing and the location were wrong.

The timing and the location were uniquely insensitive, but the root of the problem is that too many young footballers and their clubs do not understand that drunken, boorish behaviour nearly always offends someone else and is never acceptable.