Ashley Cole: My Defence
Wednesday, 20 Sep 2006 22:55
Arsenal did not want Ashley Cole to release this book
Published by Hodder Headline, out September 21st, hardback, 273pp, £18.99.
In a nutshell…
Defender. Defensive. Self-important. Revelatory. Accusatory.
What's it all about?
It's about Ashley Cole, the England left-back who has been involved in one of the most torturous and drawn-out transfer sagas in English football. In January 2004 Cole, a contracted Arsenal player, was caught at a meeting in London with Chelsea officials. At close to midnight on August 30th 2006, Cole became a Chelsea player. This book is his attempt to convince the public – and most importantly it seems the Arsenal fans – that those two facts were little more than a coincidence.
The book has been serialised in The Times and a lot of the story is well known, but Cole's publicists have been happy to let it be known that Arsenal were unhappy that this were book was coming out. They even refused to allow Cole to use official club photographs, the player claims.
And there are indeed some interesting revelations in the book, not least how desperately unhappy Cole seemed to be during the last year at Highbury and how his relationship with Gunners vice-chairman David Dein, who considered him a "son of the club" according to Cole, deteriorated beyond repair. It also sheds some interesting light on the character of Cole himself, as well as the personalities in the mega-rich world that is modern football. His relationship and glitzy wedding to Girls Aloud singer Cheryl Tweedy also form an interesting subplot away from the football.
Who's it by?
Ostensibly, it's written by Cole and there are some telling examples of how the publishers have tried to leave the tone of the book in the 24-year-old from Stepney's voice. The incessant use of "weren't" as in "I weren't happy" is tiresome at best and downright patronising at worst. Certainly a footballer's autobiography should be the fruits of his own thoughts but no one believes for a minute that Cole actually sits down at his PC of an evening and waits for the muse to come to him.
The real man behind what appears in print is Steve Dennis, a former Daily Mirror journalist who has gone on to become one of Britain's most renowned ghost writers. Dennis has previously courted controversy with his autobiography of former royal butler Paul Burrell.
As an example…
On tapping up: "Look, tapping-up takes place in football. And if it's not blatant tapping-up, it's a diluted form of the same thing."
On David Dein: "I blamed him for wrecking my Highbury career. And I did blame him. And still do. This quote from me still stands today, as much as it did then."
On former Arsenal captain Patrick Vieira: "Nobody in the Arsenal dressing room had the same presence as him, not even the boss."
On wife Cheryl Tweedy: "She's the one person who makes sense of all the madness, and she's helped me understand it more and made me more patient and tolerant."
Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster
You'd perhaps be forgiven for thinking it already has bearing in mind the column inches and TV time lavished on Cole's protracted move to Chelsea. But it hasn't made it to the big screen quite yet, thankfully. Some would argue Cole is still too young to have written an autobiography, let alone star in a film. And besides, football films are always awful.
What the others say
"The book is quite possibly the least self-aware media outing since a turquoise tracksuited David Icke proclaimed he was the son of God on Wogan, and was mystified by humanity's lukewarm response. The one thing it supports is Thierry Henry's claim earlier this summer that his former team-mate was misunderstood. Evidently. He is far more ghastly than any of us suspected." - Marina Hyde, The Guardian
"Such books are ten-a-penny nowadays and are rarely illuminative or enjoyed by anyone save the most ardent fans. But My Defence is different in one crucial respect. Few publications can ever have been so mistitled or so unwittingly revealing of their author's manifold flaws and, also, the tawdry state of modern sport." – London Evening Standard
So is it any good?
Bearing in mind that in his introduction Cole asks the reader to "read my account and then make up your own mind", presumably in favour of the England defender, it doesn't exactly meet its objective. According to Cole, he has done no wrong. Everything is everyone else's fault. Not his. He was only asking for five measly grand extra from Arsenal after all. I mean how can a young international footballer expect to live on £55,000-a-week?
Cole is steadfast in his opinion that the media have made him out to be the villain of the piece – a sentiment he refuses to budge from throughout the book. He seems blissfully unaware that much of what he admits to in My Defence plants him firmly in the 'did wrong' corner. He seems not to grasp the fact that, even if – as he is adamant – the meeting with Chelsea's Jose Mourinho and Peter Kenyon was a pure coincidence, he has in the same breath admitted to talking to agents about moving abroad because of his unhappiness with the way Arsenal "betrayed" him.
And for someone who is so determined to prove that he was not interested in a move to Chelsea, his account of how he did eventually end up at Stamford Bridge is nowhere near convincing enough. Sorry, Ashley, but your defence just doesn't ring true.
If he hoped that this book would ensure he was given a warm reception at Arsenal when he goes back as a Blue, he is sadly mistaken. Cole comes across as a naive, self-important whiner, whose attempts to convince us that, as a down-to-earth east London lad, he knows the value of money fall on deaf ears. His protestations and inability to accept that any of what has happened to him is his fault does him no favours at all, particularly when it is considered that this book is making him a sizeable sum to add to his new megabucks salary at Stamford Bridge.
Arsenal do not come out of the book smelling of roses either, but Cole has not built bridges with the club he professes such love for, he has merely ensured that he will never be welcomed back to his former home in the way the Vieiras and Ian Wrights have done before him.
As the man himself puts it at the end of the book about the twists and turns of the last year and a half: "Some would say that's life. I would say that's football." Too true, Blue.
3/10 for believability, 6/10 for interest
Martin Ashplant
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