Everybody hates... Ashley Cole

Why does everybody hate Ashley Cole?


A black cab driver who took Cheryl Cole home once, told me that when he got to Cole mansions, he saw a strange man lurking around the manor. He shouted “Careful of that guy- he looks dodgy”, as Her Royal Majesty, “Nation’s Sweetheart” stepped out and made to enter. “Don’t worry” she reportedly chirped nonchalantly. That “dodgy” guy was Ashley Cole, Cheryl’s husband. Whether this was because Ashley Cole had a generally dodgy demeanour or whether it was the fact that he was a black man hanging around a posh house, I do not know but what I do know is that he seems to have a chronic case of an almost pulmonary hate-attack.

Even Facebook users have got in on the action- the group I hate Child Rapists has 171 members, , the group “Ashley Cole, what a wanker!” has over 90,000. The jokes are relentlessly cruel. I recently read one that went: “Ashley Cole goes to borrow a book on suicide, what does the librarian say? Keep it Keep it”. Fans want blood- on football discussion boards they say that they want his eyeballs out and that he deserves to die a slow death. Yes, I kid you not. A lot of people I know say they have “haters”. They make me laugh. No one is hated as much as poor Ashley.

I had not realised it was that serious because the allegations that follow Ashley are not any different to the allegations faced by many other Premiership footballers, notably David Beckham, the demi-God, when he was accused of bedding Rebecca Loos. It was curious then that the British media blamed Victoria- she was the one who refused to move to Spain, she looked too fake in her too long hair extensions and she was too skinny. There was no mob baying for a divorce. Victoria was encouraged to look beyond the alleged affair. As a forceful retort, we saw her 9 months later, bloomingly pregnant They then moved to the USA to live in wedded unperturbed matrimonial bliss. Even Wayne Rooney, who most women could not bear to shag (even if he asked nicely) cheated on then girlfriend Coleen with a prostitute. More recently, John Terry has been accused of bedding the mother of his team-mate’s son and forcing her to have an abortion. He also tried to gag the press not to speak about the matter via a super injunction. Indeed, he was stripped of the captaincy due to the controversy, but he was also given “compassionate leave” to sort the matter out on a sun drenched beach in Dubai and his forgiving doormat wife posed lovingly. By way of contrast, Ashley allegedly tried to cheat on Cheryl with a woman in a cheap Primark dress (he was too sick to be really successful) and sent a couple of nude pictures. When there were further allegations that he actually cheated with five other women, he got fined by Chelsea and was publicly divorced by his wife, mere days before the World Cup.

(Cheryl knew the marriage would not last so she only splashed on half a dress).

To disclose my ambivalence, I must say that I am not a big Cheryl fan. I like her enough on the X Factor and I think she is pretty but something about her strikes a discordant chord with me. Maybe it was the fact that she was mean to a toilet attendant. Surely the irony must not have been lost on Cheryl that there she was, an award winning singer, involved in a physical altercation with a woman who had to work in a loo for a living. She allegedly called the woman a “black bitch” and “a Caribbean jigaboo” (although she was cleared of racially aggravated assault) but even if she just called her a “fucking bitch” as she claims, I cannot square that with her saccharine mixture of Haribo and Barbie Doll sweet television persona. It seems fake.

Football fans say they hate Ashley because he is an ungrateful, disloyal git. They hate the fact that in his autobiography, he nearly “swerved” and hit his car when he learnt that he was only going to get paid 55,000 pounds a week by Arsenal. This is a strange thing to include in a book that would be read by people wishing they could earn half of this figure in one year so I am also wondering if his agent is not also secretly in on the hate-fest. However, when considering that most top players are being paid almost double this amount, I find it difficult not to justify his indignance. I don’t know about anyone else, but I would be mega pissed off if I found out that my colleagues were making double my wages even though we did the same job. They said that he had no loyalty to Arsenal, yet Wayne Rooney, who left his beloved Everton to play for Manchester is revered on the pitch. Fact is, football has a short shelf life and an injury in any game can mean the end of one’s career, so players always need to act in their current best interests. Ashley Cole has done anything any other footballers had not done in the past.

It has been posited that the intensity of hate directed towards Ashley is in equal proportion to the love directed towards his wife and the more exposed profile of their marriage. People seem to believe that Cheryl has probably become the Lady Diana of the Twenteens. I am not convinced; Cheryl is no Di, not in style, not in taste, not in charity, and not in the opinion of lots of people, I dare say.

Based on my perusal of the message boards and press, it seems like many people, feel, quite simply, that Cheryl has married beneath her, despite the fact that she really can’t sing if her last supper depended on it, despite the fact that she is just an average dancer, despite the fact that she only left school with a few O’Levels, and despite the fact that underneath the veneers, hair extensions and L’Oreal hair dye, she is not that stunning. There seems to be a feeling that no one would be stupid enough to cheat on Cheryl Cole. This, mostly from men, who would jump on anything that had a heartbeat. I am not so optimistic that there are not even more stupid men out there. On balance, I think Cheryl did quite well for herself. Not being the brightest Crayola in the box, the girl managed to marry one of the most talented sportsmen in the world, and arguably the best and most visible left back with an earning power that exceeded her album sales at the time. And yes, I am going to go there. Is some of this targeted hatred towards Ashley Cole based on the fact that here is this “half-caste” half black man, who has been handed the best of the English rose on a gold plated platter and he has decided that the head chef has not served him up enough? Is there some latent feeling of wanting the nigger to know his place?

It is clear that Ashley is quite simply a talented and not very intelligent young man who has made the very same mistakes that lots of moneyed and talented men in the UK make and will make on a daily basis when confronted with more money than common sense. Excerpts from Ashley’s book actually show, that deep down, he is still a little boy looking and fighting for approval and craving the attention. He was gutted that no one was screaming his name on the pitch and it seems like he tried to seek validation and attention wrongfully, outside his marriage. However, making him into the “baddie” is rich, especially coming from the media personalities whose very own lives, if held up to the same scrutiny, might be found to be replete with scandal. However, unlike a lot of other “celebrities”, Ashley never lied to us about who he was and what he represented. He has always been a stupid lad who picked up women at the CC club. And Cheryl Tweedy, at the time, was happy enough to buy it.

(Main pic from kameraloud.wordpress)