GIVEN the chance to step in for Mark Austin’s Sunday Mirror column for a week, New Statesman editor Jason Cowley collapsed to temptation and gave Ashley Cole a drubbing over his split with Cheryl. The silly boy should never have left Arsenal.

“The bitter truth is that he’s the author of his own misfortune,” Cowley wrote. “Cashley’s humbling is a parable for much of what has gone wrong in football in this greedy era of excessive excess. His greatest mistake was to leave Arsenal. Had he stayed, under the wise guidance of Arsene Wenger, surely none of this would have happened.”

Very true, and spoken as if dictated straight from the barfly banter at the Twelve Pins pub in Finsbury Park, rather than the editor’s chair at the New Statesman. And wonderfully, there was no need to bother with a declaration of interest. Cowley is an avowed Arsenal fan, whose book The Last Game published last year was all about the 1989 championship win at Liverpool. I reviewed it here.