James Lawton: Beckham's celebrity circus has few lessons for English rugby's hero

An old pro footballer had some succinct advice for Jonny Wilkinson when it was suggested that David Beckham was waiting to take a call and offer some timely advice on how to deal with the worst effects of sporting celebrity.

"Don't make the call," growled the old pro before lapsing into a few bars of Nat King Cole: "Stay as sweet as you are... don't let a thing ever change you."

The point, of course, is that it is football which has been so spectacularly called to change by the success of Wilkinson and his team-mates in the World Cup of rugby. Change in its values and its demeanour, and, most of all, in its willingness to accept the importance of discipline.

Arsenal's Sol Campbell plainly didn't grasp the point in a BBC radio interview this week. He was invited to reflect on the way the rugby men handled themselves in the Telstra Stadium last weekend when a series of refereeing decisions - so outrageous in the view of their coaches that an official protest is now being prepared - threatened to rob them not of a few points but the entire purpose of their last four years of prodigious work. Campbell, who a few months ago claimed, with the active support of his club, that he was the victim of a refereeing conspiracy, at first completely misunderstood the question.

He thought the interrogator was discussing misconduct off the field, and said that rugby players didn't suffer from such a harsh spotlight and that, anyway, they were used to coping with long tours. The questioner tried again. Was it not exemplary the way Lawrence Dallaglio walked away from a potentially devastating referee's decision with a shrug of his shoulders and - this bit was implicit - did it not contrast rather sharply with the behaviour of Campbell's team-mates when a penalty was conceded late on in the recently disfigured League match at Old Trafford?

Well, Campbell wanted us to know, when England conceded their penalties, there was still time to retrieve the match, unlike in the awarding of the last-minute penalty in the United game. Anyway, didn't we understand, the games of rugby and football are completely different?

Not completely, Sol, and until football understands this, and why eyebrows have been raised so long by some at the mad elevation of a Beckham, who this week was cheerfully passing on the Queen's privately expressed sentiment that she was honoured to hand him his Order of the British Empire for his services to football - a gong two steps up from the one the fabulous Jimmy Greaves has still to receive 30-odd years after his retirement - we cannot expect too many lessons to be heeded.

Yes, in some quite profound respects football and rugby are different. Football is the game of the world not by accident. It has an inherent beauty than can be admired, and adapted to its needs, by every nation on earth. Rugby has its own quite separate virtues, and some of them are not without their own beauty. A French team on song can certainly hit the aesthetic high notes. And the try all-powerful, all-grinding England scored last weekend, when the huge Dallaglio, reminding us that his tragically lost sister was a ballet dancer, showed wonderful grace and wit to give Wilkinson and Jason Robinson the vital space and options, was not the kind of thing you would find in a game without great potential to thrill the senses.

But if rugby and football are quite different in some ways, they are just the same in others. They are sports of body contact and teamwork and both of them carry the participants to extraordinary highs and desperate lows.

When England's rugby men had the greatest prize that would ever be available to them a stride or two away, they behaved quite magnificently. They showed, for all time, the value of keeping their heads.

Certainly it was impossible to imagine from them the kind of loss of control which marked the behaviour of Paul Gascoigne in the World Cup of football in 1990, when tears rolled down his face from no greater emotion than the fact that a moment of his own stupidity had wrecked his chances of appearing in the final. Or of Beckham when, just a year younger than the Wilkinson who delivered victory in the last seconds in Sydney, he was dismissed from the 1998 World Cup for his schoolboyish kick at an opponent. That made so risible the suggestion that Wilkinson had anything to learn from his friend and commercial ally Beckham.

Wilkinson, like all his team-mates, delivered under the greatest possible pressure, and now he is required to take the celebrity walk. He will be paraded through the capital. He will accept it all as gracefully as he can but already he has proclaimed precisely where his priorities lie. It is with getting on with his life - and playing his game.

Meanwhile, football gives us the same old diet of maladministration and controversy and self-interest. Sven Goran Eriksson is upset with the Football Association for revealing that they have offered him a new four-year contract. Why, because it might call into question his commitment to the job that pays him £2.5m a year? For the moment at least the mind - and the spirit - recoils. Better to dwell on the mood of Sydney a little longer, and, maybe, play a little Nat King Cole.