James Lawton: Court verdicts cannot disguise game's image problem

We cannot be totally sure of the emotion which provoked John Terry's tears when he left a London court a free man yesterday, but relief is a pretty fair guess. Certainly his employers, Chelsea Football Club, and the embattled image-makers of the game had reason enough to breathe again.

Football was surely praying as hard for Terry – and his team-mate Jody Morris and Wimbledon's Des Byrne – to avoid convictions for violent assault as it was for Roy Keane to finally pull down the curtain on some of his more disturbing thoughts.

Terry and his mates came through as lightly scathed in the courtroom as the Leeds United contingent did when they had to answer the charges that followed another night on the town which slipped out of control. But English football is guilty of another appalling oversight if it does not learn something from this latest brush with the law.

It is not that their hugely celebrated – and rewarded – players are any more predisposed to seeking out situations of risk than any other highly paid group of the workforce, but simply that they offer a so much more inviting target.

Terry's barrister told the jury, convincingly as it turned out, that Terry and Morris and Byrne, who was convicted of carrying a bottle as an offensive weapon and fined £2,000, had been the victims of a conspiracy shaped by denizens of the night, people who had crawled out from under the stones of London nightlife to protect the financial interests of a "so-called" exclusive establishment of pretty girls and expensive drinks.

That convinced the jury impressively enough, but it did raise the question of why seriously professional young football players – Terry's profile as a potential England centre-half was soaring before he was excluded from England's World Cup party as a direct of result of his involvement in the court action – might choose to while away the late night in such a place.

No doubt because they are young and very rich and full of sap. None of this would be a such a problem if they happened to be lawyers or stockbrokers, but they are footballers, a breed which, absurdly or not, has never been under greater scrutiny.

Is today's English footballer any more irresponsible than the one who operated when George Best was boasting of drinking a bottle of vodka a day and, later, when the young Paul Gascoigne was doing his best to also submerge a wonderful talent? Probably not. But while Terry, who could now be inhabiting an entirely different plateau of the game had he taken a different turning on that night of aggravation, claims that justice was done in the courtroom, he might profitably take a somewhat wider view.

The court may have cleared him of glassing a bouncer but it made no comment on the wisdom of a young footballer with the world at his feet getting into such a situation. The idea that English football is a little too easy on itself is something that surely needs countering with some force. As the financial horizons of the game are being cut back so sharply, as the manager of the most powerful club in the land concedes that his biggest problem is one of motivation, the brevity of a professional footballer's career can hardly be over-stressed.

It is a message that has long been delivered by the Professional Footballers' Association, but the union also makes the point that no system of discipline is truly workable if the employers of erring players put expediency over the enforcement of genuine authority.

In the European game such discipline is implicit in a culture where certain basic truths are inhaled the moment a young player signs for a big club. He has been chosen, against many odds, for a run at glory, and he understands that he is about the making of his life rather than a careless revel in his own good fortune.

Such responsibility does not always swim comfortably in that sap of youth, hence the need for more rigorous discipline. There are many English professionals who would rail against such a point, and describe it as insulting. Such a reaction was most powerfully expressed last year when Peter Beardsley, a model professional, criticised the decision to invite Gascoigne to talk to young players about the need to toe the line.

"Why Gascoigne?" asked Beardsley. "There are hundreds of players who do their job and are grateful for the opportunities they have been given. They should be the examples. They are certainly the majority."

Beardsley has a point, of course, but unfortunately the way it works now is that the image of football will not be shaped by such paragons of virtue. Upsurges of the old anarchy are made inevitable by money and youth. It is why vigilance rather than celebration is the sounder response to John Terry's winning day in court.