James Lawton: Bates misreads story of the Blues

Baroness Thatcher once said that there was no such thing as society. Now Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea who appears sometimes to the right of both Maggie and Genghis Khan, is now saying there is no such thing as a football club. At least, that is, not one that is inhabited by flesh-and-blood memories of great players who made dreams that will never die.

A football club without respect for the men who made it is surely a hollow, worthless place indeed.

When Bates says the boys of the 1970s gave nothing to Chelsea he is showing his fundamental ignorance of what a football club should be.

It is not a complex of commercial outlets. It is not a series of over-priced corporate boxes. It is a place of history – and humanity. Bates' decision to dispense with the services of Peter Osgood is simply crass. Ossie was not quite the model servant of Stamford Bridge he sometimes claims to have been but he was adored on the terraces for the very good reason that he brought a thrill and a joy to supporters' Saturday afternoons, especially when his hangover wasn't too crippling.

When you think of Chelsea what first comes to mind? Is it the current profit balance, or the names of men like Roy Bentley and the young Jimmy Greaves and, yes, Osgood and Alan Hudson and the late Ian Hutchinson?

If Ken Bates doesn't really know the answer to that question he should really ask himself, after all these years, what he is really doing in football – apart from trying to turn a profit?

Bowyer's lesson in life

Words are cheap, we know, but some of them can carry that little bit more resonance, and this is surely true of the recent statement of that extremely problematic young footballer Lee Bowyer.

No one had to suffer a more withering front page, not even the beleaguered Michael Barrymore, than the one Bowyer faced when he looked at a mass-circulation newspaper in the wake of his trial last year and saw himself depicted as, among other things, a liar and a scumbag. He was also invited to sue if he had the nerve.

He didn't do that. Instead, the other day he said: "I go to work and then I go home. I don't really do much else, except go fishing and walk my dogs. This is how it has to to be in view of what happened in the past. Do I have regrets? Yes, I have made mistakes. Everybody has made mistakes but in our world [football] everybody finds out about it. It has all made me a stronger person, and I think a better person."

The cynical reaction is that Bowyer is repairing his image. But there is another possibility. It is that he has learned a lesson, one which could rescue both his career and his life. It may just be the one that most great footballers, including Pele, inherited along with their talent. It is called humility.