James Lawton: Ugly side to 'beautiful game'

You can live with a whiff of madness. You can offer a little help and therapy. What you can't do - and this is the problem now facing Newcastle United in particular and football in general - is appeal for respect and responsibility and discipline when it isn't there and, furthermore, has no reason to be.

Lee Bowyer and his team-mate Kieron Dyer, did not arrive by chance at their disgusting fight in a stadium filled with some of the most passionate and good-hearted football fans in the land.

From the weight of film evidence, Dyer seemed to carry the lesser guilt for the display in the dying minutes of a 3-0 home defeat to Aston Villa.

But they both had history. They had been indulged for so long they came to the point where they stepped beyond all restraint.

For their manager, Graeme Souness, it was the return of the anarchy he thought he had banished when another Newcastle player, Craig Bellamy, was dispatched to Glasgow Celtic on loan after he refused to play a role he didn't like.

Bowyer was branded a liar by the courts and his professionalism was questioned by former manager David O'Leary.

Even though he was found not guilty in the assault trial which did so much to destroy Leeds United, Bowyer did not, could not, deny he was involved in outrageously unprofessional behaviour.

But he survived as a pro. Indeed, he was rescued by former Newcastle United manager Sir Bobby Robson, who, ironically enough, drew a public apology from Dyer a few hours before seeing the player dragged away from Bowyer, his attacker.

And for what did Dyer apologise? For helping to break the managership of Robson, by refusing, like Bellamy, to play in a certain position. For believing that a salary beyond the wildest hopes of almost everyone who filed into St James' Park at the weekend did not bring duty along with the most extraordinary privilege.

The more you consider the flailing fists of Bowyer and Dyer the more you realise you are looking at a classic study of cause and effect in today's football. The cause is the game's spineless refusal to impose proper levels of discipline.

The effect is that anything, however squalid, goes.

You might say that, of all clubs, Newcastle United have shaped their latest crisis. The television pictures showed chairman Freddy Shepherd smouldering with rage, but could he ever have imagined that anyone on Tyneside would forget the shaming saga of his revelry with fellow director Douglas Hall as they were taped in a Spanish girlie bar?

They sneered at the "mugs" who bought the over-priced souvenir shirts - and Tyneside womenhood.

They poked fun at local hero Alan Shearer, a vast asset for the club, at the weekend when he announced his intention to carry on for another year.

An outraged Shearer said last night: "What happened was a disgrace to the name of Newcastle United and to our loyal supporters.

"There is no defence for it and I made my feelings known in the dressing room. Our dirty linen has been hung out for the country to witness yet again,"

Did Shepherd possibly just not see that it was the kind of behaviour which would linger down the years, polluting any sense that Newcastle was an institution of solid values rather than some cynical money-making machine?

And what did it say to the players when someone like Robson was so publicly undermined, when he was kept waiting for a settlement of his contract after doing so much for the club of his roots and then changing so quickly from a hero to a nuisance?

Robson's successor Souness did well to so rapidly usher Bowyer and Dyer before the public gaze as they issued their apologies. But if Dyer's seemed to carry more of a hint of true penance, what, in the end, were either of them worth?

Only one meaningful gesture could have come from Newcastle - the tearing up of the contracts of two professionals who had made a mockery of their status.

But that was beyond all reasonable expectation because both players are still, despite their tawdry behaviour, worth many millions of pounds to their club.

In football, of course, you can turn your back on many things. But money isn't one of them.

When Manchester United's Eric Cantona went over the wall at Crystal Palace and attacked a fan, admittedly a decidedly unpleasant one, with terrible violence, there was no hint that his place at the club was in doubt. Cantona was a hero - and untouchable.

It was the same when defender Rio Ferdinand was suspended for failing to take a drugs test. In the eyes of his club United and the Professional Footballers' Association, he was a martyr.

When Arsenal players behaved so atrociously at Old Trafford, surging around Ruud van Nistelrooy in a grisly imitation of a street mob, there was not a breath of criticism from their manager Arsene Wenger.

The picture presented by Bowyer and Dyer was truly shocking. But it couldn't have been too much of a surprise to anyone.

It wasn't as though the fight came without so many wretched preliminaries.

- INDEPENDENT