Where were you when you heard, then?  The news I mean.  More pertinently, where was Ashley Cole’s phone?  It was that very phone that heard and broke the news first, via a text sent by Cheryl.  Who can say where it was though?  That’s the thing about Ashley Cole’s phone, isn’t it:  it gets everywhere.

It was in the hands of a friend, he claims, when various pictures of his naked body and ‘racy’ texts were sent to various women during his marriage.  “I would laugh if my foot didn’t hurt so much,” said Cole.   One of the photos was captioned ‘I’m so ugly x’ and the rest, The Sun dutifully reports, were too rude to reproduce in a family newspaper.  For whatever reason, The Sun has also declined to reproduce them.

This was our Tom and Nicole and loyalties were quick to surface.  The Metro newspaper done the old ‘he gets blah blah money to do nothing other than kick a ball about some grass,’ a spurious line of reasoning in any instance and one especially prone to dissection when one considers the other party in the break up. Would Ashley be worth the money if instead of kicking the ball, he air kicked vigorously as a pre recorded tape backstage done all the actual kicking for him?

One thrilling detail from one of the girls alleging a fling with the Chelsea player:  “he put on two dud sci-fi films before we got down to it.”  One dud sci-fi film may have been romantic, you could have snarked at it amusingly and pointed out plot holes in the way sickly couples often do in twee American sitcoms and never do in real life.  Two dud sci-fi films though, love, and it looks like he’s trying to tell you something.

This all, in the hands of our own national press, fell roughly into the same narrative as the John Terry/Wayne Bridge dull saga, something to do with adjoining hotel rooms (“He said ‘JT is in the next room’.  I said ‘Justin Timberlake’?-  I don’t think he got my joke”).

Bridge timed his announcement of International quasi retirement to drop right before City’s game at Chelsea and set off ‘The Handshake’- with much speculation on how both players would approach the pre-match formalities.  You will know by now, most probably, how it went down but even without the benefit of your hindsight I’m willing to predict that the whole thing was a crushing anti-climax-  which is the first one of those we’ve had in either of these stories for a while.

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