Brian Viner: Fergie's chewing gum wrappers offer plenty of food for thought

The perennially thorny issue of whether leading figures and institutions in sport should set a moral, or at least behavioural, example off the field of play loomed even larger than usual last week, as pressure increased on England's cricketers to pull out of playing a World Cup match in Zimbabwe, and as West Ham brought Lee Bowyer back to his old stamping ground – pun fully intended – of the East End of London.

While we're on the subject of people in sport setting an example, I would also like to explore the emotive business of Sir Alex and the chewing gum. For last week, as the England and Wales Cricket Board wrestled with the Zimbabwe question, the Sky Sports cameras, during the Worthington Cup semi-final between Manchester United and Blackburn, caught Sir Alex Ferguson in flagrante spearminto. There he was, a knight of the realm, unwrapping a piece of chewing gum and insouciantly letting the wrapper fall to the ground.

Now, you might think it frivolous to compare Ferguson dropping litter with the issue of whether, by playing in Zimbabwe, England's cricketers will be giving succour to Robert Mugabe's oppressive regime. Or with West Ham giving a lucrative contract to a player unlikely to foster better race relations up and down Plaistow Road. But it is, no less starkly, about example-setting.

I should here make it clear that I yield to nobody in my admiration for Sir Alex, arguably the greatest British football manager of all time (let us not forget, as we are sometimes wont, the miracles he achieved at Aberdeen). Although I don't much enjoy the close-up shots of him manically chewing (since I moved to rural Herefordshire I have befriended cattle who chew less than he does), I can see he couldn't otherwise get through the 90 minutes.

Besides, it is well-known that mastication is addictive. Like all addicts, Sir Alex should receive understanding for what is, after all, a harmless habit, unlikely to make him go blind.

But what I can't forgive is the dropped wrappers. I have a thing about litter. A card-carrying coward in almost all instances of likely physical confrontation, I turn into Charles Bronson in the Death Wish canon when I see someone jettisoning so much as a tissue. I have a standard procedure, ostentatiously picking up whatever has been dropped, and piously saying to the guilty party, "here, let me put this in a bin, as it's obviously too much trouble for you".

My disdainful condescension knows no bounds, nor does my fearlessness. Once, in London, the guilty party was about 7ft 6in, with a tattoo of a skull on his neck, but even then I waded in. I can't say for sure that my children won't become fatherless as a result of this crusade, but what I can say for sure is that they won't ever drop litter. They know how I feel on the matter, and while they might grow up to be fraudsters or jewel thieves or Liverpool fans, they won't ever leave empty crisp packets on the pavement. Or chewing-gum wrappers in the dug-out.

Sir Alex, however, has no such compunction. My friend Mike even tells me that on the tour of Old Trafford a joke is made of it, that the discarded wrappers are left there like dead flowers at a roadside shrine. I think Fergie should clean up his act; there are kids watching.

Which brings me to Lee Bowyer, whose act, I fear, is beyond cleansing. His move to West Ham has attracted much comment, and by wiser voices than mine. There's not much I can add, and there wasn't much the Hammers' manager, Glenn Roeder, could add either, when interviewed on Saturday by Mark Pougatch of BBC Radio Five Live.

Pougatch, a fine broadcaster but no Jeremy Paxman, did not give Roeder nearly as uncomfortable a time as he might have done. On the other hand, even Paxman might have struggled to extract from Roeder the slightest twinge of ambivalence about his controversial signing.

He had bought Bowyer, he kept saying, purely for footballing reasons. The past was the past. What was done was done. His only concern was the future. Big platitudes, little platitudes, duck-billed platitudes, Roeder came out with them all.

And all I could think of was my friend, a famous writer, who has supported Liverpool since the mid-1950s – and who I know will forgive me my cheap gibe above – yet who cannot forgive Gérard Houllier merely for attempting to sign Bowyer last summer. "If that signing had gone through, they would have lost me," he says.

Speaking of Houllier, I can scarcely believe I've nearly reached the end of this column without referring to the interview he gave The Daily Telegraph on Saturday, in which he said that he needs four more years and three more players to win the Champions' League.

It took me about 12 hours to stop laughing. The man has spent £100 million. Anfield must be littered with players' contracts. Still, it could be worse; it could be chewing-gum wrappers.

b.viner@independent.co.uk