James Lawton: Beardsley remains a beacon amid the madness

Peter Beardsley rarely puts his head above the football parapet these days. There are compelling reasons why he prefers working quietly with the boys in the Newcastle United academy.

One of them is that even when he operated in a brilliant striking partnership for England with Gary Lineker almost his every public utterance was received with unremitting scorn. Beardsley gave off little stardust. He was fodder for the cheap shot stand-up comics who fed so hungrily on the carcass of the game. His liking for the word "obviously", his fatal lack of glamour, made him arguably one of the most frequently mocked professionals in the history of the game.

But Beardsley did break his rule this week. He went on the record with his reaction to news that celebrity bad boys such as Paul Gascoigne and Paul Merson were to be recruited in a publicity drive to remind young professionals of their responsibilities at a time when football seemed teetering drunkenly, riotously towards a point of moral collapse.

Said Beardsley: "I don't understand why the FA would want to use someone who has had misdemeanours. They would be better off using someone like Alan Shearer, or even Bobby Robson. Why should someone like Paul Merson preach to my boys about drugs? Personally, I would use someone who has never had a problem – and there are lots of those type of players about."

You don't have to agree with Beardsley on a point of strategy – isn't it true that the devil sings the catchiest songs ? – to understand the force and the integrity of his views. If Beardsley has always had quotes that no one wanted to rent, if his personal charisma was never overwhelming, it has probably taken the last few weeks of moral meltdown to get a proper measure of what he meant as a professional.

Kevin Keegan once said that he would have played Beardsley if he turned up a minute before the game and without his boots, just as Bill Shankly said that he would send out Tom Finney in his overcoat. For myself, Beardsley's outrage at the idea of Gazza and Merson as spokesmen for a "better way," brought back into sharp focus a night in Vancouver 20 years ago. The young Beardsley, a consistent star for the local Whitecaps in the North American League, was dining in an Italian restaurant. Beardsley and his wife were celebrating their first wedding anniversary. He was drinking Coke and she had an orange juice. The proprietor was, naturally, a "soccer" fan. He brought over to Beardsley's table a bottle of the best champagne. It was politely rejected. Later, as he left the restaurant, Beardsley said: "Thank you for the gesture, it was very kind. But you see I don't need champagne. I have my wife and the chance to play football? What more could anyone want?"

It is a question loaded with pathos in this week when three more footballers appeared in court on charges of assault, when bottles were thrown at Stamford Bridge and a meat pie at Millwall, when a Spurs player mimed a swig from one of the beer bottles, when the managers of Millwall and Birmingham City, Mark McGhee and Steve Bruce, were banished from the touchline of the New Den, a repository of, among other malodorous things, viscious racism and the chairman of Cardiff City, Sam Hammam, saw no incongruity in the fact that his chief bodyguard was a convicted hooligan only recently free from being banned from every ground in the land.

A week also, and perhaps most discouragingly of all, when a spokesman for the Football League told The Independent that he could not imagine any on-field behaviour being bad enough to warrant the deduction of points and his counterpart at the Premier League said that their rules governed only member clubs and not the players. But who employed the players, who offered them new, inflated contracts even after they had dragged the name of their clubs into the gutter, and who is responsible for those players when they go out into a public arena and dive and whine, cheat and foul, and speak to officials in torrents of obscenity?

Beardsley's voice, we can be sure even now when each day brings a fresh example of moral anarchy in the boardroom and on the field and in the nightclubs, is still a majority one. Beardsley is right about the number of decent players aware of their responsibilities and their privileges. But the good men are not only being betrayed by the worst of their workmates but also the palsied reaction of the authorities. John Barnwell, of the League Managers' Association, had a four-hour meeting with Professional Footballers' Association chief, Gordon Taylor, this week.

They agreed it was time to react to a genuine crisis of will and image in the game, and Taylor's significant contribution was a willingness to accept the principle that in some cases the agreed maximum fine of two weeks' wages was insufficient, and in certain circumstances could be raised. In exchange, he expected clubs to show more responsibility, and accept that the effect of hammering a player with a big fine was lessened dramatically when that player was routinely included in the club's next first team. Barnwell's response was immediately to rubber-stamp Chelsea's decision to include John Terry and Jody Morris the day before they appeared in court to face charges of affray and causing actual bodily harm.

Barnwell said: "If you work in any profession and your are bailed on a charge then you are usually allowed to carry on working until the final judgement is made." There are other judgements to be made, however, and they can be reached in a boardroom as well as a court of law. Terry and Morris broke club rules when they were on licensed premises less than 48 hours before a game. They were there in the small hours of the morning. A few months earlier, half the Chelsea team went on a rampage in a Heathrow hotel, sickening American tourists shocked by the terrorist outrages.

We know well enough Peter Beardsley's reaction to all of this. It shone through his rare public statement this week. It is one of disgust and disbelief. Disgust that so many members of his old trade do not know how to handle their good luck properly. Disbelief that as the madness goes on, old lags are sent into the battle.

It is another point of confusion, obviously, for a pro who saw a bottle of champagne not as a gift but an intrusion.