Ken Jones: Arsenal duty-bound to take moral high ground

I hesitate, but not for long, to mention a knotty problem that arose for Arsenal Football Club yesterday when it was revealed on these pages that tickets bought by their England midfielder Ray Parlour for last weekend's FA Cup tie against Liverpool at Highbury fell into the hands of touts who happily turned a handsome profit.

Prompted by my colleague Nick Harris's diligent enquiries, Arsenal are looking into the matter but have quickly moved to avoid embarrassment by accepting Parlour's explanation that the tickets (it would be interesting to know how many he purchased) were passed on to an acquaintance "in good faith".

As a famous editor used to proclaim about mystifying events that touched the raw nerve of his journalistic instinct, I think we should be told. In other words it is Arsenal's bounden duty to make public every fact that their investigation uncovers.

It shows how far we have come in the years since prominent footballers began earning on a scale to make leading corporate figures envious, how far in cynicism, that even if Parlour was now up against it, any number of Arsenal supporters would think it irrelevant to the issue of whether their team can go on and win the Premiership.

The probability that tickets sold to players find their way on to the black market despite punishments imposed by the football authorities is not, of course, peculiar to this era. Difference was that nobody seriously pretended that men held to a wage ceiling and thus in moderate financial circumstances could live all their young manhood on the playing field without cheating on rules that scandalously limited their recompense.

Going back more years than I find comfortable to remember, a story broke around Newcastle United shortly before they defeated Blackpool in the 1951 FA Cup final. As I remember it now, a photograph taken at Kings Cross station in London showed a Newcastle player handing over a package said to contain more than one thousand tickets, almost the team's entire allocation.

Nothing was proved but through an acquaintanceship with the recipient, the late "Sulky" Gowers, who ran a London nightclub and befriended many sports personalities, I eventually got to the truth. The tickets had indeed changed hands and quickly found their way on to the black market. "Sulky" confirmed this one night after concluding proceedings at his club in the customary fashion of asking customers to stand for the Queen as the prelude to a tuneful rendition of lyrics that included the line, "Now take that Princess Margaret, she married Armstrong Jones, why don't they give a yiddisher boy a chance."

Anyway, "Sulky", who had a number of racecourse scams on his CV, handled most of the big ticket deals until he went the way of all flesh to be succeeded by "Fat" Stan Flashman, late of this life and an office near to where "Sulky" did his deal with Newcastle. Making no attempt to conceal the breadth of the services he was able to provide, Flashman boasted that nothing was beyond him, not even "two together" at Buckingham Palace garden parties.

Flashman's dealings with one manager from the old First Division became a legend in the game. A deal, amounting to many thousands of pounds, was completed at the club's ground shortly before an FA Cup semi-final, tickets for which were issued by the Football Association. To avoid suspicion, the manager ordered one of his players to handle the transaction. "Unless I carried out his orders, the bastard would drop me from the team," the player said one night in a moment of indiscretion. "As it happens, I was spotted speaking to Flashman by the club secretary. He was suspicious but the manager interrupted him, saying, 'Don't worry, I know what's going here and I've told the lad if it happens again he'll never kick another ball for us'."

As I remember it, only one manager, Alan Brown, who took Sheffield Wednesday to the 1966 FA Cup final against Everton after joining the Moral Rearmament movement, held out against allowing his players to buy tickets destined for the black market. Sticking to the official allocation of 25 tickets each for family and friends he was confronted by a disgruntled delegation. "Please yourselves," Brown said. "It's all you are getting. If you don't think it's enough then don't bother to turn out at Wembley." Taking a big risk, he added, "I'm prepared to use the reserves but you can be sure that the world will know why." Sheffield Wednesday lost 3-2 but it wasn't for want of effort.

If the sense of values of today's heroes is screwed up they have no excuses to fall back on. The important question is how it got that way. If their standard of integrity is not what it should be, who is to blame? Their employers, that's who.