The price of fame - and the price of racism

In my opinion, Cole was booed because he has become the poster-boy for the overpaid prima donnas who populate the Premier League.
One columnist tried to claim on Monday that at his best, Cole is one of the best full backs in the world. I suspect millions of football fans across the country will disagree and I can tell you that if a full back playing for Tamworth FC in front of 600 people had attempted 'that' backpass, he'd have been booed as well. And believe me, plenty did during the dismal last couple of seasons at The Lamb.
The fact is that when Cole is being paid however many tens of thousands of pounds a week to do his job, he can expect criticism when he gets it wrong. And let's be honest, a percentage of those tens of thousands of pounds are precisely because professional sportsmen know they will be criticised when they get it wrong.
The other factor, which appears to have completely bypassed our London-centric media, is who was doing the booing. Because of the price of tickets and because England have to play at Wembley to pay the bills for a stadium which is not as impressive as it should be, most who watch in the stadium are from the south-east and London. So isn't it obvious that there were a fair percentage of Arsenal fans involved? And didn't Cole play for Arsenal before a controversial move to Chelsea?
That's like Blues fans booing an ex-Villa player; not pleasant, but part of football since time immemorial. Get over it, Ashley and keep counting the cash.
Racism, however, is different. When I watched Tamworth in the West Midlands League in the mid-1980s, they were one of the few teams in Midlands non-league football with more than a token non-white presence (if there is anyone out there who remembers, I'm thinking of the likes of Ian and Shane Ward and Martin Myers).
The few hardy souls who travelled to support the Lambs at the likes of Oldbury, Wednesfield, Wolverhampton Casuals, Rushall and Pelsall admired the Ward boys and Myers because they were fine players and also because of the abuse they took from old men in cloth caps who still thought it was clever to direct monkey chants at black players.
And what did we do? We protested. On more than one occasion, we became involved in heated arguments with opposition fans as we told them they were out of order. And it worked. Gradually, the practice died out and it is incredibly rare to hear racist abuse in English football grounds these days, especially at non-league level.
So what to do with Spain? As my colleague Brian Dick argued in The Post this week, nothing less than the toughest treatment will do. Fine the football associations six-figure sums; close the stadia; ban the fans.
Quite simply, England should not be playing the likes of Spain and Croatia until those nations change their attitude.