Millionaire sportsmen should stay on their feet and behave

"I never had any doubt that I would be vindicated." The words of Kenny Richey, the Briton released from an Ohio jail after 21 years on death row? Close - it was, in fact, the stirring response of Gavin Henson to the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to prosecute him for alleged rowdiness on a train.

Three of his friends have since been fined for "drink-related foul-mouthed and arrogant behaviour" on the way back from a London game - they were, it transpires, so drunk they couldn't remember frightening a carriage full of children and vomiting. I find it inspiring that Gav was sitting quietly with his Cherry Coke, or whatever it was, while they were pouring beer over each other.

I started worrying - I'm a naturally anxious person - about sporting role models when my friend Rona, a primary school teacher, told me she had noticed a trend among her little darlings. During every lunchtime knockabout at least one young player will throw themselves to the ground à la Drogba/Ronaldo/ Johnson/insert Prem player of your choice, roll around in feigned agony, and - if no advantage is given - scream against the injustice of the world.

Most people won't find this surprising, and there's a fair chance that I'm already coming off as Miss Jean Brodie. But for me it was depressing confirmation that, for some modern sportsmen - more often than not the ones with the highest profiles and biggest bank accounts - being a role model is just a wearisome detail in the fine print of their contract, shunted in there with the much-resented media interviews and the obligatory community workshop. Sportsmen often argue, when caught doing something socially unacceptable, that it is unfair they are held to higher standards than anyone else when there are plenty of wealthy City fellas who behave with equal abandon and don't get a hard time for it. To which I say: When was the last time that a bunch of kids spent their Sunday afternoon watching a live feed from the trading floor?

I admit to some pretty ropey double standards: I'll happily accept a dodgy offside that goes the way of my team (look, when that team is Luton you need all the help you can get). I just can't stand seeing male millionaires, with all their trappings of machismo, howling and thrashing when someone accidentally grazes their shin. Particularly if the next day I'm likely to see them scowling out at me from an advert for some ladykilling product as if they're a stick of pure testosterone. I don't care how metrosexual you think you are, crying like a five-year-old girl who's just had her pigtail pulled is not a good look.

You'd never get that on the rugby field, of course. Mainly because you'd look an absolute idiot, but also because nothing says "quit whingeing" quite like a stealthy punch in the head from the opposition.

Talking of the other game, I can't recommend enough this year's Heineken Cup, whose opening rounds have been frankly sensational, thanks both to the class of the performances and the closeness of the competition - not a single place in the quarter-finals was confirmed before the final weekend of games. The more predictable, stultifying and infuriatingly amoral the Premier League becomes - I can already hear your holidaying columnist, Hunter Davies, turning on his sunbed - the more I love that messy, boisterous game, rugby.

Emma John is deputy editor of Observer Sport Monthly.

Hunter Davies is away

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