March 23 – Cole Tapped Up | On This Football Day

March 23 – Cole Tapped Up

TAPPING up. It surely goes on all the time in one form or another (“It has been going on since the beginning of time. Everybody knows it is going on.” Alan Hansen), and in your author’s humble opinion, is often quite a sensible thing. After all, there really is no point in a club putting together a bid and going after a player only to discover when they finally get permission to speak to him, that he has no desire or intention to move there anyway.

But, in their finite wisdom, the Premier League overlords have deemed such behaviour illegal. In practice, very few people have ever been caught, let alone punished for the offence, but there is one example in recent history.

Today in 2005 Ashley Cole, Chelsea FC and Jose Mourinho were all charged by the Premier League for breaching their rules on tapping up. It all centered over a meeting between Mourinho, Peter Kenyon, Cole his agent Jonathan Barnett and so-called ‘super agent’ Pini Zahavi in January 2005.

In his autobiography Cole claims nothing untoward happened and that his meeting with Zahavi simply overlapped with a meeting between Zahavi and the Chelsea manager.

“We talked about general football stuff before Mourinho asked how life was with me. Life’s good, I told him. ‘And are you happy at Arsenal?’ he asked. This was not an unusual question in my book. Friends and family had been asking the same thing for weeks and Mr Mourinho had just walked in on a meeting with Pini Zahavi. It wouldn’t take the most perceptive of people to get nosey on that one.

“‘No, I’m unhappy but it’s a long story,’ I told him. He asked if it was because of Arsène Wenger. I told him it wasn’t; the boss was brilliant, I had a very good relationship with him and my unhappiness was with other people. I could tell he was itching to ask more, but, at that point, Jonathan stood up and said: ‘We had better be going. Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure.’

“I can only speak about what was said and not said while I was in the room, and in those 15–20 minutes, the chit-chat never strayed anywhere near what could be considered an approach by Chelsea. Not once was there anything mentioned about figures, transfers, further meetings or even leaving Arsenal.”

The Premier League, for one, were not buying that, and come June, Cole, Chelsea and Mourinho were all slapped with fines they could easily afford: Chelsea £300,000, Mourinho £200,000 and Cole £100,000.

So as Cole contended it was merely a chance meeting, a civil chat and not an attempt by him to engineer a move to Chelsea, or an attempt by the Blues to tap-up Ashley. A year later, Cole left his boyhood club Arsenal to join, low and behold, Chelsea! Well, there’s a surprise. That one came right out of the blue.

Given the huge weekly packet he is now on at Stamford Bridge you’ve got to wonder if Cashley really needs to be selling stories to OK! magazine for a few extra pennies. Apparently he does. Check out which brilliantly-named woman was making waves in the ladies game on this day right here.