Churchillian ring to Neville in chambers

Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut Trevor Immelman may be still smarting from being overlooked for a wild card into the International team that will oppose the USA in the Presidents Cup challenge next week at Fancourt Golf Club in South Africa but in partnership with Rory Sabatini he showed that he is a real team player.

I for one am cheered by the collective conscience and proletariat solidarity that has blossomed in the English football camp.

The news that Her Majesty's finest spent last night secluded in the meeting chambers of a Manchester establishment represents a remarkable departure from the traditional beers 'n' bum type "frolics" that have engaged the hearts and minds of previous national squads during friendly international weeks of yore.

The players were, of course, agonising and theorising and debating how best to respond to the FA's decision to send Leeds striker Alan Smith home from the English camp because of the delicate matter of his facing charges from the West Yorkshire police.

Although Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers Association stressed that the players would not hold a general strike, as they had threatened to do over last month's Rio Ferdinand row, they were considering a response.

This would not have happened in the England of Paul Gascoigne. The current lot are a more serious bunch. Manchester United defender Gary Neville is the Arthur Scargill of the movement. And you can see it too. With that perpetually pale demeanour and the prominent Adam's apple all it would need is a slender pencil of a moustache and, Nev might, in a different time, have been a typical edgy young socialist, tweed jacket, worn copy of Marx, the works.

Instead, he is the celebrated son of Neville Neville, the bread and butter on a United table laden with glistening treats and a "bezzie" of David Beckham's.

The international soccer player's life leaves one with little reason to complain but now that Neville has found a cause, he has busied himself rallying stirring, righteous indignation among the nation's best players, encouraging Becks to colour in the "Free Smithy" placards and persuading David James to leave the PlayStation alone for an evening.

One can imagine the scenes in that drawing room, a fire blazing and throwing evocative light on a gold-framed portrait of Churchill at his most thunderous, Neville holding in his hand a piece of paper and around him the young heroes of England, in rapt attention. Vows made over a late-night brandy and glasses smashed against the marble fireplace. A rush then to catch the last ten minutes of Joe Millionaire.

All in all, it has been a strange turn of events. On the face of it, it is hard not to feel a little bit sorry for Smith. Now 23, he finds a once-promising career threatening to go into a bit of a tailspin and this humiliating departure almost certainly represents the last chance that Sven-Goran Eriksson will give him at international level.

I have always had a soft spot for Smith since the television documentary of about five years ago covered his lonely graft through apprenticeship football to his role of saviour-in-chief of Elland Road.

The pity is that he did not leave Leeds United - a club with an obscene disciplinary record whose books are disproportionately loaded with fools and thugs - as a youngster. In the narcissistic and depressing environment of Leeds as represented by Bowyer and Woodgate, the intemperate, loutish streak in Smith's generally excellent attitude to the game has been allowed to fester. Eleven dismissals, one in a rare appearance for England against Macedonia, is an unforgivable record.

Smith has the petty streak of the hothead running through him, a flaw partly attributable to his youth but one that would probably have been doused and harnessed positively at a more settled club.

Smith is in trouble for throwing back into the crowd at Elland Road a plastic bottle - which was originally fired towards the visiting team's dugout - and injuring a spectator. Whatever his motivation - he responded to an action that might have injured a visiting player - what he did was daft and irresponsible.

In effectively sending Smith home from the England camp just hours after his arrival as a late call-up, Mark Palios and the FA reinforced the message they hammered home after the Rio Ferdinand debacle.

Premiership players, regardless of their status, will be brought to book publicly and unflinchingly from now on. That the FA are willing to take on the Premiership's most bullying personality, Alex Ferguson, is a welcome indication that when it comes to the heedless list of crimes and misdemeanours perpetrated by overpaid and underskilled footballers, they have decided to draw the bottom line.

The funny thing about English football is that the mindset of those playing seems to lurch between two starkly different worlds. Already established is an ethos of total professionalism and an advocacy of the quiet life. Smith, for instance, is a committed teetotaller. More and more of England's top players seem to have made the conscious decision to simply not appear in the tabloids beyond the back pages. They live private "private lives".

But against that, the depth of irresponsibility and arrogance and basically antisocial behaviour amongst those who demonstrate the belief of their own infallibility has staggered even the most cynical. It was hard to think of anyone sinking lower than Bowyer and Woodgate until reports of an alleged rape sprung up with this new season.

Smith's sins belong, of course, in a less serious category. He remains a young player deeply committed to a lost soul of a club that does little to merit his loyalty. But he has paid according to what would appear to be the FA's new policy of zero tolerance.

That the England players believe they can have some influence on this is partly because of the fact that for years the Premiership has inflated their sense of worth and place within the hierarchy. It is also a legacy of club managers that have for years now hypnotised their international players into the belief that club comes before country.

It is no harm that England's players debate and pout over this latest controversy. In fact, it would be no harm - and endless fun - if they made good on their threat to strike.

We have grown used to footballers for which life decisions appear to run no deeper than which flash car to drive to the training ground.

Two things are happening here. First of all, an elite group of players are learning that just because they shout, the world doesn't listen. And they are also learning to have an opinion, to take a stand against something outside their immediate sphere of care; they are being encouraged to act on principle. It is a start.

Maybe things will turn a corner and in time, it will be possible to feel that the Premiership is a strand of sport worth our attention again, that is has in its number athletes with some regard for the people that support them.

If they even begin to hint at the notion that they have regard for a society that has blessed them with such an exalted position and has asked practically nothing in return, then the Saturday evening results may feel significant again.