PREMIER LEAGUE:The outrage at Henry's brazen trickery might at last bring some top players to their senses, writes ANDREW FIFIELD

YOU MIGHT find this rather difficult to believe, but Thierry Henry is rather sensitive to criticism. During his time with Arsenal, journalists who had dared to speak ill of Titi would regularly be roused from their mid-morning slumbers by telephone calls patched through from the Gunners’ training base and subjected to a stream of outraged invective from the great man.

That, of course, was in the days when Twitter was something old ladies did to you at bus stops. Now, Henry has no need to lift the receiver to issue his limp-wristed excuses; he can simply tap them into his laptop from the safety of his bunker in Barcelona.

Besides, if he had tried to track down all his critics ever since giving the whole sporting world the finger with his left hand in Paris last week, he would presumably have run up the kind of phone bill that even his gargantuan wage packet would struggle to cover.

Enough bile has been spat across the channel over the last week without yet another column clearing its throat this morning, but it is tempting to view the fact that it took a backlash of almost Biblical proportions to make Henry issue a statement that even approached a contrite tone as a symptom of a more general condition among elite footballers, who have become so convinced of their own transcendental status that they now consider themselves entitled to float above the mores which govern the rest of us plebs.

This is, I think, particularly true of the Premier League. There is surely no other sporting organisation which spends quite as much time reminding itself how wonderful it is or listening to others say it for them.

Sky, for instance, have just unveiled an advertising campaign for its next batch of live events entitled “10 Days That Shook The World”.

That is hardly out of kilter with the rest of the station’s coverage, but in their quieter moments – if they have any – the marketing execs might wish to ponder on whether comparing a schedule that includes Stoke versus Portsmouth to the birth of communism and the reshaping of the globe’s geopolitical landscape is not stretching hyperbole to the point of plain idiocy.

Still, at least it helps explain why so many top-flight footballers appear to believe they should be immune from criticism, no matter how reprehensible their actions.

It is why Henry reacts with huffy indignation to claims that he has, at one fell stroke, sullied his reputation and dragged his sport into disrepute; or why a nonentity such as Marlon King, a player for whom the term “journeyman” would represent an over-promotion, feels he can grope and then pummel a young woman in a nightclub simply on the basis that he is a Premier League footballer.

Such incidents are, admittedly, at the extreme end of the behavioural spectrum but we are force-fed more mundane examples – whether it be a brazen dive to win a free-kick or the kind of foul-mouthed outburst which would make Roy Chubby Brown blush – at top-flight grounds every weekend.

You wonder how long supporters will be willing to put up with the game’s supposed guardians treating it with such contempt. On the basis of the rabid reaction to Henry’s misdemeanour – which, for once, was not confined to the usual shock-jocks and cyber-warriors with more time than they know what to do with – it would appear not much longer.

There are, of course, some good guys left and Ireland’s team, while by no means angels to a man, contains more than most. Glenn Whelan, Liam Lawrence. Keith Andrews and Sean St Ledger are all honest, likeable sorts, who have sweated their way through the leagues and have yet to be coated in Premier League stardust.

Even those who have spent most of their careers at the elite level can hardly be labelled prima donnas, with the likes of Richard Dunne always more likely to be classed as workhorses rather than thoroughbreds.

And that, perhaps, is why the outrage at Henry’s brazen trickery has not just been confined to Ireland.

The sight of one of football’s most marketable and monied stars denying the likes of Dunne, St Ledger and Whelan the chance of going to a World Cup finals – and history suggests there may not be many more opportunities – appealed to that very primitive human compunction to fight the corner of the underdog.

Ireland deserve more than sympathy, of course; they deserve to be in South Africa next summer, whatever Roy Keane says.

But if the opprobrium generated by Henry’s left hand forces footballers to understand how they are perceived outside their own self-absorbed bubble, it might – just might – have been a price worth paying.