So Peter Crouch is the latest footballer to be the subject of allegations of infidelity, as published in the News of the World and elsewhere last weekend. These must not be proven to be true, because there was much emotional investment in Crouch, and not simply of the footballing kind. If the allegations do indeed turn out to be correct – and, so far, Crouch, his agent and his club, Tottenham, have declined to comment – women everywhere may have to abandon the last vestiges of hope that any famous player is capable of romantic faithfulness.
For many women, Crouch represented an imagined point of honour beyond the regular dispatches in the tabloids about the love lives of so many of his colleagues, a sort of safe harbour in which it was possible to continue to believe that a professional sportsman was capable of monogamy. He just seemed an unlikely romantic villain, partly because he had always portrayed himself as an unlikely romantic hero (he once told an interviewer that if he hadn't been a footballer he would have been a virgin).
Why was this? Was it that Crouch's height – he is 6ft 7in – and lankiness made him appear an improbable candidate for waywardness, particularly given his spectacularly attractive fiancee, Abigail Clancy? Or perhaps it was that his ineptness in front of goal (how come he is so tall, yet so bad in the air?) gave him a non-predatory air in the wider world too.
In any case, confirmation or denial is eagerly awaited. For if Crouch has failed female supporters, surely all belief in the existence of professional sporting monogamists must be abandoned or another imagined standard-bearer found. In fact, some of us already have one, and for me the line has always been drawn at Paul Scholes. Now, Scholesy, don't let us down.
