The excuses some of these footballers come out with, eh? ‘I didn’t touch him, ref.’ ‘He took my legs.’ ‘I couldn’t sleep, so I went to a lap-dancing club and drank cognac until my hands stopped shaking.’ Only one of these, unbelievably, was anywhere near the truth.

John Carew replaced Gareth Barry in yesterday’s hurricane at Wigan and within five minutes, had made a goal and scored one during Aston Villa’s stupidly one-sided (in favour of Wigan) 4-0 rout of the home side. The commentary team wondered if he had a point to prove to Martin O’Neill after being dropped in midweek.

Officially, the reason for John Carew’s absence against Ajax in midweek was down to a virus, until rumours began to circulate in the glow of victory that Carew had been seen doing an impression of a social gadfly and knocking around a lapdancing club in Brimingham. Martin O’Neill, who never seems the most understanding of managers, had allegedly blown steam out of his ears and grounded Carew in retaliation.

This is one of those stories where opinion is divided. Carew, obviously, broke a club curfew (if he’d wanted to be priapic in the company of women, he should have asked Ashley Young for some website addresses), but how far should the punishment have gone? Until Barry was forced off due to injury on Sunday, Carew didn’t look like playing any part for the second game in a row and despite the one goal lead Villa had forged, his introduction turned the game inexorably in Villa’s favour.

O’Neill has to understand, which I’m sure he does, that Carew is a key player for Villa, as a marginally more potent Emile Heskey figure. So the question remains – did the punishment fit the crime? How long would Carew have been out for for what is, in my eyes, a minor indiscretion? If O’Neill is applying the letter of club law, it sounds like a fine and a ban were in order. Gareth Barry was banned for a fortnight over the summer for his public slagging of the Villa manager, so if Carew was to expect the same, he would have been unavailable for Ajax, Wigan, Blackburn, Newcastle and Slavia Prague. Five games without such a key player would have been unthinkable, even if you do rule a club with a rod of iron.

Of course, you expect this sort of thing to be water off a duck’s back to an experienced pro like Carew. Maybe he wasn’t seriously concerned about missing a UEFA Cup game after his Champions League experiences, but neither he nor O’Neill were wrong nor right. The people that would lose out most during a spat like this would be fans disappointed due to a player’s stupidity and a manager’s stubbornness.

O’Neill explained in a statement after Wigan that Carew explained he had mitigating circumstances for his appearance in a lap-dancing club and O’Neill said ‘then I decided he was wrong,’ which smacks of Cloughie’s famous ‘We all sit around and talk about what went wrong, and then we decide I was right.’ As a tiny story it’s kind of funny – boys will be boys, and all that. It does make you wonder what Carew’s mitigating circumstances were – “I was there because I simply hadn’t seen enough nipples this week” – and whether or not another manager would have accepted them.

The only serious part about it is the knock-on effect it might have between Carew and his manager. This is the first time that club loyalty has been tested during the season for O’Neill and he was correct to stamp on it and cut the whole thing dead. But if Carew was in the position of thinking nobody would find out, then he was sorely mistaken. What is worrying for the manager is the blasé attitude of his star striker to testing the mettle of his boss.

Myself, I’m sanguine about the whole incident as long as it is forgotten as of now. I’m inclined to think Carew has been harshly treated in light of some of the things footballers usually get up to, but Villa simply don’t have the resources to ban players unnecessarily, especially not a player of his importance to Villa’s style of play.

While inside I’m snickering like a kid who’s just seen his first page three girl, as are a lot of Villa fans (the WM commentary team yesterday did more snorting than Beavis and Butthead), the pragmatist in me is tutting at this little indiscretion and wondering what the Christmas do will throw up. I’m just waiting for the inevitable expose – ‘I can see why they call him ‘Big’ John, claims lap-dance beauty.’ Now that would be some half-time entertainment worth seeing.

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