HAYDEN Evans was very cross: 'There is no price that could have been worth paying for this advertisement.' Well, it was a real page-turner. Under the headline See Ruud Gullit's Sexy Football, newspaper readers were confronted with the deeply disturbing image of David Batty sporting stockings, suspenders and stiletto heels below his Newcastle shirt.
If Britain's Channel 5 meant to grab attention for the broadcast of the Partizan Belgrade v Newcastle United game they can congratulate themselves, but Evans, Batty's agent, will not be joining in.
'It stinks. David is not a kid, he is an established England international and he doesn't need this,' he said.
From Evans' anger you might think that a player making a prat of himself for commercial reasons was an innovation, but footballers and managers have been ex-changing their dignity for dollars for some time.
The only previous hint of cross-dressing in a football-based commercial, however, was the unlikely pairing of Terry Venables and Lily Savage advertising the benefits of a sugary soft drink, as the advertisers' conviction that football shifts units of almost any product has brought a litany of tosh to our screens.
Another example was Peter Schmeichel dressed in a butcher's apron and performing with the mournfulness of a Scandinavian Leonard Cohen, strumming a guitar and mouthing a paean to Danish bacon. That went some way off the weird scale.
