To Benjamin Mendy, Luka Milivojevic and other dim-witted footballers, don’t abuse football’s golden ticket - Stuart Rayner

As the country goes into lockdown for the third time, elite sport will plough on. It was no great surprise, but a bit of a relief.

For some, televised football will offer a distraction from being locked in – a nice one for some, an important one for others.

For we football writers it means getting out and seeing real people, albeit from no less than two metres away, with conversation muffled by masks. Under these circumstances, you will certainly take that.

For the footballers, it is even better, they actually get to play a game most are not allowed to.

With it comes responsibility.

It might not always seem it when you are sat freezing your unmentionables off on a Tuesday night in some far-flung part of the country, but what we are being afforded is a great privilege so many would love at the best of times, but particularly now. The unspoken part of the deal is we must not mess it up.

Perhaps it needs to be spoken – again – more loudly to some of the more dim-witted footballers.

Just as we have to be more careful than most to justify our golden tickets, so they have to be even more vigilant. They may not all like being role models but in this instance, they have to be.

Their clubs have to be, too.

If football clubs want to be allowed to play and keep their revenue streams flowing – because that, certainly for the Premier League, is what it is all about – when there is a good argument to say they should not, at least not trawling up and down the country to do so, the players have to behave and their clubs must make sure they do.

There were some fine words spoken at the weekend.

“We condemn it,” said Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson after Luka Milivojevic was at a New Year’s Eve party with Fulham’s Aleksandar Mitrovic. “We certainly apologise for it.

“He should take responsibility for that.”

Hear, hear.

“We are extremely disappointed and strongly condemn this image,” said Tottenham Hotspur after Giovanni Lo Celso, Erik Lamela and Sergio Reguilon were photographed ringing in the new year with Manuel Lanzini and too many others.

Good on you.

But they were just words.

Hodgson picked Milivojevic to captain Crystal Palace against Sheffield United on Saturday. Lo Celso, Lamela and Reguilon were fined but the latter was on Tottenham’s bench against Leeds United, as Lanzini was against Everton, and Manchester City’s Benjamin Mendy, another rule-breaker, was against Chelsea.

Fining players but letting them play reinforces the message to these covidiots they can do what they like if they are good enough and prepared to write a cheque at the end of it. That they were stupid enough to allow themselves to be photographed showed their cavalier attitudes.

Milivojevic’s donation to the NHS, whilst welcome, reinforced the suspicion. His January 6 apology was far too late.

In a normal year they should not have been at a Thursday night party before a weekend game. In these circumstances it is a massive no-no.

Those sticking to the rules at great emotional and financial cost are deeply frustrated and for all the good work Marcus Rashford and company are doing, these players are giving them a stick to beat footballers with – quite rightly in this case.

That the authorities have apparently shied away from punishing them is bad enough but for their clubs to allow them to keep playing (or at least in the case of Reguilon and Mendy given them a free ticket to watch from the bench) is shameful.

Those of us being treated as a special case have to earn it.

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