We need more Alec Stewarts!

Jun 15 2008 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

WILLIE McKAY and Alec Stewart share a profession, but thankfully little else.

If only the latter was the norm and the former an exception, professional sport — if not professional sportsmen — would be all the richer.

Instead, the upshot of McKay’s consultation — or should that be consortium? — with Joey Barton behind bars last week is that the reputation of sports agents remains somewhere between the gutter and the sewer.

From the outside looking inside, with Barton refusing Newcastle United’s request for him to take a pay cut following his assault conviction, it appears McKay, pictured below, has done the right thing by himself.

After all, whether the Magpies now sack Barton (guaranteeing him a handsome signing-on fee elsewhere) or keep him on at £60k-plus a week, Mr 10 Per Cent will be quids in.

It’s a measure of football’s mercenary madness that it would probably pay both men for Barton to be fired.

Stewart? Though now an agent himself, this cricketing gentleman is still doing the right thing by sport.

Where so many middle men are fork-tongued purveyors of leeching sycophancy — applying flattery as balm while bleeding players for all they’re worth — Stewart values honesty higher than a fast buck.

Just before McKay headed into Walton Prison to plot Barton’s future, Stewart, pictured right, did anything but conspire with his top clients to maximise their earning power.

The calls for Ian Bell and Paul Collingwood to be dropped from the England side are nothing like the universal chorus of disapproval for Barton’s defiance, but are audible nonetheless.

Yet Stewart, though both men’s agent, refused to cock a deaf ear.

Instead, in the England player ratings section of his BBC blog, he gave Bell and Collingwood each 2 out of 10 for their efforts in last week’s third Test against New Zealand.

BelI, admitted Stewart, “needs runs in the one-day series to keep his critics off his back”.

Collingwood, he added, is “out of sorts”, “low on confidence” and battling “demons”.

By the same token, Stewart was outspoken in praise of Tim Ambrose, who is in direct competition with another of his star clients, Matt Prior, for the England wicketkeeping gloves.

“I call it as I see it and I don’t ever let any agency connections get in the way when my role is to comment on performances,” explained Stewart.

“The players understand that you have to be hard sometimes.”

If only more Premier League footballers were made to understand that.

Instead, indulged and cosseted at every turn, all too many of them become so detached from reality that they believe themselves above criticism.

So detached, that being asked to take a pay cut while serving a prison term for a crime which would mean instant dismissal for most of us seems to them an affront, rather than a reprieve.

Good on Alec Stewart for teaching players (though cricketers need far less educating than the average Premier League footballer) to take responsibility for their mistakes . . .

Rather than teaching them how to profit from them.