Rating footballers out of 10 for a national newspaper is a thankless job. For a start, these side columns are the first pieces the players read the following morning. They do not peruse the 1,000 words of carefully chiselled analysis, they do not seek out the big match colour or the tactical overview.
They see if some bozo has given them five out of 10, and then sulk for the rest of the morning.
And yet the individual player assessments and player marks are quite possibly the most random evaluations of the night. For a start, they are compiled against the clock and written while the match is going on (so is everything else but, unlike the match report, the ratings do not tend to get rewritten for the later editions).
This means the reporter has his head down for much of the game, rate check on 22 players, plus substitutes.
You tend to know who has had a stormer, and who has had a stinker, and the rest melt into a collective whole. Look up to see a guy deliver two good passes and he gets seven; one good, one bad, make six; two lousy ones five. Maybe there are sports writers who truly believe they can appraise individuals accurately while touch typing and getting the copy delivered 20 minutes before the final whistle. We have a word for them, though: liars.
I mention this only because next week probably the most important player at Chelsea is Ashley Cole, the left-back, who will take on Lionel Messi, Barcelona’s right-sided midfield player and, according to some, the best player in the world.
It reminds me of the time in 2004 when, playing for England in the European Championships, Cole came up against Cristiano Ronaldo, another young man with a growing reputation, and outplayed him. It may well have been the finest performance of his career. And in one national newspaper it was valued three out of 10*. To put this into perspective, in football rating terms, three is equivalent to the mark you get for spelling your name at the top of a GCSE paper. Run out with your shorts on your head, and you will likely be given no worse than three. Cole got it for the game of his life.
Now he needs a repeat performance if Chelsea are to progress to the Champions League final. Stopping Messi a second time – in a match in which Barcelona must score – is imperative if Chelsea are to get the chance to erase the memories of last year.
Cole would win few popularity contests but, on form, there is no better full-back in the world. His speciality is extinguishing the best and his misfortune is that, in recent seasons, the best like to wreak havoc from wide of the right. Yet Cole stopped Ronaldo, and there is nobody better suited to placing the shackles on Messi. And this time, if he does it, we’ll make sure he gets more than three. We promise.
* No, not from me, this is still a column, not a confessional.
Martin Samuel is the chief sports writer of the Daily Mail, where his column appears on Monday and Wednesday