Next time avoid playing loyalty card, Tony Bhoy

OSCAR WILDE had a good line about principles: “I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”

Wilde’s feelings on football are unclear, although I somehow doubt his first port of call after release from Reading gaol would have been the Royals’ old Elm Park stadium.

Still, he might have appreciated the behaviour of Tony Mowbray in ditching West Brom for Celtic – a decision which represented not so much a scrapping of his principles as Mowbray paying a known criminal to break in to his own office and empty the contents of his conscience straight into an over-sized paper-shredder.

This decision, it’s worth remembering, comes less than two months after Mowbray issued this rallying call to his players as relegation from the Premier League loomed: “If there are players I want to keep, and we get bids for them, they owe the football club, they owe the fans and their team-mates another crack at it. Let’s all try to get back to the Premier League because if we do that, we will be so much better for it. They should have a responsibility to feel that. I don’t want to ram that home. It comes from within. You have either got that or you haven’t.”

Well, at least now we know that Mowbray hasn’t got ‘it’, despite assuming the high ground so often last season he should be giving the British & Irish Lions tips on how to perform at altitude. And West Brom fans, already causing internet servers in the west midlands to crash as they bombard message boards with angry rebukes to the man they applauded from the field when relegation was confirmed, have a right to feel let down.

Personally, I have never begrudged footballers or managers walking away from jobs – particularly jobs well done – when a more lucrative or challenging offer comes along. Why, after all, should they be denied the sort of freedoms routinely afforded workers in other industries?

If Mowbray, an admirable man and manager in many ways, really wants to go to Celtic – and, for my part, I could think of nothing worse, except perhaps a job at Rangers – he should knock himself out.

But spare us the high-minded bilge in the days and weeks before you depart, professing loyalty to the club and implying any player who so much as glances at alternative employment are moral reprobates.

Unless you are one of those all too rare beasts that practice what they preach, it just makes you look silly.