You would expect that locating sympathy for Ashley Cole would prove as laborious and unfruitful a task as attempting to track down the lost city of El Dorado but, lo and behold, amongst a jungle of negative headlines, there in the Independent is a gleaming beacon of hope for the under-siege Chelsea man.

He may be firmly one of the most disliked individuals in the country at present but Sam Wallace has some sympathy for the man who has allegedly cheated on his wife, Cheryl, and angered Chelsea with his behaviour.

Cole's PR team are out in force in the morning's papers, spinning the line that his future could be in doubt as he feels 'victimised' by the club, but Wallace has some sympathy with that perspective, most notably as a result of how Chelsea dealt with headlines around John Terry.

"While Chelsea stood firmly behind Terry as the media firestorm raged around him they seem to have taken a different attitude towards Cole. The allegations that he used club officials to help him in his philandering seem to have lit a righteous anger in the club that was hitherto absent.

"Say what you like about Ashley Cole – and most people do – but what goes on in the privacy of his marriage is not anyone else's business, not even his employer. Punishing people on the basis of their private lives is a tricky business because no outsider can ever be certain of the full details.

"If Cole's crime is that he broke the rules at Chelsea then he is not the only one. In fact, his very signing at Chelsea was facilitated by Kenyon and the then manager Jose Mourinho running roughshod over the regulations governing transfers. But Chelsea did not censure either of them, it took the Premier League to do that.

"Cole may also wish to point to Chelsea's swift exoneration of Terry over allegations that he was paid £10,000 to show an undercover reporter around Chelsea's training ground in the company of a well-known ticket tout. Terry claimed that the money went to charity and the club found no evidence of wrongdoing. Makes you think, doesn't it?

"Cole's chief crime, in the eyes of a critical public, seems to be that he has blown a marriage with a woman who has been publicly venerated to levels unseen since Florence Nightingale was doing her ward rounds in the Crimean War. But however annoying it is for those people who regard him as an ungrateful little sod it is not the grounds for disciplining him."

Wallace concludes with a proposal that is unlikely to find favour with Roman Abramovich, or any of the dressing room for that matter.

"Cole does not have anything to apologise about over his marriage because only he and good Sister Florence know what goes on there. And if Chelsea want to start dishing out punishments according to sexual transgressions then everyone at the club, starting with the owner, had better put their cards on the table."