London: Unlikely crusader, is Benoit Assou-Ekotto.
Ears jangling with metal and his deftly coiffured hair resembling a confection of David James's worst mistakes, he keeps any semblance of social conscience well hidden. Even Harry Redknapp, irked by how much preening the Cameroonian likes to indulge, admits his left-back can be "quite highly strung".
How disarming, then, that this unabashed poseur should turn out to be of the real world. By his visit last week to Broadwater Farm Estate, seedbed of the riots that have torn through the Tottenham High Road and beyond, Assou-Ekotto betrayed empathy for his club's suffering constituents.
Few expected, either, that he would accentuate such a gesture by suggesting that Premier League players could plough "one or two per cent" of their income back into their communities.
Contradictions
Assou-Ekotto is a character prone to contradictions.
Not long after joining Tottenham, he took a scythe through his team-mates' hypocrisy in explaining that his sole motivation was money.
Deloitte's annual report on football finance discloses that Premier League players earned a combined £1.4 billion (Dh8.46 billion) last year. Two per cent of that total — the extreme end of Assou-Ekotto's prescription — comes to £28 million: quite enough, one suspects, to restore a few defaced facades along the Seven Sisters Road.
Expressing charitable donations as a percentage of salary is a highly vexed concept. There is, after all, a rather central capitalist precept that you are allowed to keep what you earn.
But at a time when Tottenham has been riven by London's worst urban strife for 25 years, is it not reasonable to question, as Assou-Ekotto hints, whether the area's highest-profile ambassadors could do more?
In answer, I give you the example of golfer Ryo Ishikawa. In a gesture of quite stunning munificence the Japanese player has pledged every penny of prize money he earns in 2011 to victims of the March tsunami. So affected was he by images of a shattered Sendai, the 19 year-old said: "I feel thrilled. I believe this is the best way for me to spend."
