The asterisks cupboard got a good clear-out this week, but when is the right time to use them, asks MALACHY CLERKIN

IT’S ALWAYS the footballers, isn’t it? A long time ago, in another life and another newspaper, a few of us were sitting around a table planning a piece on the trial of Leeds players Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer. You remember it – a club night out gone awry, an Asian student who ended up in hospital, days upon days of court testimony filling up every page and airwave slot that was going.

To borrow a phrase John Terry employed in his statement to the FA that was read out in Westminster Magistrates Court this week, there was plenty of industrial language in the witness box. Our little round-table discussion came upon the dicey area of how to approach it. Shit or s**t? Wanker or w****r? Leeds or L***s?

Those of us who argued that we’re all grown-ups who can take a little cursing from time to time knew from pretty early on that we were onto a loser, asterisking in the wind if you will. No matter that the page was going to end up looking like the ceiling of a planetarium, there was just no way were we going to be allowed to write out the full words.

Having taken our beating, the final ignominy came when we lost the battle for just how many asterisks we would have to use in each word. The general feeling from on high was that, just to be on the safe side, we should reduce the f-word to literally that – an f and three little stars. “Oh for f**k’s sake!” grouched one of our number. “At least leave me the f**king k!”

The store cupboard of asterisks got a good clear-out this week, not just in the Terry trial coverage either. Just as most people were getting over the shock of seeing a member of Britpop heroes Supergrass leading the Tour de France, they had to collect themselves anew when Bradley Wiggins began turning press conferences into scenes from The Sopranos. Whatever we think about the rights and wrongs of his dismantling of people who ask questions about him on Twitter, it has to be said that the way he did it was pretty spectacular.

“I say they’re just f**king wankers,” quoth Wiggins. “I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of s**t, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. C**ts.”

Even the avowed defenders of a good curse-filled rant among us will admit that Wiggins’s sign-off there is a little unnecessary. But leaving that aside, it seemed that the yellow jersey’s outburst meant nothing but widespread confusion as to how to handle it in the next day’s papers. Some had the objects of Wiggins’s derision as “f*****g w*****s”, some said shit where others didn’t, some left out the c-word coda altogether.

This is the thing. There doesn’t appear to be hard and fast rules that anyone sticks to (unless you’re the Guardian, whose louche policy appears to be to let anything and everything go, the laissez-faire m*****f*****s). Hilariously, an over-zealous sub in the Daily Mail saw fit to douse the Wiggins quote in so many asterisks, it was if they’d been applied from a salt shaker and the lid had fallen off. The upshot was that even arses was reduce to a****. It’s come to something when the humble arse can’t get a legitimate, ahem, airing.

Anyway, this is all J**n T***y’s fault. Or at least he’s the one getting the blame. In truth, it’s more accurately the fault of prosecutor Duncan Penney who began proceedings by instructing Anton Ferdinand not to be coy about using precisely the words used on the pitch at Loftus Road that day last October when he was in the witness box. Thus, we heard c**ts and f**ks and knobheads by the hundred-load as the week went on.

After a while, it was hard to shake the feeling that m’learned friends were quite enjoying themselves, playing to the gallery and holding up to ridicule the lumbering oiks that pass for professional footballers. Indeed, there was something particularly odious about the legal folks spending the week pretty much goading the three players into being free and easy with their language in a public court, only for the chief magistrate to turn around and declare in his summing up yesterday that, “We are talking about everyday speech and everyday people here, not Balzac”.

Which, when you think about it, is just about the most condescending, haughty, look-down-your-nose a load of . . .

Ah, I seem to have run out of asterisks.