HERBERT: In Rashford's self-destruction, the real villains are 'pimps'

My daughter is in her mid-20s, so forgive the intemperate response to the story of Marcus Rashford's minders ordering a young woman to surrender her phone before spending an evening in the player's company in Belfast.

The woman was apparently 'allowed to tell her mum' where she was going. Who are these people? How dare they?

This detail and others spill out in lurid new revelations about Rashford's night on the lash last week. There are his identical mobile phones, on the table in front of him. His wad of £20 notes spilling out of a bag - £10,000 in all. And though many will take prurient delight in the obscenity - because contemporary football is a pantomime stage, a reality TV freak show to sate those for whom 90 minutes' sport is no longer stimulation enough - there is an unspeakable sadness in this Burlesque morality tale of a young man drowning in cash.

Sadness in the picture it creates of a boy masquerading as a 26-year-old, with limitless spending possibilities, surrounded by limpets and hangers-on. Rashford orders bruschetta but is unwilling to touch it because he doesn't like 'tomatoes with seeds in'. He sits down with a diamond-encrusted watch on each wrist, unable to see how utterly ridiculous he looks.

Sadness in the apparent lack of any individual to knock some sense into him, tell him what he doesn't want to hear and march him out of Lavery's pub, the Dirty Onion bar, or Thompsons Garage nightclub in Belfast.

This is not exactly an individual drowning in ego. The minders were the ones clearly ruling the roost on that night. Ordering transport, forbidding autographs, booking hotel rooms, organising transport, taking a large slab of the Rashford readies, thanks very much.

Some will have little sympathy for an