Jordan, did you REALLY need to trash your reputation for a few million more?

You can be exposed to the crazy economics of top-flight football for so long that the unfathomably vast salaries just become routine: a casual reference point in the game's vocabulary.

But when Jordan Henderson mounted a flawed, awkward, sometimes excruciating defence of his decision to play in Saudi Arabia, it was the time to pause and ask the question. Why Jordan? Why, on a Premier League salary of £190,000 a week, did you really need to trash your reputation for a few million more?

He didn't seem to see the reaction coming. Didn't appear to compute for a moment, that the various pretty words he's uttered about inclusion and diversity and rainbow laces - 'I've never liked to see people ostracised or bullied, it's how I was brought up' - would suddenly seem hollow and baseless.

Perhaps that's just the way it gets in the protected, gilded cage at the top end of football, hearing so many other people's platitudes that you begin to believe your own publicity.

That publicity always did seem slightly confected. Wearing armbands and laces and making some pronouncements is hardly going to the ends of the earth, celebrated though it was at the time. But to witness someone who had made that one of his 'causes' drowning in his own self-justification and contradictions was depressing.

'We can all bury our heads in the sand and criticise different cultures from afar,' Henderson said in one breath, before declaring in the next the need to 'respect' the 'values' of Saudi Arabia because 'surely that's the way it should be'. Those 'values' including the criminalisation of homosexuality.

Henderson was at least willing to put his head above the parapet and discuss his decision in a lengthy interview with journalists from The Athletic. But