What if footballers really did let their football do their talking for them?

“Let your football do the talking,” they said. “Fine,” I said. But , ideally, whatever my throw-in technique said about me I’d take back – I meant nothing by it. Intro done. What does the way some high-profile players play say about them as people? We looked at Michael Owen, Luis Suarez, Theo Walcott, Joey Barton and Jack Wilshere.

Michael Owen’s clinical finishing and scampering around the pitch mark him out as a boring, self-absorbed twat with an eye for grabbing attention wherever there’s any going. The scampering indicates that underneath it all he’s just desperate for recognition – that he might well chew through a lemon for you if you were happy to call him the best at it in front of a camera. Don’t ask what his fabulous goalscoring record translates into – that isn’t really what this is about at all.

Luis Suarez’s racism whilst playing suggests that he is a racist. Or, to make an important distinction, that he is a person who says racist things, which is very different from being a racist, definitely, in the eyes of Liverpool fans, whilst he is playing for their club, and is their best player.

Theo Walcott’s inability to do anything of merit on a football pitch makes it indisputable that he is devoid of a personality. One writer, for Sabotage Times, reckons that “Theo Walcott has never quite been able to shake off the comparisons with Thierry Henry” – I’d say, actually, he’s done a pretty good job of that. He’s gone wrong. If his feet are doing his talking for him, though, at least we’d be spared the interviews – whether it’s him being glad to be back or just about to get his head down in training.

Joey Barton’s all action displays which increasingly result in nothing happening indicate that he’s got more to say for himself than his talent merits. Clearly he has more about him than the average Theo Walcott, but that doesn’t automatically tell us that what he has to say is of any merit whatsoever. The amount of time he spends on the right wing in games should also be a worry – his crosses from that position have, for the experts, always carried a little too much racist propaganda with them.

Jack Wilshere’s football-playing was unavailable for interview having not appeared for months. Thus, we’ll have to go off his actual words, which appear on Twitter. “Having a fruit salad in bed….. #5aday,” he tells us today, before linking to a picture of the fruit salad. Clearly he’s ahead of his time on Twitter: he’s parodying the footballers’ bland tweets genre created by Rio Ferdinand and Michael Owen, it’s actually really clever. Why else would anyone tweet about a fruit salad, think about it.

Dimi Berbatov’s first touch hints that he is a gentle lover.