Which is tragic when you consider he is one of our greatest players (up there with Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka and Mark Schwarzer) and arguably our most effective ever player. He’s still the only Australian striker all but guaranteed to get us a goal if we need one.

But Timmy, great as you are, that does not give you right to crap on the A-League by telling the English media you were just going through the motions. And for someone who uses the word respect so frequently it’s a tad ironic, because if you were not giving 100 per cent it means you didn’t respect the league, the club and the coach.

Either he doesn’t understand the word or thinks it applies only to him.

Some people might still fly to his rescue and say: "He’s right. The A-League isn’t as good as the Championship."

But so what? The A-League was paying his wages and part of the deal was surely that he bring to the league some of the passion and professionalism that made him what he was in England – the home of football.

The really troubling thing is not whether he’s telling the truth about his own training attitude at a club he didn’t respect…it’s more the fact that he was willing to say so to the English media. Did he not know it would get back to Australia or did he simply not care?

I’m not sure which is worse, but it tells you something that many have suspected about him for a long time: a person who grew up in Australia would never have said those words (not to the media at any rate).

Could it be that Timmy didn’t spend enough time in Australia as a young man learning Aussie style and soaking up our culture? Footballers have always been popular but something happened in England in the 90s that took it down a dark path.

Footballers became so famous and so well paid that they became part of the different moral universe which had previously been the preserve solely of rock stars and Hollywood.