ONE of the big stories of recent days has been about Adrian Mutu, his drug-taking and his subsequent sacking by Chelsea.

Chelsea, it seems, are also considering taking legal action against Mutu personally for the recovery of the transfer fee they paid.

I fully support Chelsea's stance. In all my time in football it has been a clean sport as far as drugs are concerned. There has been the odd murmuring of performance-enhancing drugs being taken but nothing compared with athletics, for example.

The FA's testing procedures are quite strict but it's recreational drugs which have become the big issue at the moment.

I'm not quite sure what the FA test for. I always thought that they were testing for performance-enhancing drugs and I'm not sure whether that includes recreational drugs. In the normal course of events, I wonder what action they would take against a player if traces of cocaine or another recreational drug were found.

I think I'm right in saying that in this case it was Chelsea who asked the FA to come in and do the test.

But this is very much an isolated case which has been dealt with quickly and firmly and it sends a stark message out to everybody.

People talk about players being role models. I think that, first and foremost, role models should be parents and teachers. No-one talks about film and pop stars being role models but for some reason now footballers come into that category.

The media builds up how players have a responsibility in the way they behave, but some of the players in question are hardly out of their teens or early 20s and still growing into their maturity. It's a lot to expect in some cases.

Take Stan Collymore whom I know from when he had a very brief period with us at Wolves back in the early 1990s. He's hardly been a role model in his professional life and I'm sure he'd be the first to admit it.

Now, though, he's being built up into something even bigger than when he was an outstanding player and achieving celebrity status for I'm not quite sure what.

He is on the television in a variety of shows such as The Farm and this week, I believe, he's being a Buddhist for a day! It's a strange world when the media has built him up into a role model - something he never achieved when he was playing - but now he is all over the television and radio for reasons completely beyond me.