I once scored a goal while smoking a cigarette, during a five-a-side game. The ball came over at waist height and I swivelled and volleyed home. Back of the net, etc. The great thing was the way that the defender backed off me to avoid being singed in the genitals by the lit end of my Superking. If I hadn’t been smoking he would probably have got in a decent challenge, the goal would not have been scored and the world of football would thus have been greatly impoverished.

There is nothing in the rule books about not smoking on the pitch but players seem reluctant to do it these days and the game is, to my mind, much the poorer as a consequence. There is something terribly noble, cavalier even, about tearing up the wing with a Woodbine clamped between your lips, something that we have lost over the years.

I’ve always rather liked William Gallas, so I was delighted to see that he, too, is a smoker. Or a smoker up to a point. He was photographed emerging from a nightclub with a cigarette in his mouth and, as a consequence, that ascetic puritan Arsène Wenger threw a strop. “I don’t like that,” he said. “He has a responsibility as captain of Arsenal and that cannot be accepted . . . it is a public job with a public responsibility.”

Oh, lordy - and the cigarette wasn’t even lit. There was no comment from Wenger about the place from which Gallas had just emerged - that nemesis for the modern professional footballer, the nightclub, with its booze, its profusion of willing air-headed slappers and inevitable lurking, jealous boyfriends.

I wonder if Wenger would have reacted in exactly the same way if Gallas had been caught on CCTV holding up a post office with a sawn-off shotgun and then, emerging with his swag, had lit up a quick gasper before piling into the getaway car. “It is disgusting behaviour,” the Arsenal manager might have told a press conference as Gallas was banged up for five years, “and sends out the wrong message to young fans. Smoking is a filthy habit.”

You might argue that if football is to clean up its act and its practitioners become likeable and respected members of society, then a few players smoking is the least of its worries. I mean, does Ashley smoke? There. QED.

Smoking and football were once synonymous; that old working-class culture of booze, fags and football. In one autobiography of Brian Clough it was reported that the entire Nottingham Forest team - the team that won the European Cup - smoked like laboratory beagles, usually in the prematch talk just before taking to the pitch.

And the very best of the players - or at least, those most loved by the fans - smoked the greatest amounts. The Nottingham Forest and Manchester United player Ian Storey-Moore, I seem to remember, liked to fit in a couple of Benson & Hedges at half-time, which did not stop him scoring an astonishing 118 goals in 236 games, from the left wing.

Arguably the greatest footballer in the history of the game, Johan Cruyff, famously smoked until the stuff came out of his ears; at the other end of the scale, so did Blackburn’s Simon Garner, possibly the best-loved player in the history of the club.

In the past 10 years the authorities have begun to clamp down, of course. They had it in for Ricardo Lavolpe, the Argentinian who became Mexico’s finest manager and who returned from the 2006 World Cup having been described as the coach of the tournament. Lavolpe chain-smoked during games, pacing up and down the touchline, and was told to desist by Fifa. He responded by saying that he would rather give up football than give up smoking. His management technique, and nicotine habit, seem to have been based on that of another extraordinarily gifted Argentinian, Cesar Menotti.

The new piety has now been imposed upon beleaguered supporters. The Football League imposed a smoking ban at all grounds, despite the fact that few of them are what might be described by the law as largely enclosed. Antismoking campaigners will insist that people have accustomed themselves to the ban and even may find it hard to fathom how it could ever have been allowed. They should spend a few minutes in the lavatories of any league ground at half-time; there is so much tobacco smoke you hardly have to light up yourself to get a decent hit.

Wenger is not a bad man, by modern footballing standards, but his priorities here seem to be misplaced. He has been captured by the same propaganda that has swallowed the government whole. Nobody would argue that smoking is a healthy activity - merely that it might not necessarily rank as the greatest evil in the world as we know it, and that people, even Arsenal captains, have the right to live as they see fit, within the law. And when Gallas sat down on the pitch crying at the end of that game against Birmingham City, Wenger should have been on hand with a few words of consolation for his captain; and a packet of Marlboro Lights.