Andrew Cole can remember when the love came back. It was at the weirdest of times, a moment when the old game that holds so many of us in its thrall crept up, slung on the handcuffs and made him a willing captive again. We are sitting in the clubhouse at Fulham’s training ground in southwest London, and Cole’s thoughts drift beyond the cold and damp outside to the same venue on a hopeful summer’s day. “Pre-season,” he recalls. “I hate pre-season with a passion: the long-distance running, the hot mornings. So it was funny . . . ”

He stops and smiles.

“When I came here to do pre-season,” he explains, “I was, ‘Wow’. It was like going back to the good old days. You came, you worked hard, but the laughter was there. You worked hard, but in a happy atmosphere, and after a week, maybe two, I was saying to myself, ‘Yeah, this is what I’ve been missing’.

“These last six months have been unbelievable for me. I love my football again — love it with a passion. And that’s so important, because I’m at a stage of my career where I just want to enjoy it. I look forward to coming to work, look forward to the training, look forward to the games, look forward to the banter. I’m like a child again.”

Fulham have given Cole back the love. In return, he has gifted to them goals — nine already, at a rate of nearly one every two games, the ratio he achieved in his salad days. Encouraged by Chris Coleman to say his piece around the dressing room and training ground, he has shared with the younger first-team players the know-how gained from winning 10 major trophies. He has brought the side a focal point it had lacked since the departure of Louis Saha. He has offered them — yes — smiles.

How his short career here has contrasted with the 2Å years he endured at Blackburn, where, apart from a few good memories (notably his winning goal in the 2002 League Cup final), the overall flavour of his experience was sour. The deterioration of his relationship with Graeme Souness can be measured by the gap between the £8m the manager spent to sign Cole from Manchester United and the fee of zero he jettisoned him for.

“I’ll be brutally honest with you,” says Cole. “I was at a stage, in my last season at Blackburn, where I wasn’t bothered whether I was in the game or not, because the relationship I had with the guy up there (Souness) was never going to work. In the end, I just didn’t want to be there — not Blackburn, because there was nothing wrong with Blackburn, it’s a lovely club and the fans and the players were great — I mean working under him.

“It was a vicious circle. He tried to dominate someone he couldn’t dominate. He couldn’t dominate me. That’s just the way I am. I won’t be dominated by someone I don’t like. So in the end, we just went round and round and it became obvious the best thing for the pair of us was to go our separate ways.”

Cole never complained publicly — “I’d like to think I’ve got a little bit of class about myself; I didn’t want to hurt the club” — but there was no hiding his spats with Souness. “A lot of the boys used to pull me aside and say, ‘Come on, Coley, we’re in the relegation fight, we need you’, and I’d always say, ‘As long as I’m here, I’ll always give 100% for you guys, the board and the supporters’. There was never a point when anyone could say, ‘He didn’t try a leg in that game’. But in my heart, for a long time, I knew I had to leave.”

Every month Cole waited, he lost a little bit more of the love. When he finally escaped to Fulham last July, it was with the sense that although his lot would improve, he’d never get back his old feeling for his profession, the feeling that had made all the downsides since leaving home at 14 to attend the FA’s National School at Lilleshall worth it. “I really had got to that stage,” he says.

That is why these past six months have been such a happy surprise. “It was strange. I think I spoke to Cookie (Coleman) just twice on the phone before joining, and the first time I met him was after I’d signed. I’d never have believed I’d get on with the manager so well, because past reputations have made me out to be a certain way. So when I did meet Cookie, I sat down with him and said, ‘You know, people have this perception of me’, and he turned around and said, ‘I’m not bothered. It’s for me to make my own opinion of you as a player and a person’. That encouraged me straight away.”

PERCEPTIONS. The same things have been said about Cole so many times that he knows the words by heart. Sullen. Surly. Arrogant. Awkward. They have followed him like stalkers. His difficulties with Souness were seen by his critics as further evidence of an anti- social personality (others may have noted that Cole is only one of a long list of players — and it is continuing at Newcastle — to fall out with the manager). Like the Andrew/Andy thing being a big deal (he prefers Andrew but is really not bothered), it comes down, he believes, to the misleading nature of perceptions.

“I don’t know how this image of me started,” he says. “When I was younger, I was never one who wanted to be on the front cover of this or that. I never wanted to do interviews. That’s why people may have said, ‘He’s sullen’. I’ve never been a player who’s looked for glamour. I turn down a lot of things (he recently declined a £250,000 offer to make an advert) and in the beginning people didn’t like it. Maybe it’s also how I’ve played my football. I’ve never run about smiling, but I’m in a cut-throat business. You’ve got to win.

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