For better and for worse, it has been a year worth writing down.

At the end of it all, Cole is hoping that he has found a sanctuary at Chelsea’s training base, where, with tighter security than Heathrow, Roman Abramovich and José Mourinho were waiting to greet him on Thursday as he walked nervously through the door for the first time.

Yesterday, he was officially handed his shirt, the No 3, although he had already slipped one on in private. Lying around his house was a Chelsea jersey that he had swapped with Joe Cole after a derby. It even had the right name on the back and so, after more than 15 years in Arsenal red, he tried on blue for the first time in his life.

“I was just mucking around with my friends and wanted to see how it felt,” he said. “It was strange because, even very recently, I wasn’t sure whether I would ever wear a blue shirt. At the start of last week I was preparing to go back to Arsenal and face all the stick back there. It felt strange slipping it on, though exciting at the same time. I’m feeling comfortable in it already. It fits me nicely.”

So finally Ashley Cole is a Chelsea player and he appears delighted that blue is his colour. Partly because he believes that he can win more honours at Stamford Bridge than at Arsenal, where he fears the club are not investing properly in the team, but also because he can begin the public fightback against all the accusations that have been levelled at him in the past 20 months — the accusations of betrayal that followed his infamous meeting with Mourinho and Peter Kenyon, the Chelsea chief executive, in January 2005, and of greed now that he is on the payroll of the world’s richest man under 40. “What first attracted you to the billionaire Mr Abramovich?”, as Mrs Merton might have asked.

Advance publicity would have you believe that Ashley Cole: My Defence, which recounts only the past two turbulent years, is a 276-page trashing of Arsenal, but it is far more complicated than that. “It is not just bitter and nasty,” Cole said. There is much more to the story, just as there is more to the full back.

Of the senior England players (54 caps at 25), he is one of the least-known among the media and, as a result, the supporters. On to that blank canvas it has been easy to paint a picture of him as, in his own words, “a gobby little shit” — the type that might tell Arsenal where to stick their contract offer and then go straight to tea with their arch-rivals.

The image comes in part from his feisty playing style, but, he accepts, also from a reluctance to engage with the media. When he did open up this summer, it was for a glossy spread in OK! at the time of his wedding to Cheryl Tweedy, a singer from Girls Aloud. Wearing a suit that one columnist described as “so shiny you could shave in it”, he was promptly denounced as too flash.

“What defines flash? A nice house, nice car, nice watch? Lawyers, stockbrokers get more money than me, but I’m in the public eye. At the end of the day, it’s my money, I earned it. I can spend it how I like,” he said. “People probably think I am a little gobby shit and I am on the pitch. I just want to win. I will be arguing with whoever I am marking. ‘I’m going to kick you’, that kind of stuff.

“Off the pitch I am a totally different person. I am insecure and I don’t really like talking to the press. I try to keep myself to myself and maybe that affects how I am seen. I’m shy and go into my shell. I need to feel wanted, which is one of the reasons it went wrong at Arsenal.

“It’s never been about money. It is about respect. I gave everything in my heart to Arsenal when I was there and was honest with them. You want to be loved and wanted. I don’t think I got respected or held in high regard.”

Cole tells the story of travelling with Arsenal to a game at Stamford Bridge and seeing Chelsea fans wave and cheer him. At a time when he was being called a Judas by some of his own supporters, it was bound to prey on an already paranoid mind.

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