Gareth Southgate, the Middlesbrough manager, has retaliated over the tactics used for a plan to ask every Barclays Premier League player to donate a day’s pay to a nurses’ hardship fund. The stunt has, Southgate believes, turned nasty, its tactics “bordering on blackmail”.

Has Southgate overreacted? No. The only surprise is that it has taken so long for a leading football figure to react at all. Southgate has backed up his dismay with action; he has blocked his club from paying their pledged donation to the Mayday for Nurses Hardship Fund.

The fund was the brainchild of Noreen Hertz, an economist and campaigner, and was publicised via a documentary during the summer on Channel 4 called The Million Pound Footballers’ Giveaway. I was asked to review the programme for Radio 4 and while I scoffed at a dreadful piece of broadcasting, football players must have been quietly seething.

Southgate is concerned that Hertz is leaking the names of players who have not contributed, a ploy he calls “outrageous”. It is outrageous. Imagine seeing your name on a website because you had declined to hand over cash to someone knocking on your door for Guide Dogs for the Blind. But Southgate should have been angry sooner.

Hertz promised nurses, at the Royal College of Nursing annual conference, that she would make sure that every football player in the top flight would, by the end of the season, have donated a day’s pay – amounting to £1.5 million – to their cause. By the time the final ball was kicked for the 2006-07 season she had raised half the expected sum.

There are more than 365 worthy charities to which footballers may like to donate a day’s pay (and if they did they would be penniless), but here was a woman with a camera crew in tow telling them that a hardship fund for nurses should be top of their donation list.

Why footballers? Hertz argues that the plight of nurses will not make it to the front page unless footballers are involved. The whole tone of her campaign is that the contrast is irresistible. A player can earn £20,000 for 90 minutes on the pitch, whereas a nurse earns £16 per hour and a half on duty.

A lot of people earn more than a nurse earns and it would be rude to collar them and tell them so and ask what they are going to do about it. This is, however, what Hertz and Channel 4 did. The camera crew thought that they were capturing boredom on the faces of the players as they listened to Hertz’s crass presentation, but we were, in fact, seeing the players trying to work out if they were being bullied, cajoled or scolded for earning too much. Lee Carsley, the Everton midfield player, asked the question, which Hertz ducked: “Why does it have to be a day’s salary, why not a donation?” Nurses have a strict pay structure but players do not.

A striker on £100,000 a week can receive a pass from a full back on £30,000 a week. Had Hertz simply asked for a donation, I expect every player would have made one, but Hertz, in pleading for a day’s salary, was asking them to accept that they are paid too much, given that they rarely save a life or indeed stick a thermometer in anyone’s mouth.

That half of all Premier League players pledged to give up a day’s pay was perfect. Some gave, some did not. They did not act like the sheep footballers are mistaken for. And now a club are withholding their pledge on principle. Players do not want to be coerced and should be applauded if they have the guts to say so.