WITH our increasingly cosmopolitan game, the ability or otherwise of those who arrive from foreign shores to speak our native tongue has often coloured the public’s perception of their worth.

Ossie Ardiles became virtually a national treasure as a result of his quaint pronunciation of his employers as ‘Totting-ham’ in the early 80s, even having an atrocious Wembley song composed in his honour; whereas more recently Fabio Capello has often been portrayed as the village idiot because he cannot deliver a monologue with the verbal dexterity of Sir John Gielgud.

In these cases of course, the preoccupation with their linguistic skills rises or falls in inverse proportion to their level of performance.

If Ossie Ardiles had only the limited skills of, say, Mark Falco, no amount of cute mangling of the English language would have saved him from the derision of the White Hart Lane ‘Shelf’.

Similarly, the current England manager’s fractured English only became a concern once he tried to persuade Paul Scholes, Sir Stanley Matthews and Postman Pat’s cat to join his World Cup squad shortly before their departure to South Africa.

And yet it would seem that the ability or willingness of ‘foreign imports’ to become reasonably fluent in the language of their adopted country can have a significant impact on the likelihood of their success.

Carlos Tevez may well be able to point to an impressive playing career in England with a variety of clubs, but his stay seems doomed to end in derision due to apparent ‘misunderstandings’ and his complaints of social isolation and poor restaurants cannot have been helped by being limited to phrases like ‘How are your potatoes?’ and ‘table for 36 please’.

Our own former leader, Rafa Benitez was interesting on Soccer AM at the weekend when he was asked to explain why Fernando Morientes had failed to set the world alight at Liverpool.

Benitez highlighted the failure of the player and his family to learn the language as a cause of stress and isolation which inevitably affected his performance. Amusingly, he contrasted this situation with his own daughter recently asking him for a ‘booty’ – as in jam or chip – in a broad Scouse accent.

Now it is being mooted that it was Luis Suarez’s limited grasp of English that caused him to use a word which, though containing no racist connotations in his native Uruguay, may bear a close resemblance to a totally unacceptable variant during ‘conversations’ with Patrice Evra.

But surely our clubs should assist, and insist upon, foreign players and their families acquiring reasonable fluency in English – not from any xenophobic or political standpoint, but to increase their chances of successful integration into the community, protect them from unintended consequences and thus provide a stable base to fulfil their potential.

The only language barrier Liverpool players should have to struggle with is deciphering Jamie Carragher’s on-pitch positional ‘advice’.