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In a week in which football’s lot in life is to be judged against the heroes of Britain’s greatest Olympics since 1920, and to be found wanting, three senior England players, Rio Ferdinand, David James and David Beckham, went some way to demonstrating that the national sport, and those who play it, can still be a force for good.

Lending their support to a government initiative against knife crime, the trio appeared on a podium with Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, and Alfred Hitchcock - no, seriously - Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and recently appointed knife czar. No guessing who wanted to be toughest on young offenders out of that lot.

The copper? Are you mad? Hitchcock is one of Sir Ian Blair’s senior men. He is wetter than an English summer beneath all the talk. When he was interviewed by this newspaper last month he said there were 200,000 youths who carried knives and then talked of putting them in community programmes. The Home Secretary talks a better game than she plays as well, reacting to a problem that has been allowed to grow with a pledge of harsher sentencing that basically amounts to 12 weeks for knife possession for anyone over 16. The last person sent to prison for supplying a knife to an under16, meanwhile, was sentenced in 1997. The Government has recently approved a tougher stance, but most courts still have one eye on an overcrowded prison system.

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You want tough views on law and order, ask a footballer. The most right-wing Conservative governments are founded on the policies of working-class kids made good and the worrying aspect of yesterday’s announcement was that the speakers in tracksuits were more in tune with the man in the street.

Forget football’s disdain for authority figures with whistles and flags. The player seen mouthing off to a referee on Saturday is very likely to sit slightly to the right of Norman Tebbitt when it comes to young offenders. Boys who have clawed their way out of inner London’s dead-ends don’t indulge the bleeding-heart stuff.

Football is a working-class sport and most knife crime affects working-class communities. Stephen Lawrence was a pupil at Ferdinand’s school; Damilola Taylor was from the same Peckham estate. When Beckham was 13, the older brother of one of his closest friends was stabbed and paralysed on an otherwise unexceptional day in the East End. He was about to sign professional forms with Leyton Orient. More than most politicians, these guys have seen knife crime from the sharp end.

So, after the standard, carefully prepared government spiel, what followed was distinctly off-message. Ferdinand spoke of a deterrent and of equating sentences for knife crime with gun crime; James was enthusiastic about serious punishment making the streets a lot safer. This would almost certainly not find favour with the knife czar, but it seemed more realistic than roping in three footballers to play sheriff to teenage gang members for a day.

The players meant well, all are committed to community and charity work and yesterday they were completely sincere in their wish to help. But, seriously, how much of a role model will Beckham now be in communities that are so broken and dysfunctional that 200,000 young people walk out armed with a lethal weapon at some time each year?

When the Beatles made their first film, A Hard Day’s Night, part of its appeal was the portrayal of the Fab Four as fun guys; famous but approachable. The fans felt that they could be part of that gang, too. Twenty years later, when Paul McCartney made his film Give My Regards To Broad Street using a similar day-in-the-life storyline, the quartet on camera were two superstar ex-Beatles, McCartney and Ringo Starr, and their wives, Linda and the former Bond girl Barbara Bach. Nobody could relate to that group and the film bombed.

Similarly, the Government may be overestimating the role that a footballer such as Beckham plays in the young lives of inner-city teenagers, with his pop star wife and Hollywood lifestyle. It would be like getting Tom Cruise to deliver an inspirational message to the Bloods and Crips of Los Angeles. “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant s*** to me,” the politicised rappers, Public Enemy, sang. The same lyric, Fight The Power, contains the line “most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps” – or at government press conferences, no doubt.

The Football Foundation is working on an initiative at young-offender prisons that aims to make community football coaches out of violent youths. Alastair Bennett, the director of policy and external relations, believes that converting the knife-carrying tough guy on a sink estate into a person who draws his self-esteem from mentoring young people away from crime is the way forward. “The gang leaders are probably bigger heroes than the footballers to some of these kids,” he told me. “If we can get through to them, we can reach a lot of people in the community.”

Amid the calls for harsher sentencing, there was consensus on one aspect of the softer approach. The players do not truly know what motivates the perpetrators of knife crime, because outstanding sporting talent meant their young lives were not aimless, but opportunities beyond gang life were vital. “I didn’t carry a knife, but I was around people that probably did,” Ferdinand said.

“I was fortunate because I had a goal. Some children have not got those aspirations, so it is about the community stopping them sitting around and getting in with a bad crowd. That is where the problems begin. Schools finish at three, both parents are working, or there is just a single parent, the kids have the key to the house and four hours by themselves. If there are no facilities, that is where the trouble happens; it starts with shoplifting and escalates.”

“We all had releases in sport,” James said. “Kids need a release.

Instead of selling off school playing fields for housing developments, they should be utilising those areas. A punishment deterrent is one factor, but unless you also give them something to do, they will just carry bats or whatever.”

Will gang members put down their weapons because football says so? Unlikely. Perhaps, though, this will stop Smith’s Cabinet colleague, Gerry Sutcliffe, scoring cheap points on the subject of Premier League salaries next time he is looking for an easy headline; because if footballers genuinely could do what the knife czar cannot, they would be worth every penny, yes Sports Minister?

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