For England's football team, the long, albeit trophyless, years of David Beckham suddenly look like a lost era of competence and tranquillity. On Friday Beckham's successor, John Terry, was stripped of the team captaincy for the second time in his international career, again as a result of incidents unrelated to his qualities as a player.
For once the much-criticised Football Association acted quickly and decisively, responding to this week's announcement that the trial of Terry, 31, for the alleged use of racist insults during a match in November, will not come before Westminster magistrates court until 9 July. That means after the finals of the European football championship, which are being held in Poland and Ukraine this summer, and in which England are one of the 16 competing nations.
Terry is accused of insulting Anton Ferdinand, the Queens Park Rangers defender and brother of Rio, a long-time rival for the England captaincy, in racist terms during a match at QPR's Loftus Road on 23 October. His lawyers, announcing a plea of not guilty at a hearing this week, asked for a delay in the start of the trial, which was granted by the district judge. The player and his advisers may have hoped he would be able to take part in the tournament, but an immediate outcry preceded the FA's decision.
For Terry, the loss of the captaincy – even temporarily – is a far more serious sanction than the maximum punishment for the offence, a £2,500 fine which would represent, as one newspaper worked out, less than three hours' work for a man on a basic wage from his club of £160,000 a week.
On Friday sources close to the player were letting it be known that he is "devastated" and "furious", angered in particular by the timing of the announcement.
But elsewhere it was being disclosed that when Terry became aware of mounting antipathy among the England squad's black players during the buildup to their most recent match, against Sweden on 15 November, two weeks after the alleged outburst, he had requested a player close to him to ask the most disaffected team-mate if there was a problem. The answer: "Fucking right there's a problem."
While announcing that Terry has been relieved of his responsibilities as captain, the FA made it clear that the Chelsea defender will not be excluded from consideration as a player.
The decision to deprive him of the captain's armband was made without regard for the views of Fabio Capello, the England manager. "Fabio has not been involved in the FA board discussions," the FA chairman, David Bernstein, said on Friday.
Early last year Capello restored Terry to the job, having seen it taken from him in February 2010 as a result of publicity over an alleged affair with the French lingerie model Vanessa Perroncel, a former partner of Wayne Bridge, a Chelsea and England teammate.
Bridge's anger over the liaison – always denied by Terry – led him to announce his own retirement from international football. Perroncel's subsequent denial of the allegations was followed by an apology from the News of the World, which admitted invading her privacy. While deprived of the captaincy on that occasion, Terry continued playing for England, under the leadership of Rio Ferdinand – one of three players, the other being Steven Gerrard, who "auditioned" for the post during Capello's early days in England. The Italian followed the example of his predecessor, the ill-fated Steve McClaren, in plumping for Terry's powerful presence in the dressing room and driving force on the pitch.
McClaren first appointed Terry to the job on taking over as manager after the 2006 World Cup, when the departure of Sven-Goran Eriksson coincided with Beckham's decision to relinquish the armband. There were many who felt that the Barking-born defender's previous brushes with scandal rendered him an unsuitable candidate. These included, but are not limited to, a much publicised incident of unruliness with a couple of Chelsea teammates in front of American tourists on the day of 9/11, a charge of affray – of which he was cleared – at a nightclub in 2002, the discovery that he had parked his Bentley in a disabled bay outside a Pizza Express near his home in the Surrey stockbroker belt, and the claim that he was asking thousands of pounds for giving unauthorised tours of Chelsea's training ground in 2009. His supporters praise his clenched-fist approach to the captain's mission, symbolic of the aggression and defiance still believed by many to form the core virtues of English football.
Others view the episode of the Bentley in the disabled bay as a particularly potent symbol of the degeneracy of the English game's young millionaires. To them, Friday's news was long overdue.
Guardian
