Goodbye John, but no thanks for the memories

(c) Paulblank

In 1956 it was Suez. 1982 brought the conflict in the Falklands. Fast forward to 2010 and England has been rocked by the great John Terry affair. Young man allegedly sleeps with an ex-team mate’s ex-partner. Big deal? Well, yes. Whilst some have questioned why we should be either shocked at the indiscretion of a footballer or indulging in someone’s personal life, the reality is that Terry has betrayed the trust a captain must have.  Yesterday, Fabio Capello finally axed Terry from the role as England’s captain. Well done Capello, I say.

Last week, Terry failed in his attempt to buy the right to defend this most treacherous of civil libertarian balancing acts, when his super injunction was thrown out of the courts. The Chelsea and England captain is one of the most iconic of role models – Chelsea have a worldwide following of millions and England can expect to attract audiences climbing into eight figures should they manage to get beyond the group stages of this summer’s World Cup in South Africa. Terry, whether he likes it or not, has responsibilities that come with his position. In a society where we have come to know all of our rights whilst wilfully casting aside our responsibilities as though they are somehow mutually exclusive concepts, it is of great credit to Capello that he has taken a firm line with Terry.

The worst case scenario was that the Italian, entrusted by the Football Association with the right to make this decision over Terry’s future captaincy of the England side, passed the buck to Manchester City left back Wayne Bridge. Bridge is of course the wronged party, whose ex Vannessa Peroncell was allegedly made pregnant by Terry and who has a young son that he is eager to protect. And Bridge is a popular player, evidenced by his team mates’ public support of his cause yesterday when City beat Portsmouth in the Premier League. But Capello has shown himself to be the leader we need, unlike Terry, by not shirking  his responsibilities.

Bridge is of course just a left back, the understudy to another beacon of morally irresponsibility, Ashley Cole, a man by his own self admission prone to almost crash his car if offered a paltry wage increase to say, £55,000. But  Bridge is dispensable in footballing terms. If this was a cynical, harsh case of footballing expediency, Terry is worth a hundred times what Bridge is. It was important that an issue which was to do with far more than just football didn’t come down to a case of cynical working out of the percentages.

So what has Terry done that is so bad? It goes beyond simply this latest shocking revelation. In the past Terry has committed a number of indiscretions, as The Guardian listed yesterday.  On the pitch, he is the captain of a Chelsea team that built a reputation for harassing and bullying referees. A prime example of this behaviour was last year in the European Cup semi final against Barcelona. After some questionable refereeing, Didier Drogba swore at TV cameras and was seen intimidating the referee. Terry defended the Ivorian striker after the match. And he has admitted to cheating on his wife in the past, and once said “I really regret what I’ve done to Toni. I’m not going to cheat on her ever again.”

Terry held Chelsea to ransom last summer, refusing to commit his future to the club as Manchester City publicly courted and attempted to sign him. By refusing to comment for weeks, he was able to negotiate a pay increase, to a reported £160,000. Because this is clearly necessary.

It is vitally important that Terry was removed. He has failed moral tests on every step of the way – from the attempt to subvert the freedom of the press through a super injunction, to his alleged offer to pay Peroncell not to talk to newspapers, and now, if reports are to be believed, he will refuse to do the decent thing and resign from the captaincy voluntarily. But as the leader of a group of people, disloyalty of the sort he has been accused of makes such a position untenable. Any moral authority he had to lead the England team disappeared out of Peroncell’s bedroom window when he decided that it would be a good idea to sleep with a once close friend’s wife.

Of course he isn’t the only England captain of recent times to have committed the faux pas of lying back and not thinking of England, following in the footsteps of David Beckham and the Rebecca Loos scandal. Yet Beckham was a very different case. He did not betray his team, the very people he was meant to lead and besides, it was a blip on Beckham’s otherwise highly admirable character. Terry seems to lack the very thing that a captain must command, loyalty.

Perhaps though, this is not the worst sin of all. In attempting to block these revelations, he not only tried to have an injunction placed, but a super injunction, thus preventing it even being public knowledge that there was an injunction placed. This attempt to subvert the freedom of the press and freedom of speech is insulting to all of those who have fought for hundreds of years for these most basic of civic freedoms. For that, Capello was right to show Terry the red card.