BRIAN GLANVILLE

writes for worldsoccer.com each week.

CAPTAIN KLUTZ

03/02/10

It was the famous Victorian actress, Mrs Patrick Campbell, beloved by Bernard Shaw, who was wont to say, “I don’t care what they do, as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

You could I suppose think that figuratively at least you could say that John Terry has frightened the horses, or their modern equivalents. But two questions seem to me to have gone largely unanswered. First, how on earth did he get picked as captain of England in the first place and secondly, what does the captain of England matter, anyway?

Of course, it has mattered to Terry himself a great deal, as it has facilitated his making a great deal of money, to add to the colossal sum he is paid by Chelsea every week. Judge Tugendhat who dismissed Terry’s devious claim for embargoing any public revelation of his turpitude, very correctly proclaimed that Terry’s motivation, far from being moral, was purely to protect the money he made out of his England captaincy.

Meanwhile, the whole affair reminds me of a very old Jewish story, pre Israeli navy days. Two mothers meet, one whose son is a sea captain. “By you he’s a captain,” she tells her friend, “by me he’s a captain, but by captains is he a captain?”

A soccer captain isn’t a cricket captain. He doesn’t have, in the field, his bowlers to rotate, his fieldsman to adjust. By and large, tactical functions and substitutions are determined by the manager.

Over many years, I fail to remember any captain of real significance and importance than Danny Blanchflower, an outstanding skipper both of Northern Ireland and Tottenham Hotspur. His high strategic intelligence enabled him to make vital changes on the field. His prestige when the crown menacingly invaded the pitch after an explosive match between Northern Ireland and Italy in Belfast (only a friendly since Zolt, the deputed World Cup game referee, was forced out of contention) enabled him to consign each Italian player to the guardianship of an Irish one.

And there was a notable occasion in Rotterdam in 1963 before the European Cupwinners Cup Final between Spurs and Atletico Madrid when the Tottenham manager Bill Nicholson had dismayed his own players by eulogising every member of the opposition when Danny took over, praised his own side, and saw the heads look up again. Tottenham went out and won 5-1.

If the FA were daft enough to make a man like John Terry, with an off field record as long as your arm, the England captain, they surely had it coming to them. Long, long before he was involved, or embroiled, with his ex-friend Way Bridges’ ex-girlfriend, Terry, though engaged to his long term sweetheart, had embarked on an endless series of affairs with other women.

He was a notoriously heavy drinker. He was known to urinate in a club; not Chelsea’s. He and other Chelsea players had disgraced themselves when, drunk in a Heathrow airport bar on the dreadful day of 9/11, they had stripped naked and jeered at distressed American passengers. Not to mention recent tales of how, allegedly, he was trying to set up clandestine £10,000 a time tours of the Chelsea training centre at Cobham. Though you wonder who’d be daft enough to pay that.

Meanwhile, in recent weeks his own mother has been convicted of shop lifting (surely John with all his fortune would make that a superfluous activity) while his father has been found dealing in cocaine. Hardly John’s own fault in either case but there’s an old saying about apples falling from trees.

Pro soccer has been a heavy drinking culture from time immemorial. From those pre war days when the whole Orient team turned up drunk at Waterloo Station to go to Bournemouth for a match on Christmas morning; while their manager arrived with a whole barrel of beer. They drew 1-1.

The chief difference between the footballers of those days and now lay in the massive gap in their earnings. So far as I know, Terry has yet to be found in a multiple orgy, by contrast with certain England players who did just that in Cyprus. A horrid affair, a squalid affair, but one asks again, what made the FA choose Terry in the first place? And let him who is without guilt hurl the first footballers’ stone.

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If anyone in football was ever hoist with his own petard, it was surely Arsene Wenger, after Arsenal’s pitiful performance against Manchester United at the Emirates. How casually, even contemptuously, he had dismissed the ineptitude of the ragbag team he had picked against Stoke in the FA Cup. A competition he himself had won four times.

Plainly it was the Premiership which mattered and now he can surely forget about it and pin such hopes as he has left on the European Cup. As one who saw the debacle at the Emirates, I was baffled by Wenger’s tactics. Where United had the inspired Nani on the right, Wenger deployed a non-winger in Rosicky who never stayed there and oh what a goalkeeper!

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Just published: Brian Glanville’s The Real Arsenal - From Chapman to Wenger (JR Books £18.99). The unofficial story of Arsenal.