Feeling blue: John Terry suffers yesterday but Chelsea's fans
continue to support him
You can always tell when a sportsman’s arrogance has
reached unbearable, boiling-point proportions because they start
talking about themselves in the third person.
Thus it was with John Terry, who gave an extraordinary interview
in which he said: ‘I’m on a mission and nothing is going to
distract me. I want to win the Champions League and Premier League
for Chelsea and World Cup for England. I’m not ashamed to admit it.
I wouldn’t be John Terry if I felt any differently.’
I actually laughed out loud when I read that. The only mission
Terry’s been on recently — that he ought to be ashamed of — is, of
course, the mission to seduce his England teammate and best friend
Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend.
A mission that has caused terrible damage to the significantly
more important mission of improving England’s chances this
summer.
Bridge has now pulled out of the squad, unable to deal with the
appalling treachery and telling friends that the worst thing about
it was Terry hasn’t even said sorry.
Imagine that for a moment. You bed your best friend and former
team-mate’s girl, the woman he loves and has a baby with. Yet you
don’t even apologise to him when you’re caught.
Instead, you calmly jet off to your gullible wife, who forgives
your umpteenth infidelity yet again because she prefers being ‘JT’s
wife’ with all the lucrative perks it brings, to not being ‘JT’s
wife’. And you tell the world: ‘I’m responding the way I’ve always
done — by looking straight ahead. Nobody’s going to knock me off my
stride.’
Not a thought for Bridge, not a glimmer of contrition for the
hurt and damage he has caused. That takes a special kind of ego, a
special kind of selfishness. And he wouldn’t be John Terry if he
felt any differently because ‘JT’ always does whatever ‘JT’ wants
and sod the consequences for anyone else.
His career record shows us he’s a man who sleeps with who he
likes, drinks what he likes, hits who he likes, sells out to who he
likes and gambles what he likes.
And the worse he has behaved, the more protective his club have
been and the louder Chelsea fans have roared his name.
A few people have tried to persuade me what a decent,
misunderstood guy Terry is. One newspaper friend of mine almost
welled up at a drinks party last week as he told how kind Terry had
been to his young daughter. But the Krays were nice to kids,
too.
The truth about ‘JT’ is that he is a pretty unpleasant piece of
work, surrounded by even more unsavoury types, who thinks he can
get away with anything because everyone of any authority in his
life lets him.
Mr Unpleasant and Mrs Gullible: The Terrys are all
fake smiles as they arrive at Heathrow
Roman Abramovich doesn’t care what Terry does. But why
should we expect him to? By Russian oligarch standards, the Chelsea
skipper is a veritable choirboy.
But Fabio Capello could yet be the man who finally gives Terry
the lesson he deserves — by dropping him from the England squad
altogether and inviting Bridge to rejoin it. That would surely be
the right way to resolve this, wouldn’t it? Punishing the villain,
not the victim?
‘There’s a shirt on my wall at home, the one I wore when I
missed that penalty,’ said Terry. ‘It’s there as a daily reminder
of what I’m striving for.’
Capello should send him Bridge’s World Cup shirt from England’s
training camp in South Africa to stick on the wall as a daily
reminder of what he’s missing.
I wouldn’t feel sorry for him. He doesn’t feel sorry for anyone
else.
