As spine-tingling as it may be for a footballer to pull on an armband up their sleeve, its impact on the pitch is demonstrably inferior to the rugby or cricket captaincy role. In cricket, the buck usually stops with the captain when it comes to selection and tactics while in rugby, England captain Martin Johnson repeatedly reneged on Coach Clive Woodward’s instructions to spearhead England to success. In football, the coach and only the coach is the selector and tactician while the captain is his on-field mouth-piece (or more disparagingly, Yes Man) to bark out reminders to teammates.
Susceptible to injury for almost two-and-a-half years now, Rio Ferdinand has paid the price for the unwanted sick note moniker by his national coach relieving him of the England captaincy. Over a week on from the initial likelihood that this would occur, Fabio Capello made the announcement via the Sunday papers to almost nationwide derision with the exception of the King’s Road faithful. Chelsea’s John Terry, a player who has endeavoured to be as hated as the Three Lions’ historic bête noires Diego Maradona and Cristiano Ronaldo, has been reinstated effective immediately.
For almost two decades, the prestige of the captain’s role has consistently dwindled whenever a new England player is anointed the privilege. Yesteryear, the coach would appoint someone to lead by example and represent the role-model guise, which has since been phased out to the extent that it is now effectively a fable. Because now the England captain has at least one outstanding misdemeanour he is synonymous with; their transgressions symptomatic of abusing their ‘power’.
Prior to the 1998 World Cup, Alan Shearer viciously kicked Neil Lennon in the head then allegedly told the FA that he would not represent his country at the World Cup if they charged him. After him, David Beckham was accused of having an affair with Rebecca Loos and his own narcissism prolonged an excessive spell as England captain under the sycophantic guidance of Sven-Goran Eriksson. Terry’s rap sheet is longer than the BBC’s television coverage of Comic Relief, Ferdinand missed a drugs-test in 2003 and has endured several tabloid scandals while Steven Gerrard contentiously escaped a prison sentence for hitting a DJ who refused his request to play a Phil Collins record. The role-model reservoir has well and truly run dry.
Capello this week even said that the talented Jack Wilshere would captain England one day and that he is a ‘real leader’. Yet before his nineteenth birthday he was arrested in August last year for becoming involved in a ‘fracas’ on Kensington High Street and his puerile penchant for blinkered post-match bitching on Twitter and malicious streak facetiously earmarks him as a suitable inheritor of the role.
Footballing exemplars aside, the farcical ponderings of Capello are all the more extreme since in 2008 he played down the significance of the football captain by auditioning it in his first four England matches prior to announcing that Terry would retain the captaincy ahead of Ferdinand. He even frivolously allowed David Beckham to lead out England against Trinidad & Tobago in what was a deliberate ploy to get Jack Warner onside for the doomed 2018 World Cup campaign and was invariably bemused whenever the media stressed the gravity of the standing at press conferences.
Embarrassment arguably takes the highest rank however. Lord Horatio Nelson once mused: “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy,” for Capello, his captain is as much an enemy as an ally. Terry chaired a bitterly vengeful press conference in the aftermath of England’s pathetic goalless draw against Algeria in Cape Town where insubordinately he queried Capello’s tactics and eulogised the merits of starting then-Chelsea colleague Joe Cole. Not only was Capello furious at this (“It’s a mistake when you speak about other players... I have to think about the team”) but it ostensibly created friction between the northern (Gerrard, Wayne Rooney and Jamie Carragher) and southern contingent (Terry, Lampard and Ashley Cole) of the squad with Gerrard seething that as interim captain, Terry broke recognised protocol to undermine him too.
Yet Terry has regained the role, chiefly owed to Rio Ferdinand’s injury ravaged tenure as the highest ‘rank’. He has only started four out of a possible thirteen matches, and Capello’s sympathy for Terry’s non-participation in the armband merry-go-round in the recent friendly win over Denmark has compelled him to give the now-incumbent England captain a second chance. Ferdinand, an enthusiastic Tweeter, has been conspicuously reticent over commenting on the long-winded saga, while Capello’s communication skills were lambasted again after he failed to speak with the injured Manchester United defender despite being in attendance at Old Trafford for the midweek Champions League clash with Marseilles. Capello claimed that Ferdinand did not wish to speak to him, with the sole source of annoyance revealed by the BBC’s Dan Roan, who on Tuesday was told that Ferdinand was ‘very upset’ over plans to reinstate Terry after he was relieved of duties for a supposed affair with the mother of Wayne Bridge’s child in February last year.
Bridge inevitably retired from international duty, so crestfallen was he at the painfully public revelations of his one-time friend that he labelled his position in the national scene as ‘untenable and potentially divisive’. Consequently it is hypocritical of Capello when in the wake of the Terry outrage he promised to stress how pivotal team spirit and personal discipline was to the England squad, he has now rewarded him the role again despite effectively ending a player’s international career and endangering harmony within the team prior to a World Cup just because he watched others model the symbol of on-pitch authority. Terry has been labelled all manner of innovative expletives from crowds on the road with Chelsea and been mocked for his several lapses, so surely his skin is thick enough. Or is it?
"I suppose the only time I felt disappointed was during the next game against Egypt, which was a friendly, and the armband got passed around between five or six players. I just felt, 'OK, I've been stripped of the captaincy, but don't take the piss out of me,'” he told the Martin Samuel of the Daily Mail in November last year. Perhaps not then, and this has clearly struck a chord with Capello who has this time, unlike in Cape Town, yielded to the public confiding Terry so clearly reveres.
But as Michael Corleone states in The Godfather Part II: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Capello, previously the capo di tutti capi, has acceded into a calamitously contradicting coach whose soul ally is indeed his enemy, but in an obsequious manner which makes him susceptible to the equivalent of Sonny Corleone’s toll-booth ambush. He used to be the Don; he’s now in danger of becoming Fredo.
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