FA once again goofs upon Terry captaincy

John Terry and the England captaincy. What a fiasco. What a torrid storm in a teacup. For the second time, the Chelsea centre half has been deprived of his role by the Football Association.

This time, even though he is not due to appear in court for alleged racist remarks until July. A decision mindlessly taken by the prosecution on the fatuous grounds that it would thus not get in the way of his preparations for the coming European Championship finals. It has, in fact, had exactly the reverse effect.

Why, you wonder, was the charge brought by the Metropolitan Police at all — simply because they were alerted by a single member of the public — rather than by the Football Association, who had condemned Liverpool's Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez to an eight-game suspension for a racist offence.

Odd explanation

Not for a moment am I trying to assert that Terry is pure as the driven snow. But his plea, a somewhat odd one, is that his admittedly racist outburst was directed not at Anton Ferdinand the QPR centre back, who didn't even hear it, but into the void, in some odd sense satirising the supposed insult.

Terry has all too often been involved in controversy. The time when at Heathrow Airport, he and other Chelsea players jeered at a hapless group of Americans over the horrific 9/11 outrage. The time when in a night club he urinated into a glass. The time when at the Chelsean training HQ at Cobham, Surrey, he demanded an absurd sum of money to show a group of fans around the ground.

Why, given his colossal salary, you wondered, would he have needed that money at all? But then you hear that he has allegedly had to take out a third mortgage on his house. If so, where has all that money gone? Could it be that he is a betting man?

Yet, how much does the England captaincy even matter? When Terry lost it before it was because he had been having an affair with the ex-girlfriend of England left back Wayne Bridge.

Italian practice

Hardly a salubrious charge against a married man with children, but what had that got to do with the Football Association?

Next relevant question: what does the captaincy of England even matter?

I well remember the Italian practice of casually giving the captaincy of the Azzurri simply to the player who had won the most caps. By and large soccer skippers don't matter; it's the manager or the coach who calls the shots. In cricket it is, of course, a very different matter.

In football, it is hard to remember any captains of importance.

Meanwhile, as for Terry, what of the ancient tradition that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty? Altogether a horrid affair.

The writer is a football expert based in England.