Matthew Syed on John Terry - Tell it like it is son....
Apr 20, 2017 6:44:23 GMT
Lonegunmen and sharky like this
Post by Roller on Apr 20, 2017 6:44:23 GMT
From The Times (with thanks to 18StoneofHoop on LFWs)
"It is the conspicuous absence of contrition that, even after all these years, strikes one the hardest: the aggressive self-justification that has become such a grubby part of the act; the unwillingness to admit to, still less take responsibility for, a litany of woes that will always cast a long shadow over a player whose on-field achievements are otherwise so impressive.
Welcome to the world of John Terry. A man who claimed to be a leader and whose work ethic on the training pitch was attested to by all who knew him, but who betrayed the very concept by sleeping with the mother of his team-mate’s son. A man who wanted to be known as a lion-hearted England captain but whose privileged access to a box at Wembley was touted out at £4,000 a hit.
A man who said that his first loyalty was to Chelsea but who was then accused of facilitating tours of the training ground — in defiance of the rules of his club — after footage emerged of a ticket tout allegedly receiving £10,000 while with Terry. A man who wanted to be known as a person of integrity but who was found by an independent FA tribunal in 2012 to have racially abused an opponent — the Queens Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand — for which he served a four-game ban and was handed a fine of £220,000. He had earlier been cleared of the criminal charge in court.
One does not need to list his other transgressions in full, although parking his Bentley in a disabled bay, urinating into a pint glass at a nightclub before dropping it on to the floor, and abusing American tourists at a hotel shortly after the attacks of 9/11 will be familiar to most fans, as will the court case for an alleged assault outside a nightclub in 2002, of which he was cleared, or when he questioned the referee Graham Poll’s integrity after being sent off in a game in 2006, for which he was fined £10,000.
No, the defining attribute of Terry’s career has been his shameless attempts at denial, an almost pathological inability to front up or to take real responsibility. He said those training-ground tours were raising money for charity, despite being recorded saying: “Don’t speak to no one, ’cos if anyone finds out, we can’t do it no more.”
When an associate of his agent was caught selling the Wembley box, the player said that he knew nothing about it. When video footage revealed that he had used racist language towards Ferdinand, Terry admitted using the words but then said that he uttered them by way of denying using them in an earlier altercation. When he was accused of attempting to exploit the England captaincy for commercial gain, he again tried to divert attention elsewhere, this time on to his advisers. This is not leadership; it is moral cowardice.
And is it any wonder that Terry has so palpably failed to develop as a human being when the hangers-on, agents and, yes, managers who have surrounded him have indulged this shameless dance of denial? When Chelsea were asked about the training-ground tours, they said they were “confident that at no time did John Terry ask for, or accept any money in relation to visits to the training ground”. With other crimes, they also leapt to his defence. England managers, too, were quick to overlook his misdemeanours, reasoning that he was such an important player that a blind eye was the pragmatic move. Terry was handed the England captaincy for a second time in 2011 despite being stripped of it a year previously for the cumulative weight of indiscretions that should have meant he was never offered such a privileged position again.
It is impossible, in this respect, not to be reminded of the dangerous latitude granted to Luis Suárez, another fine player with a tendency towards despicable behaviour. After Suárez was found guilty by the FA of racially abusing Patrice Evra while at Liverpool, his team-mates wore T-shirts in support of the Uruguayan. Instead of learning from this incident, then, and recognising where he had gone wrong, Suárez became convinced that he, rather than Evra, was the real victim.
True leadership is about more than grit and determination; it is also about values and personal example
This isn’t a one-off; it is a pattern. When Suárez was banned for biting an opponent at the 2014 World Cup, instead of issuing a reproach, in public or private, the Uruguay coach Óscar Tabárez turned the moral lesson on its head, describing Suárez as the “scapegoat”. Diego Lugano, the captain, said: “I’ve watched the TV images and I didn’t see anything.” This, in case you have forgotten, after the striker lunged at Giorgio Chiellini, the Italian, and left bite marks on the defender’s shoulder.
Presumably, they thought they were doing Suárez a favour by defending him. In fact, they were doing him a huge disservice because it is those around you, the people you trust, who are in the most precious position to offer a rebuke. The Uruguayan FA had the gall to sign off a statement from its star player, which said: “I lost my balance and my face hit a player, hurting my teeth.” How is a man to perceive the boundaries of acceptable behaviour when those around him are pretending they don’t exist?
And that brings me back to Terry. As the defender prepares to leave Chelsea, there is much to applaud. The 36-year old has won four Premier Leagues, five FA Cups, one Champions League and three League Cups, and made 713 appearances, 578 of them as captain. Most would agree that he has been one of the finest centre backs in the league, a player who combined sureness of touch and positional awareness with doggedness in the tackle. In his prime, he would have walked into pretty much any first team in the world.
He was also an important presence in training, according to team-mates past and present, bringing a fearsome work ethic to every session. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these characteristics in a team environment, for they offer a rebuke to those inclined to slack off, and transmit resilience. I have little doubt that Terry will be missed in the dressing room at Stamford Bridge, as well as at Cobham.
But true leadership is about more than grit and determination; it is also about values and personal example. And this is why no realistic appraisal of Terry can ignore his transgressions, nor what they tell us about the game. What of the future? He has said that, after he retires, he wishes to go into management, stating that he wants to be a “suit and tie gaffer”. This is, to my mind, revealing, for Terry has long struggled to understand the difference between the values of leadership and the accoutrements of leadership.
A suit and tie will not change his character, nor miraculously enable him to demonstrate the human qualities so important to leading any organisation, sporting or otherwise. He leaves Chelsea with his reputation as a player in the ascendancy, but reputation as a person in tatters. The wider lesson for football is that these two aspects are not, in this case at least, unrelated."
"It is the conspicuous absence of contrition that, even after all these years, strikes one the hardest: the aggressive self-justification that has become such a grubby part of the act; the unwillingness to admit to, still less take responsibility for, a litany of woes that will always cast a long shadow over a player whose on-field achievements are otherwise so impressive.
Welcome to the world of John Terry. A man who claimed to be a leader and whose work ethic on the training pitch was attested to by all who knew him, but who betrayed the very concept by sleeping with the mother of his team-mate’s son. A man who wanted to be known as a lion-hearted England captain but whose privileged access to a box at Wembley was touted out at £4,000 a hit.
A man who said that his first loyalty was to Chelsea but who was then accused of facilitating tours of the training ground — in defiance of the rules of his club — after footage emerged of a ticket tout allegedly receiving £10,000 while with Terry. A man who wanted to be known as a person of integrity but who was found by an independent FA tribunal in 2012 to have racially abused an opponent — the Queens Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand — for which he served a four-game ban and was handed a fine of £220,000. He had earlier been cleared of the criminal charge in court.
One does not need to list his other transgressions in full, although parking his Bentley in a disabled bay, urinating into a pint glass at a nightclub before dropping it on to the floor, and abusing American tourists at a hotel shortly after the attacks of 9/11 will be familiar to most fans, as will the court case for an alleged assault outside a nightclub in 2002, of which he was cleared, or when he questioned the referee Graham Poll’s integrity after being sent off in a game in 2006, for which he was fined £10,000.
No, the defining attribute of Terry’s career has been his shameless attempts at denial, an almost pathological inability to front up or to take real responsibility. He said those training-ground tours were raising money for charity, despite being recorded saying: “Don’t speak to no one, ’cos if anyone finds out, we can’t do it no more.”
When an associate of his agent was caught selling the Wembley box, the player said that he knew nothing about it. When video footage revealed that he had used racist language towards Ferdinand, Terry admitted using the words but then said that he uttered them by way of denying using them in an earlier altercation. When he was accused of attempting to exploit the England captaincy for commercial gain, he again tried to divert attention elsewhere, this time on to his advisers. This is not leadership; it is moral cowardice.
And is it any wonder that Terry has so palpably failed to develop as a human being when the hangers-on, agents and, yes, managers who have surrounded him have indulged this shameless dance of denial? When Chelsea were asked about the training-ground tours, they said they were “confident that at no time did John Terry ask for, or accept any money in relation to visits to the training ground”. With other crimes, they also leapt to his defence. England managers, too, were quick to overlook his misdemeanours, reasoning that he was such an important player that a blind eye was the pragmatic move. Terry was handed the England captaincy for a second time in 2011 despite being stripped of it a year previously for the cumulative weight of indiscretions that should have meant he was never offered such a privileged position again.
It is impossible, in this respect, not to be reminded of the dangerous latitude granted to Luis Suárez, another fine player with a tendency towards despicable behaviour. After Suárez was found guilty by the FA of racially abusing Patrice Evra while at Liverpool, his team-mates wore T-shirts in support of the Uruguayan. Instead of learning from this incident, then, and recognising where he had gone wrong, Suárez became convinced that he, rather than Evra, was the real victim.
True leadership is about more than grit and determination; it is also about values and personal example
This isn’t a one-off; it is a pattern. When Suárez was banned for biting an opponent at the 2014 World Cup, instead of issuing a reproach, in public or private, the Uruguay coach Óscar Tabárez turned the moral lesson on its head, describing Suárez as the “scapegoat”. Diego Lugano, the captain, said: “I’ve watched the TV images and I didn’t see anything.” This, in case you have forgotten, after the striker lunged at Giorgio Chiellini, the Italian, and left bite marks on the defender’s shoulder.
Presumably, they thought they were doing Suárez a favour by defending him. In fact, they were doing him a huge disservice because it is those around you, the people you trust, who are in the most precious position to offer a rebuke. The Uruguayan FA had the gall to sign off a statement from its star player, which said: “I lost my balance and my face hit a player, hurting my teeth.” How is a man to perceive the boundaries of acceptable behaviour when those around him are pretending they don’t exist?
And that brings me back to Terry. As the defender prepares to leave Chelsea, there is much to applaud. The 36-year old has won four Premier Leagues, five FA Cups, one Champions League and three League Cups, and made 713 appearances, 578 of them as captain. Most would agree that he has been one of the finest centre backs in the league, a player who combined sureness of touch and positional awareness with doggedness in the tackle. In his prime, he would have walked into pretty much any first team in the world.
He was also an important presence in training, according to team-mates past and present, bringing a fearsome work ethic to every session. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these characteristics in a team environment, for they offer a rebuke to those inclined to slack off, and transmit resilience. I have little doubt that Terry will be missed in the dressing room at Stamford Bridge, as well as at Cobham.
But true leadership is about more than grit and determination; it is also about values and personal example. And this is why no realistic appraisal of Terry can ignore his transgressions, nor what they tell us about the game. What of the future? He has said that, after he retires, he wishes to go into management, stating that he wants to be a “suit and tie gaffer”. This is, to my mind, revealing, for Terry has long struggled to understand the difference between the values of leadership and the accoutrements of leadership.
A suit and tie will not change his character, nor miraculously enable him to demonstrate the human qualities so important to leading any organisation, sporting or otherwise. He leaves Chelsea with his reputation as a player in the ascendancy, but reputation as a person in tatters. The wider lesson for football is that these two aspects are not, in this case at least, unrelated."