The soap opera that is English football

John Terry was re-instated as England captain

Oh how the English love a good struggle and a debate! Hats off to the media and all those involved in English football for keeping us interested in what was admittedly a wasted week of international football.

John Terry. Bless him! If not for him, papers wouldn’t have sold as much. Fabio Capello – he deserves even more praise. If he were not Italian and actually held press conferences that made sense, we would all have been bored to death.

Admit it folks. No one loves drama and intrigue as much as the English. Theatre might have been cultivated as an art in Greece and Egypt, but the English greats like Chaucer, Spencer and Shakespeare truly gave us the beat of what it was and ever since then we have fallen in love with it.

Not one England football game passes by without a major plot which is being played out behind the scenes. Whether it is players’ sleeping with someone else’s missus or simply a manager who feels that knowledge of a hundred English words is enough to suffice.

Way too much has been written about the England captaincy by everyone from the biggest voices in the game to the half-drunk stumbler in the pub to talk about it once more. So, instead of talking about English captains and their role as a leader let us look at whether the role of the captain makes much sense to those real heavy weights in international football.

Don’t get me wrong, leading out your country in any form of sport must indeed be a truly great honour. But, in a sport like football it seems like the role is more nominal as you have a Coach/Manager who is effectively controlling and overseeing all the proceedings of the team. In such a scenario, the entire discussion about the captaincy seems a bit overdone to me.

Take Spain for example, Iker Casillas is the captain of La Furia Roja. But it is Carles Puyol who is the leader out there on the pitch. In fact, Casillas probably even comes after Gerard Pique, someone who has already shown great motivational talent at a very young age, when it comes to being the driving force that keeps the world champions going.

The same can be said about Italy, who currently lack a clearly nominated captain on the field after the departure of Fabio Cannavaro following last year’s World Cup. Cannavaro might have quit, but even without the armband players like Giorgio Chiellini have stepped up to the mantle and the ones around him know that here is someone they can look up to.

In fact in Tuesday’s friendly against Ukraine, Alberto Gilardino led the Italian side out despite not playing for a single minute in their Euro 2012 qualifier against Slovenia. Articles about Gilardino being captain in the Italian media were non-existent. It seems that apart from the English no one really cares who the captain is, as long as the job gets done.

Terry, Ferdinand, Barry. All these are just names in the bigger scheme of things that is the England national football team. In five years from now, we are not going to remember the Denmark game where the captain’s armband was passed around leaving John Terry feeling like he was a six-year old whose lunch box was tossed from one to another.

What we might remember however, will be if the national team actually wins something for a change; If Terry leads England to a respectable performance in Euro 2012 in spite of all the doubters, in spite of the manager’s flaws and more importantly in spite of all the drama we build up around it.

Picture: Getty Images

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