Now is the winter of our discontent

"He's a disgrace to Liverpool Football Club. Some players should not be allowed to play for Liverpool again. With the history that club's got and in a situation like today, he could have caused a riot."Sir Alex Ferguson on Luis Suárez, Saturday 11 February, 2012

Have we had enough rancor yet? Or do we need more? If so, we surely don't need two of the most famous football clubs in the world supplying it.

Fabio Capello's petulant flounce from the England job this week may have become expensive collateral damage in the Ferdinand-Terry race row, but there was no requirement for anyone - least of all Liverpool's Luis Suárez, Manchester United's Patrice Evra or their respective clubs and managers - to reopen football's other simmering feud, with it's distasteful undercurrent of open and implied as well as accidental racism.

Things were bad enough two weeks ago when Evra was booed by Liverpool fans every time he touched the ball during the clubs' FA Cup tie. Players get booed like this for the most petty of reasons: Ashley Cole, who still gets booed by Arsenal fans for accepting the Abramovich coin in 2006, added Newcastle supporters to his fan club when he cheated on his Geordie wife, Cheryl Cole (the apparent singer, talent show judge and national sweetheart once found guilty for assault in a racially-tinged incident involving a Surrey nightclub's toilet attendant).

It is a normal part of player baiting, one has to accept. But booing a black player for making a complaint about an opponent making a racistly malicious remark? Different league. Likewise, did my own fellow Chelsea supporters really need to boo Rio Ferdinand for being Anton's bigger brother? Nope.

With the memory of their toxic last encounter only two weeks cold, Liverpool and Manchester United needed to tread very carefully before their league meeting yesterday at Anfield, given that it was also the reverse fixture from the game in which Suarez made his original remark to Evra, and since he was banned for eight games for the offence. If you then ice the cake with this North-West derby being one of the most contentious rivalries in sport, everyone needed to be on their best behaviour.

So, the sight of Suarez refusing to shake Evra's hand during the increasingly pointless pre-match love-in was probably one of the most brainless things I've ever seen a footballer do (and let's face it, there are plenty of brainless acts from which to choose).

However, the thing that troubles me more than else is the lack of club management in this issue. Kenny Dalglish - one of the most hailed figures in the modern game - has been relentlessly criticised for his lack of condemnation of Suarez in the first place. You would have thought he'd have gone the extra distance yesterday to tell Suarez to just get on with playing football and not inflame things further.

If it was disappointing seeing the idiot Suarez blanking Evra's handshake - itself an offer of profound significance - it was as disappointing to, again, find Dalglish implicitly supporting his striker by his lack of guidance and his lack of admonishment after the game.

There was, for years, a whiff of unfounded racism around Liverpool, with suggestions that the club had a policy of not signing black players, despite signing Howard Gayle in 1977 at a time when there were still few black players anywhere else in the-then First Division. Dalglish has done his club no favours at all by standing by Suarez by not saying anything about his behaviour towards Evra.

Liverpool isn't a racist club, and Sir Alex Ferguson's barbed reference yesterday to "...the history that club's got" didn't help, not that anything the Manchester United manager says when on such viperous form ever does (although I go some way to agreeing with him that Suarez was a disgrace for not shaking Evra's hand -  small gesture that would have travelled a thousand miles).

I don't believe that racism exists on any institutional level in football. It can't, surely? True, apart from the occasional Korean or Japanese player, there is a distinct lack of Asian players in the senior echelons of the game. But the idea of racism still being an ingrained problem, given the immensely black and white make-up of most professional teams (a fact that has hardly needed pointing out in recent years) is nonsense.

It would, though, be foolish to dismiss the signs of its lingering presence: the exit of Micah Richards from Twitter following the posting of racist comments against him, and the utterly vile comments posted yesterday against former Liverpool player and now talkSport presenter Stan Collymore show there is no shortage of morons out who are either racist, or stupid enough to think anonymously sending racist comments to black sportsmen and media personalities is clever.

British football is possibly teetering on a precipice when it comes to race: the next England manager will, potentially, have to deal with a team split between the anti-Terry lobby and those who can't care less. We don't need the remaining four months of the domestic game mired in a worsening atmosphere of poison.

When Two Tribes Go To War

As anyone who regularly attends English Premier League football matches will attest, the idea that in this prawn sandwich-munching, bring-the-wife-and-kids-for-a-family-day-out, multi-million pound fan "experience" era of the game, its nefarious side has been completely extinguished would be regarded as foolish.

No doubt, things are vastly improved, certainly from the days of my own youth, when standing in 'The Shed' of Stamford Bridge made owls out of inquisitive boys, as we rotated our heads fully through 180 degrees to see the newest outbreak of mayhem on the terracing behind us.

There is no doubt, too, that the orchestrated warfare that erupted with grim regularity in the '70s and early '80s between entire armies of clubs' fans - Millwall and West Ham, Chelsea and Tottenham, Arsenal and Leeds - has disappeared from the neighbouring streets of these clubs' grounds (although it would be the height of naïveté to suggest that it has disappeared altogether).

There is also no doubt that in recent weeks the word "tribal" has crept back into the football writers' lexicon as the supposed 'race rows' between Liverpool's Luis Suarez and Manchester United's Patrice Evra, and Chelsea's John Terry and Queens Park Rangers' Anton Ferdinand have been ratcheted up.

Tribal is not just an unfortunate word in the racial context, but entirely inappropriate in the actual context of what it is to be a football fan. I don't consider Chelsea or my fellow Chelsea fans any more of a tribe as any other group with whom I claim association - be it England supporters, owners of the complete recordings of Nick Drake, or corpulent male professionals in their mid-forties from the south-west suburbs of London.

However, fate, irony, some perversion or a combination of all three contrived to bring Liverpool and Manchester United, QPR and Chelsea together last Saturday for the FA Cup 4th Round's lunchtime kickoffs. Sports hacks couldn't believe their luck with the column inches they were gifted to stoke up the tension - and risk creating self-fulfilled prophesy. For things easily evolved from being about four football players, to being entire sets of supporters pitched against each other.

For a start, the North-West derby just didn't need it. Liverpool-Manchester United was already one of the longest running team rivalries in professional sport; Suarez from one side was serving his suspension, while Evra from the other had returned to his football. Unfortunately The Kop didn't receive the memo, and spent much of the game's rancourous 90-plus minutes barracking the Frenchman for being "a lying bastard", amongst other choice suggestions, for reporting Suarez to the FA, the result of which being the Uruguayan receiving an eight-game ban.

The Ferdinand-Terry affair, on the other hand, was still an open goal. Ever since the QPR-Chelsea league match on October 23rd when Terry is alleged to have made a racist slur against Ferdinand, the Chelsea and England captain has been allowed to play on by the FA, as they maintained the position that he was facing a public prosecution, rather than an FA disciplinary charge, as Suarez had.

I am sure that some legal expert somewhere will explain the significance of the two, different situations, but to me, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police, in claiming to have sufficient evidence to charge Terry with a public order offense, did the FA a favour, as it allowed them to totally swerve the tricky issue of their national captain being accused of racism.

So, if Terry is found not guilty, he and the FA will simply go back to some form of normality, and if found guilty, his England career as captain and player would most probably be over. Responsibility well and truly offloaded.

Unfortunately, things were ballsed up - quite literally - by QPR drawing Chelsea in the FA Cup 4th round, in a tie to be played just days before Terry's case opens, today, at Westminster Magistrates Court. No doubt under the most hawkish of legal advice, nothing official had been heard from either player or club on the matter since Terry was charged - until it was revealed, on the eve of the cup tie, that Ferdinand had received in the post a "malicious communication" (which, according to different reports, contained either an air gun pellet, a bullet or a shotgun cartridge).

Naturally, the package lacked a return address, but the nods and winks were already heading the way of Chelsea fans amid suggestions that some form of highly misguided  support for Terry had been enacted. Internet discussions sprang to life and Chelsea's historic - and unwanted association - with far-right groups became a convenient charcoal brick with which to warm up the barbecue further.

Thankfully the Ferdinand mailbag became a sideshow to the less injurious topic of "Will they? Won't they?" and whether Ferdinand would shake Terry's hand in the somewhat ridiculous pre-kickoff 'Respect' handshake ritual between the two teams.

In this the ever-reliable "friends close to the star" suggested that Ferdinand would blank Terry (which would not be a first for the defender - Wayne Bridge came close to the old thumb-to-nose finger waggle gag when he confronted Terry on the pitch for the first time after it was revealed he'd been enjoying relations with Bridge's then-fiancée).

Shortly before kickoff on Saturday it was reported that there would be no team handshake at all. It was explained that they didn't want to risk a handshake snub towards Terry prejudicing the court case about to open today. In truth, the QPR players had decided as a team on Friday to blank Terry, causing a cataclysmic humiliation for the Chelsea and England skipper, and the FA itself.

The only thing this messy piece of PR really prejudiced was the ability of football to stand up above racism itself. Whether Terry did call Ferdinand a "f****** black c***" or not is now for a court to decide. The fact is that Ferdinand and his teammates could have shown themselves to be bigger indivduals by accepting Terry's handshake and moving on. They may have believed it was supporting the cause, but instead it would only have prolonged and provoked things further.

And there lies the biggest issue of all. If you go looking for a rift you'll find one and make it larger, and racism and tribalism are two causes football could do without. If Terry did use such a slur, he's an idiot and should be punished. We all know that many players are blighted by a red mist that descends in the heat of battle. It is debatable as to whether Terry's alleged epithet, uttered in a high-pressure London derby his team were losing, makes him a congenital racist. Stupid, but not malevolently racist.

He is , however, a role model, a senior player and his club and country's captain. In both jobs, he works every day in multi-cultural squads, being a high-profile ambassador for the FA's Respect and the 'Racism - Kick It Out' campaigns. He needs to command the utmost respect from the players he spends most of his week in the company of. And he should have remembered that before opening his mouth in a game monitored by 13 high definition television cameras, unprecedented online scrutiny and the video pinboard that is YouTube.

In no way do I endorse racism or the use of language that draws malicious attention to someone's racial origin, physical appearance, sexual preference or any other tag.

Football is strange theatre. I doubt any, or at least many, of the fans who chant "Yiddo" towards Spurs supporters are card-carrying Nazis, or even know the significance of the slur. And while I've always baulked at the despicable song that refers to Auschwitz, one is wearily resigned to the fact that most members of this chorus line are morons braying with their fellow terrace sheep in complete ignorance of true anti-semitism, and certainly the full, sordid and abhorrent ugliness that was the Holocaust.

The Evra/Suarez and Ferdinand/Terry spats are no more than that - spats. What we have to avoid is the creeping return to English football of the Neanderthal monkey chants that are still projected towards black players from the terraces and stands of football grounds in Spain, Serbia, Poland and Germany. As it is, an eagle-eyed smartphone owner caught sight of an idiot at Anfield on Saturday impersonating King Louis. This shouldn't be allowed to be a return to the disgraceful banana-throwing days of the 70s, when the likes of Luther Blissett, the young John Barnes and Chelsea's heroic pioneering black debutant Paul Canoville ran a gauntlet of hate and ignorance from their own supporters.

I like to think that football has moved on and, for the most part, it has. Supporters might still mockingly draw attention to Liverpool fans' employment status, to Arséne Wenger apparently lacking both a plan and money, and to Ashley Cole having the temerity to cheat on the nation's unoffical sweetheart, Cheryl Cole (God help him if it was Susan Boyle), but this is no more than mild joshing, baiting to get a rise out of the opposition rather than any declaration of war.

Football really isn't a matter of life and death. It's a game. You scream your lungs out at your own midfield, the myopic referee or the small contingent of noisy away fans (who will give as good as they get), all in the name of giving a match some atmosphere. Within this pantomime will be some of the funniest songs, the sharpest wit and the most cutting of self-depreciation. Left to itself, it's harmless. It just doesn't need journalists to turn it into something else, as we all know that friendly abuse can quickly become something decidedly unfriendly.

Captain, Leader, Liability?

In just over a month from now John Terry will turn 31, by which time it's possible that the "JT - CAPTAIN, LEADER, LEGEND" banner draped over the Matthew Harding Stand upper tier balcony at Stamford Bridge may have become both tarnished and redundant.

Without prejudging the two official investigations - the FA's and, now, the Metropolitan Police - into Terry's allegedly racist remark to Anton Ferdinand on October 23, the skies have certainly become darker over the Chelsea and England captain.

What is clear is that if either enquiry finds Terry guilty of abusing Ferdinand at Loftus Road - even in the heat of the moment - the Chelsea captain's career will be over.

Before getting into what JT did or didn't say to the QPR defender (who has "very strong feelings on the matter"), the broader issue is that the spotlight has once again fallen awkwardly on a footballer whose ability to attract negative publicity has been historically as accomplished as Uncle Albert Trotter's skill at sinking his own ships.

At this point I must declare my proprietary interest, which should be perfectly obvious but still requires me to hold up a palm and reaffirm my lifelong allegiance to Chelsea. I recognise that what follows here breaches several constitutional laws of fandom, including heresy and the one which states, quite categorically, that you never, ever question your chosen team or its players, no matter how far they transgress the law. However...

John Terry's status as a Chelsea Football Club legend has been built and maintained over 13 years by a number of factors. He is, first and foremost, a formidable central defender, hewn from the same lump of English resilience that attached the 'typifies the bulldog spirit' contractually-obliged qualifier to any mention of Terry Butcher. Terry (John) is a defender not afraid to put his forehead between a striker's boot and the ball on or near the goalmouth, the footballing equivalent of an RAF Spitfire pilot defending Britain in the summer of 1940.

His elevation to first team regularity at Chelsea - and, indeed, the club captaincy - was, by turns, inspired and an almighty risk. By the age of 22 he'd already accumulated an impressive record of off-field misdemeanors which, were it not for his club's relative benevolence would have created a reputation so toxic that he would have been playing non-league football or driving a white delivery van around Basildon by now.

Terry was amongst a group of Chelsea players (Jody Morris, Eidur Gudjohnsen and Frank Lampard) accused of abusing American tourists at a Heathrow Airport hotel shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001; having been duly fined by the club for that incident, he was later caught in a late-night hue-and-cry at a London nightclub, in which a bouncer was injured. Terry - arrested and jailed for the night - was later cleared of all charges at a subsequent trial.

But despite these large and early blots on Terry's copy book, an inspirational piece of talent development by the Tinkerman himself, Claudio Ranieri, gave him his chance.

With Marcel Desailly out injured during the 2003-4 season, Terry - already identified as understudy to the French World Cup winner - was promoted to the starting line-up. The following season, Jose Mourinho took over, Desailly retired, and the boy King John was crowned, with Frank Lampard installed as his Lord Lieutenant.

Despite being born closer to Upton Park than Stamford Bridge, Terry has always been regarded (and has positioned himself) unquestionably as Chelsea "through and through", a one-club man. We'll ignore, then, all that nonsense about a lucrative new gig at Manchester City.

Since becoming Chelsea’s captain, he has led the team through the most successful period of its 106-year history, including winning back-to-back Premier League titles in the first two seasons under Mourinho, with Terry commanding the leanest defence in the league. Some might say, though, that Mourinho's partnering of Terry with Ricardo Carvalho, along with Claude Makelele in the holding position, was the real key to that robust defence, masking Terry's only playing weakness - his lack of pace.

But with Chelsea battling criticism that it was a team of foreign mercenaries buying the league title with Abramovich's plundered oil roubles, JT remained the club's pillar, the base of an English spine with Frank Lampard ahead of him in midfield, and the fans behind a team which, was at least English-led. When Mourinho was fired in September 2007, Terry emerged as a more influential figure at the club than simply it's on-the-pitch captain. Increasingly seen as a crown prince, and handsomely rewarded with the Premier League's then highest-ever weekly wage of £135,000 a week, Terry appeared bullet-proof.

No-one is bullet-proof, though, and in the British public eye, wearing body armour is an invitation to take potshots at the famous in all their finest hubris. So when Terry's penalty miss in the 2008 Champions League Final in Moscow condemned Chelsea to more frustration in its pursuit of the one prize it still covets, the world was given notice that he might be impervious after all.

Terry’s armour had been tested earlier in 2008 by the arrest and cautioning of his mother and his then fiancée’s mother on suspicion of shoplifting from a branch of Tesco (embarrassingly one of the official sponsors of the England team). The same month Terry himself caused more embarrassment to club and country by having his car photographed in a disabled motorists' parking bay.

His parents became a source of pride again in November 2009 when his father, Ted, was caught by a Sunday newspaper apparently trying to sell cocaine. Even with that hanging above him, Terry Jr. was dragged back into the spotlight the same month when another newspaper broke the story that the Chelsea captain was offering guided tours of the club's Cobham training ground for cash. Though later explained as a charity initiative, it cast another shadow on his integrity as leader of both his club and his country.

That integrity was stretched to breaking point early in 2010 when the 'super injunction' was lifted that had previously prevented reporting of an affair between the married Terry and Veronica Perroncel, then the girlfriend of his former club teammate Wayne Bridge. Whether this was the straw or not, England coach Fabio Cappello - who would potentially be including Terry and Bridge in the same squad - decided that the camel's back had been snapped, and Terry was stripped of the England captaincy.

Despite this Teflon Terry retained the Chelsea captain's armband amid stoic PR mumblings about "fine servant" this and "inspirational leader" that.

Managers come and managers go, pretty frequently at Chelsea, but Terry has remained rooted at Stamford Bridge, like a 1000-year-old oak that not even hurricanes can dislodge. However, the storm clouds gathering in the wake of the Ferdinand incident may, however, may lead to that tree being upended.

Stamping out racism is a point of principal to football's governing bodies, although the evidence of crowd behaviour in Russia, Spain, Serbia, Germany and Denmark would suggest that there is a long way to go. John Terry appears to have stumbled upon a land mine with a particularly sensitive pressure plate.

I'm going to tread gossamer-thin ice here: before I do, let me state for the record that I do not condone racism in any form: as a regular visitor at Chelsea in 1982 I remember Paul Canoville making his home debut as the club's first ever black player, where his arrival was greeted by obscene monkey chants and bananas being disgracefully lobbed onto the pitch. Today whether a player is black, white, yellow or pink is not an issue.

In football's topsy-turvy sense of morality it seems you can get away with almost anything of dubious personal conduct, but lose your cool in the heat of battle and make reference to another player's skin colour, and all bets are clearly off.

Terry hasn't helped himself, however, with any of his mitigation. If he called Ferdinand "blind" (as one initial explanation is said to have stated), it was still used as an adjective to the sexual epithet that followed, which in itself is offensive enough. If, though, he used the word "black" then clearly a line of stupidity was crossed.

Does it make Terry a racist? No, but then the FA and Metropolitan Police investigations won't be looking to find a KKK hood hanging in Terry's wardrobe - just evidence that proves conclusively that, even if just sledging a fellow player, he was guilty of using a phrase which drew attention to Anton Ferdinand's race, which is just the sort of behaviour football clubs and football authorities do not want to see any player - let alone the captain of a leading club and the national side - engaged in.

I don't believe John Terry is a bigot - but then I don't know him personally. Equally I can't say whether whatever he said to Ferdinand at Loftus Road last month was meant to be racist. It was unbelievably crass, especially in the modern game where high definition television scrutiny strips away any veil of doubt. And the sad fact is that one thing said in the heat of the moment could bring down the curtain of a career which may not have been glittering, but has certainly been full-on.