In this Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2008 file photo England's soccer coach Fabio Cappello, left announces the appointment of the team captain John Terry, right in London. A senior Football Association official said Friday Feb. 5. 2010 that John Terry has been stripped of the England captaincy by coach Fabio Capello following a media storm over his private life. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)
A round of applause, please, for England coach Fabio Capello. It took Capello 12 minutes to sit John Terry down and justifiably strip the Chelsea centre-back of the captaincy of his country – a captaincy he should never have had in the first place.
Ignoring Terry’s affair for the moment, it’s important to remember that his pre-captaincy days saw him charged, later cleared, with assault and affray in connection with a nightclub incident, and drunkenly berating Americans in a Heathrow hotel with teammates in the immediate aftermath of September 11, for which they were fined two weeks of their wages.
Steve McLaren duly appointed Terry England captain in the months after the 2006 World Cup, but the indiscretions continued.
In November 2006, he was charged with improper conduct for comments about referee Graham Poll, for which he was reprimanded and fined £10,000. £10,000 was also the amount that Terry was alleged to have pocketed for secretly offering tours of Chelsea’s facilities to what were undercover journos.
There were other incidents involving alcohol and excessive gambling, but few caused as much justified contempt as his highly-publicised affair with the partner of teammate Wayne Bridge.
After much public debate, Terry was correctly ousted from the leadership role.
There were some who questioned the decision, asking why the actions in a player’s private life should determine their role within their working life, but sport mustn’t ignore morality.
It says a lot about modern football, sadly, that Terry’s replacement has his own list of indiscretions, and too often codes, clubs and countries have overlooked continual player indiscretions, let alone promoting such players into positions of responsibility and leadership.
There are examples of this scattered throughout the sporting world.
Last week, for example, Port Power announced its leadership group for the upcoming AFL season with Dean Brogan promoted into a vice-captain role.
This is the same Dean Brogan who punched a teenage Adelaide Crows fan in the face for baiting the Power ruckman in public, breaking his nose. The same Brogan who was involved in another assault and faced a maximum penalty of two years in jail.
It is the same Brogan who has been a regular at the AFL tribunal, most notably for his quarter-time hit on Andrew Lovett, and was described as a bully for his intimidating tactics on younger and smaller opponents.
Brogan’s appointment to the Power’s leadership group barely caused a whimper in AFL circles or in the South Australian press.
But what example is a club, with a growing reputation for its poor disciplinary record, setting for its young players by promoting a player with Brogan’s record into a leadership position – a position that involves helping to groom the clubs’ young players.
Codes and clubs who fear having one of their own in the tabloids for all the wrong reasons – and appearing to try and educate players about acceptable behaviour – are in fact appeasing, even rewarding, players who should be kept well away from such leadership responsibilities.
The real concern comes down to football's growing trend of big corporations taking up slices of the world game at the expense of smaller teams.
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