By IAN YEE
He’s been stripped of the England captaincy twice, tried to engineer an ego-fuelled one-man mutiny against his own national team manager (he failed), is currently charged with racially abusing a fellow professional, and is, of course, an all-round jerk. Meet Chelsea’s new manager, John Terry.
Flanked by his assistant Frank Lampard, his captain of equally good standing Ashley Cole, and his first big-money signing Joe Cole – an England veteran in self-exile in France (not sure if you’ve heard of him) – Terry will take to a press conference this summer having finally taken over the job that he believes he is “born to do”, to quote his infamous rant from the Cape Town Coup of 2010.
Deny it all you want, Chelsea fans, but that’s the dream come true, isn’t it? For them, ironically, Terry can do no wrong. But I wouldn’t blame the fans either.
If you had told me that David Beckham would take over as Manchester United manager a few years from now I’d break down in tears, attempt my first backflip, and probably die a happy man from the injuries sustained, never mind that he would totally suck as a manager. In any case, we all know who’s really in charge at the Chelsea dressing room. Andre Villas-Boas might have that slick trenchcoat, but it’s Terry who wears the pants. It’s all working out perfectly for Terry, too.
The boring, technocratic AVB, for all the wonders he performed with Porto, has now been rightly dismissed. In fact, it was almost too convenient that the team were performing so poorly that Roman Abramovich had to fire him. Terry, too, is reaching the end of his playing career. No longer the force he used to be, increasingly vulnerable to injury, and not quite the kind of player who you’d imagine would be able to do a Ryan Giggs.
Where Giggs floats around the pitch, Terry shakes the ground around the attackers he subdues. He is the ultimate antidote to AVB. While the Portuguese manager spent way too much time crouching and thinking, Terry is the type that would be bouncing around the touchline urging the team on. I still remember when AVB was in Malaysia for Chelsea’s pre-season tour, and the press were hounding him.
The impression I got was of a man too eager to stamp his mark, to position himself as the intellectual, forward-thinking young man who was wise beyond his years and therefore deserved respect even in a profession where he was a relative toddler. He even got himself an Abramovich-style beard to look the part. He looked like the sixth member of One Direction before that.
In the end, he could only fool himself. For all his technical talk and training ground jargon during those press conferences in Kuala Lumpur, he betrayed a sense of naivete and insecurity as he shunned questions related to anything beyond his technical expertise. That expertise might have brought him success at Porto, but Chelsea, the Premier League and the Champions League are a totally different game altogether.
Andre Villas-Boas
At the start of the season, I predicted that Chelsea would struggle to stay in the top three because of AVB’s dry, clinical approach, and so it has been. His approach put off players from Alex to Anelka, and it proved equally sterile on the pitch. You see, this is a bunch of players that don’t need to be schooled on the finer details of tactics. They are legends, like Didier Drogba, Lampard, Cole and even Anelka.
You just need someone who can keep them motivated enough beyond their paychecks to play together. In that sense, Terry is the ultimate answer – barely bothered with footballing finesse, completely consumed with the idea of being a leader of men. And rather unsurprisingly, Terry has in the past indicated his desire to manage Chelsea once his days on the pitch are over.
But why wait? Liverpool did great with Kenny Dalglish as player-manager. So, as much as we all love to hate him, Terry could actually be good for the club that, at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be good for anyone. His appointment would at the very least be good for the neutrals, if only to watch him get a taste of his own medicine when he’s in the managerial hotseat. The way things stand now, it’s either him or Rafa Benitez, the only manager with an ego big enough to think he can placate Abramovich. #NoBrainer.
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