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Just want to know some other opinions on John Terry after the recent uproar/media frenzy/tabloid mayhem.

For those who don't know he is a Chelsea football player, England captain, and on something in the region of £170,000 per week (high even for a football player).

He has also got the girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend) of an ex-team mate pregnant during an affair and arranged for her to have an abortion, if the tabloids can be believed.

So- with the World Cup only just around the corner, is he still the man to lead England to glory? Or should he be stripped of the captaincy?

Several sports personalities today (mostly on the radio) still call him a great leader, a man of integrity, a role model on the field, and we shouldn't judge him for his off-field transgressions.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

John Terry - Tosser.

Precisely. And you only need one england player to agree with that before he stops listening/passing/playing with him.

Team member : "What's that dave your a paedophile?"
Captain: "Yes but you musn't judge me by me 'off-field transgressions'"

That's the kind of stupid dumb ass logic only football could come up with.

Overated anyway. He is only a half decent centre back regardless.

And nobody will lead England to glory because they are fething dogpoo.

The one that nearly made me crash my car was Darren Gough on Talksport radio earlier:

"He is the bravest, the BRAVEST man ever to wear the Chelsea shirt. He has never shirked in his duty, count on that!"

Such bravery that he hired a team of ferocious lawyers to try and stop the story becoming public knowledge. Terry, grow a pair!!

Great Leader - Leader's lead, and look after their squad. They don't shag their teammates missus.

Integrity. Here is a Dictionary. Look it up and eat your words.

Role Model. Well, at least they didn't claim he was a good role model!

And Bravery can often be another word for Stupid.

I'd like to see him sacked as Captain, and denied a slot. Same goes for Wayne Rooney as it happens, violent little thug.

You have to wonder, if he gets subbed during a game, would his team mates start wondering whos next?

whatwhat wrote:
Team member : "What's that dave your a paedophile?"
Captain: "Yes but you musn't judge me by me 'off-field transgressions'"

That's the kind of stupid dumb ass logic only football could come up with.

That's a pretty common thing in professional sports, and generally effective. It doesn't really matter what happens off the field, so long as you win on the field.

Which is a pathetic mindset.

Considering next month he will take home more than most of us do in half a lifetime I don't care what happens to him.

Should he be banned?

Two reasons why I might agree:

1. Attempting to muzzle free speech via legal constraints. (I don't buy the argument that it is his personal life when it affects the team as a whole, which is a national possession.)

2. If the FA want to maintain the fiction that modern high level football is a noble game which inspires youngsters to do their best, etc, blah blah blah.

According to the evening news, Tiger Woods is down $1,000,000 a day in lost sponsorships since his unfortunate car accident.

I really don't give a gak what he gets up to in his spare time. I also don't care what my favourite musicians do in their spare time. Or my favourite authors. Or Jervis Johnson.
The only thing I'm interested in as far as these people are concerned, is what they do as a day job. John Terry is good footballer, bad person. Roger Waters is a good musician, but a total tosser. Who cares?

Wayne Bridge probably isn't going to get another game for England, so it's not such a big deal in footballing terms.

Trouble is, with all the media attention these overpaid pricks get, on and off the field they are role models to a lot of kids.

So every time Rooney throws Teddy from the Pram and gets red-carded, every time Man Utd players gang rape a girl, every time John Terry knobs somebody elses wife, and all without proper punishment, kids are being told 'it's okay to be a complete witch as long as you can competently kick a ball for a bit each week'.

And it's not just pro sports players. Someone 'famous' thumps some spod in the street, gets a slap on the wrist, or is apparently 'made an example of' by the Courts. A fat, gobby nightmare, famous for feth all, throws racist abuse at someone, and nothing really happens to them.

It's pathetic, isn't it? Capello should have been a new broom to sweep clean the England Team, and get across the thick feths that a spot on the team is NOT guaranteed purely by ability, but also by behaviour. Not like it will make a blind bit of difference. Everyone knows you'll crash out the World Cup on penalties to Germany. Again.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Which is a pathetic mindset.

Why? You don't have to like your teammates, and simply allowing someone to play is not a tacit endorsement of their off-field activities. If you can do your job, then anything else should be considered irrelevant. It isn't the role of an employer to serve as a social commentator, or extension of the judicial system.

@MDG
When was the last time Scotland qualified for the World Cup? Exactly. Shut it.

Media attention? How many kids do you know who read The Sun? Or stay up late to watch Match of The Day? Regardless, your argument is along the same lines as 'violent video games make kids want to kill people'. Which is a load of tosh. If the only only influence your children have on their behaviour is the tabloid depiction of footballers' private lives, and violent video games/movies, then the blame rests squarely with you, not John Terry. You sound like a hysterical housewife.

The Footy magazines Kids read pile adulation on these arseholes, and the Kids will recognise the name, and thus 'tune in' whenever it is mentioned.

T'riffic! And you are right that if the media is the only influence on a kid, there's going to be trouble. But sadly that is exactly what is happening all too often!

And hey, at least Scotland fans can accept their team is hopeless!

Gerrard should have been the captain anyway. I firmly believe the Captain should play in midfield.

Gerrard has been complete crap all season though. The only reason liverpool aren't in the relegation zone is because they have probably the best striker in the world playing for them (most of the time).

I suspect JT will keep the captaincy purely because there is no-one else viable for the role.

@MDG: You seem to be wanting England fans to admit that our team is just as crap as yours. They aren't. If England play well, they might reach the quarter or semi finals of a major international competition. If Scotland play well, they barely qualify for said competition and go out in the group stages. I'm not saying that England are a great side, far from it. They are however vastly superior to the scottish atm

J.Black wrote: @MDG: You seem to be wanting England fans to admit that our team is just as crap as yours. They aren't. If England play well, they might reach the quarter or semi finals of a major international competition.

MDG keeps on making this claim that "The English" cannot accept that England are a gak team, when as far as i can tell almost everyone on here happily admits it regularly.

Half of them are like me and actually think that England are worse than they are, ranked somewhere between Latvia and Mali, and the other half would be happy with reaching the quarter finals, im not seeing where any of our neighbors are getting the feeling that the average person south of the border thinks "England will win the world cup EZ!! LOLZ!!"

For myself, i support Middlesbrough to the point that i cant really get behind any support of England. I strongly dislike almost all of the England team due to the fact i got so used to booing them all when they came to the Riverside, the FA are corrupt, and the management are either foreign or cockney, which is almost the same thing when you live in Middlesbrough.

MDG also no doubt thinks that English people eat babies, and William Wallace was hung drawn and quartered in 1997.

Oh and for the record, Scotland are ranked between Latvia and Mali.

dogma wrote:

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Which is a pathetic mindset.

Why? You don't have to like your teammates, and simply allowing someone to play is not a tacit endorsement of their off-field activities. If you can do your job, then anything else should be considered irrelevant. It isn't the role of an employer to serve as a social commentator, or extension of the judicial system.

American employers often drug test staff and sack those who fail.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
I would also argue that employers are more than social commentators, they are part of the body of society and have similar duties and obligations to contribute to the health of society as the rest of us.

No-one is saying what John Terry did is good. Why shouldn't he be punished for it?

I can see both sides of this argument KK, for example, i think personally that if what you do does not affect your job in any way, such as an investment banker visiting a prostitute or taking a drug or something on his Saturday night off, then that shouldnt really be a big issue.

But at the same time, if you are in the public eye like JT, then you have a responsibility to be a rolemodel.

I loathe JT, but at the end of the day, humping your teamates girl while your married isnt breaking any law, it just makes you a cock.

No easy answer to be sure, but i vote sack him just because i dont like the fether, and i think he isnt the best centre half England have anyway.

Well, at least he is representing the current sad state of the nation as a whole.

Now all we need to find out is whether he is claiming benefits illegally

Throw him out.

And make him give back the 2009 father of the year award.

Waaagh_Gonads wrote:

And make him give back the 2009 father of the year award.

I agree with this totally.

I've no problem with him being in the team, frankly, (legal) off the pitch activities I would struggle to care less about, but if you're the captain of the team, there to extol them to do better and be the managers mouth on the pitch then you can't go around stabbing your friends in the back like this and expect to maintain any level of respect from your teammates.

We had a similar situation with one of the (if not the) best Australian Rules Football player of the decade caught having an affair with a teamates wife.
He lost his marriage.
Lost his job (he was captain of the team) and left football for a year and a half before making a partially successful return for another team.
Turned into a jetsetting drug taking loser who is now banned from the US.

He has to live with the consequences.

Breaking news....

Capello has phoned Wayne Bridge and informed him that John Terry has lost the England Captain's armband.

.... could he possibly have a look under his bed for it please.

Albatross wrote:Media attention? How many kids do you know who read The Sun? Or stay up late to watch Match of The Day? Regardless, your argument is along the same lines as 'violent video games make kids want to kill people'. Which is a load of tosh. If the only only influence your children have on their behaviour is the tabloid depiction of footballers' private lives, and violent video games/movies, then the blame rests squarely with you, not John Terry. You sound like a hysterical housewife.

Actually, as someone who works in an inner-city school where almost every young boy's sole aspiration is to be a professional footballer, I would say that most of them read the Sun, most of them watch Match of the Day and/or matches on TV, and MANY of them emulate the same sort of behaviour they see from these stars in the school playground, during PE lessons and on Hackney Marshes. I occasionally help out with managing the teams on a Saturday morning at Hackney Marshes, and you cannot even begin to tell me that they do not learn their behaviour from watching football on TV. I've even taken my own players off the pitch before and told them it is because I won't have them abusing the ref or other players, and they honestly do not understand why, because they see it on TV all of them time. They then bring the same behaviour into the classroom.

I've got one kid in my year group who plays for Arsenal Youth, and he really might make it, and I hope to hell he does. Why? Because, in addition to being an incredibly gifted footballer, he is also polite, hard-working, respectful and intelligent. He does not play football for the school, but he does athletics for us, is a member of the School Student Council, is the first choice for meeting guests to school, for example Tessa Jowell who came and visited our school. If I were his age, I would be proud to be a part of any team he were Captain of, and I would love to see him as England Captain one day. He would take pride in it and allow every member of the nation to feel proud in their team.

As for comparing this argument to computer games, it is NOT the same. Even if you dismiss the view that computer games have some effect on children, this is different as it is REAL people, not virtual people. Many of the kids I teach are also from one-parent families. Their male role models in real life are often gang members and thugs, and the role models they aspite to are these footballers. When they act as thugs, they DO inspire young people to act the same way.

I want the England Team to win football matches, but I also want to feel proud of them as representative of our nation as a whole. Do we really want this man to be the one lifting the trophy for us if by some mircale we won, and showing the rest of the world what sort of people we are?

Crap behaviour no doubt but I don’t see how it’s the concern of anyone other that the immediate parties. It’s certainly no business of the publics. Talk of ‘free speech’ in relation to stories like this make me want to vomit. Scummy tabloids peddling voyeuristic trash under the guise of the noble ideal of freedom of the press is just plain sickening. It's high time these feckers where reigned in.

If he hasnt broken the law I don't see how any of this story can be described as being in the public interest.

Kilkrazy wrote:

American employers often drug test staff and sack those who fail.

America can be a strange place can’t it, for all their talk of loving freedom they really do tolerate some very authoritarian nonsense. My employer can clear right off if they want to try and poke their nose into what I get up to after 5-30. Can you imagine a company in the UK trying this? They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

LuciusAR wrote:
America can be a strange place can’t it, for all their talk of loving freedom they really do tolerate some very authoritarian nonsense. My employer can clear right off if they want to try and poke their nose into what I get up to after 5-30. Can you imagine a company in the UK trying this? They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

Actually, it's happening more and more in the UK and does hold up in court - lots of companies feel that drug taking employees impinge on their brand for example.

You have told me he is a footballer, therefore he is a sinner or w***er in layman's terms.

The OC-D

The issue isn't that he's some role model for kids and all that rubbish. It's that in almost every other industry besides sport this behavior gets you a suspension without pay and a "sort your life out" bollocking.

It also astounds me how some people in this thread think a player sleeping with his team mates ex partner and mother of their child should have no effect on his position as captain whatsoever.

You only need to point at Roy Keane (who admitted that he deliberately broke another players leg and ending their career, and is still thrown up as a "football legend) to see how ridiculously far football fans take their support of a person based on the fact they are a good player.