No one comes out of the John Terry case well

Chelsea are playing Reading at The Madejski Stadium, and things are going badly. The Chelsea goalkeeper, Petr Cech, is taken out of the game in the first minute after a horrific challenge by Reading player Stephen Hunt. He suffers a serious skull fracture and spends four months on the sidelines – it’s the reason that he plays in protective headgear to this day.

Carlo Cudicini comes on to replace him. He is a capable, experienced keeper who is enormously popular with Chelsea fans. But late in the game he too is taken out of the game with a head injury – and is stretchered off, unconscious.

It’s a disaster. Both keepers are out for what looks like an uncertain period of time, both are heading for hospital, and there’s still five or six minutes to play. The Chelsea penalty box is full of players arguing, pointing at each other, and urging on the physios. Within a minute or so, the players cotton on to the question that the commentators are asking: who’s going to go in goal for the rest of the match with a slender one-goal lead?

And at the same moment, the precise moment, that Frank Lampard and co start looking at each other and trying to figure out what should happen next, something amazing happened.

The camera swung down to captain and centre-back John Terry – he’d already run straight to the bench, swapped his shirt and grabbed a pair of goalkeeping gloves, and was jogging back towards the goal, cheerfully shouting instructions across the pitch.

Right. I’m a Chelsea fan, so I’m biased. But you could have been a Liverpool fan, a Sunderland supporter or a Borussia Mönchengladbach season-ticket holder and you’d have savoured the moment just like a 30-yard volley or a last-ditch clearance off the line. John Terry was everything you’d want a leader to be – calm in the midst of panic, level-headed in the midst of confusion, he took charge of the situation, he took responsibility, and he fixed the problem.

It seemed at the time as though Terry might have written his story, his sporting narrative, that day – in exactly the same way that Australian spinner Warne wrote his with the ‘Ball of the Century’ that bowled Mike Gatting around his legs, that Eric Cantona wrote his with a simple flick of the collar, or that sprinter Usain Bolt wrote his own by managing to bring flair and elegance to a sport with boils down to running in a straight line for just under ten seconds.We know better now.

We know that John Terry’s story is a little bit more complicated than that. He added a chapter when he cheated on his wife with his mate’s ex-girlfriend. And another when he accepted £10,000 in cash for a behind-the-scenes tour of the club’s Cobham training ground after telling undercover reporters to keep quiet because, he said: ‘If the club finds out, it’s a little bit… you know’. And another when caught parking in a disabled space.

And another when he contrived to get himself sent off against Barcelona and miss the Champions League Final. And another when he donned his kit (including shinpads) for the celebrations after the team won the cup without him, after he’d sat out the match in his suit. Yet another was added later when he forced a pay rise out of Chelsea by angling for a move to Manchester City for a summer.

But regardless of all of those things, the final draft of John Terry’s story was going to have more to do with the events during an away game against Queens Park Rangers towards the end of last season than any of those other things.

During that game, he’s alleged to have called QPR defender Anton Ferdinand a… well, you probably know what he’s alleged to have called him. It’s a combination of words you’re not likely to read in the JEP any time soon, but which have been plastered across the national press for most of the week.

You probably also know that Terry’s improbable legal defence was that while he did actually say the words he was being ‘sarcastic’, that there was a stream of foul-mouthed abuse between the players during the game, that Ferdinand himself claimed not to have heard the words used, that Terry’s teammate Ashley Cole may or may not have had a go at Ferdinand saying ‘you can’t talk to JT like that’ but told his own lawyer to prepare a ‘neutral statement’ and that Ferdinand’s PR man had pressed police to charge Terry.

But the real insight wasn’t about what Terry said, or even what he meant by what he said.

It was about the way the footballers talk to each other, about how they behave as people.

There’s no little irony here – whether you’re a football fan or not, you basically can’t help but come across information about football. It’s everywhere. About transfers that may or may not happen, about what footballers wear, about the houses that they live in, about their ‘private’ lives, about their performance, about football managers, about their tactics, about their holidays…

And you can read all of that if you want to. But over the course of a week in Westminster Magistrate’s Court, we’ve learned a lot more about life on the football pitch than you might get from a year’s worth of sports pages and celebrity magazines.

We’ve learned that it’s commonplace for these young men to insult each other in ways that would get pretty much anyone else in any other workplace fired on the spot, in terms of the language that they use and the way that they talk about each other’s wives, girlfriends and mothers – all while thousands of fans watch in the stand and millions more watch on TVs in homes and pubs.

It’s pretty depressing stuff from people held up – often unfairly, sometimes unwillingly, but uniformly lucratively – as role models whom young boys and girls look up to.

As to whether Terry is guilty or not… well. As luck would have it, the deadline for this column falls before a verdict is expected. In a normal court case, that would be a problem.

In the Terry case, it’s almost a boon. The truth is that he’s already earned almost 70 times the maximum possible fine this week, so in that respect, the result is immaterial. Of course he faces a substantial ban if convicted – it’s worth noting that Liverpool striker Luis Suarez was suspended for eight matches for racially abusing an opponent last year.

The truth is that no one comes out of this well – that Terry will no doubt maintain his denials if convicted, and that there will still be a cloud hanging over him if he’s acquitted. So, in another sense it won’t change anything.

The key fact is that by Terry’s own admission, he’s an England captain who used racist language on a football pitch – whether or not he was provoked, whether or not he’s a racist or whether or not he meant to offend Ferdinand by doing so.

In doing so, he’s rewritten his own story for the final time. He’s not a former England captain anymore, or even a footballer who slept with a friend’s ex-girlfriend and then took out a super-injunction, or even a Chelsea legend who’s been the rock of the team’s back-four for more than a decade.

He’s that footballer who got done for racism after calling another footballer a… you know the rest. That’s his story.