by Chris Tobin
So footballs very own bustling billionaire hit man Roman “The Russian Redundancy Specialist” Abramovich has decided to entrust the remainder of the Chelsea’s calamitous campaign into the slippery soiled hands of all round good guy, family man if serial shagger, and former England national team captain John “lock up your wives” Terry, ably assisted by former West Bromwich Albion manager Roberto Di Mateo.
Twenty years on I see that little has changed from our school yard days together at the Blue School for Social Delinquents.
John Terry has obviously honed his skills from back then, never forgetting how he stitched up the Head Master when receiving a miserly F- for his reading and writing. He would later use that very experience to gain a Postgraduate Degree in back stabbing at International level.
I recall there was a fat kid called Frank, who was always left till last, because nobody really wanted him in their side – he was too slow, too greedy, always thought he knew best when you had free-kicks, and had an obvious partiality to a Gregg’s steak and kidney pasty. There was a time when he would be one of the first players picked, it was just that lately he was s***. The only time he would be picked now was when his best friend would be captain, or in JTs case, manager.
There was also the new kid at school having turned up from another city during the holidays; regardless of his ability and what he could add to the side, he was rarely chosen over the established clique, who had been here since 1st year. With a suspiciously girly haircut and Spanish lilt he was largely distrusted and though he was the speedy sort by the time we had taken the p*** and bullied him he ended up worse than Fat Frank.
And then we had Ashley who was the joker in the pack; thick as a wooden plank (a very thick one). I heard years later he became somewhat of a fanny magnet, and an internet porn star, he was always showing us his little winky in class, but that pales into insignificance when I remember the day he came to school with a double barrelled shot gun. Oh how we laughed when he shot a kid from the infants, took his knees clean off. I think Ashley may have been given 100 lines for that, or was it a detention. His friend Jacob would let off a smoke bomb weeks later, which rightly he got himself expelled for. I don’t think the teachers found it very funny or certainly not as amusing as the shooting incident.
I remember Ashley crying like a baby when he was not allowed to go on a foreign trip to Naples; he was awfully sensitive like that. The headmaster wanted to give him and some of the older boys a rest because the truth was they had been playing really poorly. A few of the other lads refused to talk to Sir after that.
We were quite a sporting school, but we would take immense pride in the high-board where we would have a really good lad name Daly…Tom Daly he was excellent, but he would lose out three years running to an Ivorian lad called Didier. Mr Mourinho who was in charge of swimming would suggest that Didier was not even a diver, and how it was not appropriate to include him in the same elite group as Tom. Strangely when Mr Mourinho left to go to Italy, he would heap a whole load of praise on his former protégé saying “Yes he is a Diver”.
Because Didier was good friends with some of the team I would be forced to pick him for my 5 aside team. He became a proper pain in the a*** though when you subbed him, or if you never picked him at all, and when I completely stopped passing the ball to him; he would go around whispering with Ashley and Fat Frank, telling people they wanted their mate Johnnie Terry to be captain and run things. They never mentioned the time that he had called Paddy Doherty from class C an effin Gypsy, just because they had taken a holiday in a 6 berth caravan at Butlins. They conveniently forgot about that when trying to wedge him into my position. Bloody fascist.
The next time you witness the hideous spectacle of John Terry urging his troops forward from the side-line, grappling with the fourth official whilst making a masterstroke of a substitution, believing himself to be the reincarnation of the special needs one, waxing lyrical about the great camaraderie of his team, with an amnesia more akin to Nick Clegg, just remember where he cut his managerial teeth – the school playground.
Follow Chris on Twitter @christobinsings
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