England’s gutter press bottomed out this week.
Our media is tabloid-led and absolutely ghastly. Hacks will do anything to get “stories” that are just squalid tittle-tattle.
The public, their readers, are far more moral than the journalists.
For John Terry’s mates to slag off Wayne Bridge as a bottler is disgusting. To say he is a wimp who has deserted England is rubbish. Sheer rubbish. Editors who print this garbage are sad, desperate men.
In the photo of JT crying that the papers always use, after he missed that penalty against Manchester United in Moscow, the player who is consoling him is Wayne Bridge, his best friend.
John Terry is a shameless super-yob and his behaviour has been disgusting and his wife Teri is a doormat for taking him back.
Bridge has done nothing wrong and he’s not letting his country down. He could go to South Africa as 13th man and not play one minute in the World Cup and have to suffer in silence for four or five weeks.
Why should he sign up for that? Would you?
Chelsea play Manchester City at 12.45 today and everyone has been asking : Will Wayne Bridge shake his hand?
I wondered whether any Manchester City player would shake his hand. They might just stare him out.
This morning I see that the bookies are offering 7-2 against no Man City player shaking John Terry’s hand.
City are in disarray, key man Tevez only came back from Argentina yesterday, the players know Roberto Mancini is going in the summer, and they don’t like him because he makes them train without the ball, doing tactical work on where they need to be when City lose possession. If there’s no ball, they can’t ball-watch.
Watching Mancini on TV just now, he looks stressed, depressed and defensive.
English football has yobs and nice guys and Wayne Bridge is one of the nice guys.
I certainly don’t hate Bridge for scoring the goal that put Arsenal out of the Champions League in 2004. Fact is, Arsenal were not good enough in the second half at Highbury.
When Bridge was at Southampton between 1998 and 2003, and Gordon Strachan was the manager, Strachan said that Bridge was such a nice lad that he wouldn’t mind him marrying his daughter.
That was an amazing thing for a Scottish manager to say about an English footballer but Strachan knows English footballers very well and he knew Wayne Bridge even better.
Southampton were virtually bankrupt so, after the FA Cup Final defeat by Arsenal, the club made a deal with Chelsea to sell Bridge for £7 million and then told the player. He said, “I might not get in the team!” Southampton said, “You have to go to save the club.”
Bridge went to Chelsea and had a son with Vanessa, a French lingerie model. They lived in Cobham in gated mansions 200 yards from JT and his wife Teri and their two kids. The families went on holiday together and the two girls went on holiday together as well. That is how close the couples were.
When Wayne and Vanessa split, and Wayne was sold to Manchester City for £10m in January 2009, JT offered “comfort” to his teammate’s ex-partner and they had an affair last autumn and she got pregnant and had an abortion and when The News of the World got the story in January, JT issued a super-injunction which means no names can be mentioned and the fact that there is an injunction cannot be made public.
The first I knew of this was about 9.30 on Friday morning, January 29, when I got a phone call : “John Terry’s got Wayne Bridge’s Mrs up the duff !”
At that stage nobody knew about the abortion. On that Friday, a judge lifted the super-injunction.
The strange thing for me was that I had seen John Terry the night before at an FA Youth Cup game between Chelsea and Portsmouth.
I picked Mark Jacob up at Fuglers, a firm of solictors near the huge offices of Saatchi & Saatchi, and we went to Fulham Broadway on the tube. Both teams had some very good young players and it was an entertaining game and Chelsea won 1-0. Chelsea hit the post three times. We were in an executive dining room, the club staff were very welcoming, and most of the people there were agents or worked for the two clubs. Not many faces, just Steve Bould and Ray Clemence. It was one of those nights where I kept my head down and my mouth shut. I know Ray Wilkins, so I had a word with him, but apart from that I didn’t talk to anybody except Mark all night.
Sitting near us during the match was John Terry with his little gang of mates.
One was a tomboyish girl, one a black lad. JT wore a navy blue bodywarmer with No5 on the back and at times he was chatting on his mobile. When he got up to leave, ten minutes from time, his posse went with him. He probably knew that the super-injunction would be lifted and a storm of bad publicity would hit him.
Looking at John Terry, as he left with his posse, I thought : This guy is captain of England? He’s got no class at all.
But JT is the brand, JT is King of the Geezers.
My view of CFC’s demographics is this : Chelsea has a 40,000 crowd and 30,000 of them are geezers. The club appeals to geezers and the key players are geezers. Some of the 30,000 are 18, some are 28 or 38 or 48 or 58, some are women, some are girls, but they are all, in essence, geezers. And John Terry is one of them, a prole hero, and SuperFrankieLampard is JT’s mate, and Joe Cole is their little brother.
If you’ve never been to Stamford Bridge you might not understand what I’m saying here, so let me put it another way.
Last season I went to a midweek game there and at half-time some people in our row got up to go for a drink, or something to eat, or to the loo, so I was sitting there next to this bloke who was on his own. He was a tall, rangy geezer with big hands, about sixty, wearing a denim jacket. It was one of those situations where one of us might say something to pass the time. And, beyond a certain moment, a silence might have become a tiny bit embarrassing for both of us.
“Do you go back as far as Peter Osgood?” I said.
The big geezer smiled dreamily as he was transported back to a distant decade.
“Jimmy Greaves was my first,” he said.
He had told me everything in five words.
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