The world is still fretting over the way John Terry left the field last Sunday. It was obnoxious, it was self-serving, and in time he may well be found to have been in breach of certain Premier League betting rules.
But leave the moral aspect out of this for the time being. Let those who want to write about the erosion of the game do so; let others who want to defend Terry by citing more egregious examples do the same. Put that to one side and arrive at a realisation: what happened in the 26th minute at Stamford Bridge could not possibly have been more perfect.
Retirements are generally quite banal affairs in football. Once the final whistle has blown on their career, players mill about awkwardly on the pitch, sometimes with small children snaked around their legs. Platitudes are mumbled into a microphone, the crowd applauds and chants at the right moments and then - done - off to pasture in the nearest punditry studio.
John Terry managed to tick many of those boxes, but only after an impromptu mid-game ceremony which confirmed every existing suspicion surrounding him. Terry pleased everyone and, for a player so polarising, that really is a feat.
In fact, to call him polarising is highly reductive. The football world is split into two separate, unequal parts: those who will defend him against any allegation or accusation against his character, and those who do not support Chelsea. To the latter group, he is the emblem of everything dislikeable about contemporary sport: the entitlement, the arrogance. They see him as the grubby embodiment of modern football: a post-consequences player immune from any scandal, whose behaviour is always tolerated on account of who he is and how much money he earns.
Given the different perspectives in play, it is quite astonishing that Terry managed to organise a stunt that satisfied such dramatically different crowds. Those gathered inside Stamford Bridge cheered and whooped as their captain, leader, legend passed through his constructed guard of honour. It was fitting to them and entirely right that he should swagger with hubris until that final moment.
And, somehow, everyone else agreed. Away from southwest London, the perception of Terry remains that he was one of the finest defenders of his generation. His brave headers, blocks and freakishly reliable distribution have, however, been cheapened over time by his reputation. There is the Anton Ferdinand incident, of course, but also the missed penalty in Moscow, the full-kit celebration in Munich and that business involving Wayne Bridge. From that perspective, Terry’s stage-managed exit was equally perfect, in that it confirmed and justified all the reasons people have for disliking him. There he was, gilding his own legend, celebrating himself, and constructing another moment of eye-watering pomposity.
Like all modern footballers, it’s hard to know who he truly is. His public-facing personality has been constructed from the fragments seen on the pitch and the anecdotes printed in the newspapers (or even the comments lip-read on YouTube). Terry is up for interpretation: to Chelsea supporters, what he has achieved at Stamford Bridge has shaped that image and any outside attempt to interfere with that ideal is met with ferocity. To those antagonised by the Blues' success, the opposite is true; everything beyond the white lines is used to asterisk what he accomplished and, to them, mentioning Terry the footballer without deference to those caveats is almost a sin.
The guard of honour catered to everyone. Outsiders pretended to hate it, but really they loved what it represented: Terry being Terry - the ego, the classlessness, the determination that the world should bend around him.
But then those who were there loved it too, for exactly the same reasons. Terry has been the centre of a reality which, since Roman Abramovich’s takeover, has pitted Chelsea against everyone else. Terry is the perfect emblem of that and someone who has existed in the middle of those opposing energies for his entire career. What better way to bow out, then, than in the manner he did? The Chelsea half of the world celebrating, the other cursing him and his gaudy spectacle.
Everybody won on Sunday. Everybody got exactly what they wanted from that moment.
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