Surreal swear case puts footballer Terry on the spot

BEING new to football — that is, having gotten into it in my 40s as opposed to my teens — it still remains something of a mystery.

Not the bit where two lots of 11 men get on a pitch every Saturday and run up and down with a ball — that offside rule isn’t nearly as complicated as men like to think — but the other stuff. The culture. What happens not from the knees down, but from the neck up.

Like ‘handbags’. According to John Terry and Anton Ferdinand, calling a fellow player a funking cult (see what I did there, to get around the newspaper no-swearing laws) is just ‘handbags’. You know, like what birds would do. Well, I don’t dispute that John Terry knows lots of ladies, even ladies that aren’t his lady-wife, but that seems a bit extreme. We ladies tend not to batter each other with handbags, verbal or otherwise.

Nor do we call each other fat, the way Terry is alleged to have called the QPR goalkeeper. (Which, given the athleticism of these overpaid overlords, is like calling a giraffe stumpy.) This is where footballers and women differ as species. Calling another woman fat is beyond the pale, as is calling her a funking anything, never mind a cult. Male football banter is eyewatering. Frequently very funny — “Let him die, let him die, let him die”, when a player goes over and doesn’t get back up straight away — but it’s a long, long way from how women speak to each other. Even women who never carry handbags.

The court transcript is surreal. All these very rich men in expensive suits, being terribly serious while saying the c-word over and over. It would be properly funny were it not that Terry is alleged to have used the word ‘black’ as part of his insult, which is why they’re in court in the first place. And yet this trial is meaningless. The most he can be fined is around €3,000, the equivalent of a fiver to you or I.

Compare this to the Danish bloke in the Paddy Power pants — Nicklas Bendtner was fined €100,000 by UEFA for flashing his logo’d underwear during a Euro 2012 game. Or to Wayne Rooney, who was fined €38,000 for shouting something grumpy — but not racist — at a TV camera as he left the pitch. Bizarre, no? And yet football, still massively homophobic, is supposed to be strongly anti-racist: when a moronic civilian racially abused Patrice Muamba on Twitter, he was jailed for 56 days. In prison. Can’t see that happening to John Terry.

Obviously, footballers can’t all be nice chaps like the departing Beckham or the upcoming Oxlade Chamberlain. There are loads of muppets with genius feet, little education and too much money — it is quite literally not cricket. Or rugby, or golf, or polo. But that never makes racism or homophobia ok, ever, anywhere. If Terry is guilty, he has to go.