Modern game is leaving old-school Terry far behind

BACK in the spring of 2007, contract talks between John Terry and Chelsea broke down.

The problem was not so much that the then 26-year old Terry was demanding a nine-year deal worth £60m.

Chelsea were more concerned that Terry was looking for a clause that would give him an option to become the club’s manager when he retired.

Terry’s current contract dates from 2009 and is worth £1.5m a year more than what he was looking for in 2007, but it contains no automatic management promotion clause. This is a pity because John Terry as Chelsea manager would be a box-office phenomenon, most likely a weepy melodrama that would make up in hysterical intensity what it would probably lack in duration.

Terry is interesting in that at the age of only 30 he already seems a man out of time.

The last couple of years have seen a big change in the way football is written about, particularly online. There has been an explosion of interest in the tactical and geometrical side of the game.

Until quite recently, tactical analysis in English-language newspapers had been limited to the ‘Big Ron’s Chalkboard’-style feature in which a crude graphic would be used to illustrate how a team might score a goal by, say, passing the ball down the flank to a winger who would cross it for a forward to shoot.

The 2008 publication of Jonathan Wilson’s ‘Inverting the Pyramid’ heralded the arrival in English language football writing of the kind of serious tactical talk that has long been part of the mainstream conversation in countries like Holland and Italy.

Meanwhile, game statistics like passing patterns and the software for analysing them have become widely available for the first time. A generation that grew up playing Championship Manager and hearing about the impact of statistical analysis in American sports was hungry for the kind of deeply technical discussion of the game that can be found on websites like Michael Cox’s zonalmarking.net and its legion of imitators.

The new wave of tactical analysis is not to everyone’s taste. Some find the focus on the systemic and the technical rather than the individual and the human rather dry, and the internet is full of opinionated fans whose understanding of the game has grown more detailed without getting any more insightful. But there is little doubt that at the top level of the game, tactical schooling has become an essential part of players’ education.

That is why John Terry increasingly seems like such a throwback. He is the captain of one of Europe’s best teams and peaked as a player under the tactically shrewd management of Jose Mourinho. Yet his way of talking about the game seems more suited to discussing the First World War.

Teams like Barcelona and Arsenal sometimes give the impression that they see matches as problems to be solved, but with Terry they are always battles to be won. Instead of pressing, he talks about ‘passion’. Instead of tactics, he fetishises ‘character’.

It could be that he is just dumbing down when he speaks to the public, but the way in which he was given the runaround by Miroslav Klose in the World Cup, as though he had never been asked to solve the problem of a withdrawn centre-forward before, suggests that what comes out of his mouth accurately reflects what is going on in his head.

Terry’s view of a team sport seems as hierarchical as the army, as can be seen in his apparent obsession with the captaincy. He is the only player I can remember seeing do a TV interview bare-chested but still wearing his captain’s armband. To Terry, that armband sets him apart. As Carlo Ancelotti has floundered in recent weeks, Terry has again emerged as the loudest voice at the club.

In January he explained how his influence and that of key lieutenants had saved the team from disintegration under the strain of multiple changes of management, “It was important that myself and Didier and Lamps kept everyone together”. Last week he was again talking about how important it was that the “big characters” – himself, Lamps and Didier – led Chelsea out of their slump. The prescription as always was more character.

Of course the big picture at Chelsea is that Terry, Lamps and Didier are quickly becoming yesterday’s news. Terry bears the scars of numerous injuries, Lampard’s productivity has fallen off a cliff and Drogba has not responded well to the arrival of Fernando Torres. They have been great players for Chelsea but tomorrow night’s match against Manchester United seems likely to expose their recent decline.

Terry will soon have to face up to being gradually sidelined by the club where he has been king. The rest of us are left to hope that he returns one day as manager. The tactics won’t be up to much but the human drama will more than compensate.