Bridge out of troubled waters

IT’S one thing for Fabio Capello to lose Wayne Bridge. But his bigger worry should be that he has lost John Terry as well.

Of course, barring injury, Terry will be in South Africa, albeit without the captain’s armband. But that’s not all he seems to have mislaid in recent weeks. The Chelsea man might have brought all of this madness down on his own head – and his touching reconciliation in Dubai, an intimate family moment conveniently hidden in plain view, won’t have won him any extra sympathy – but it’s clear that, though more villain than victim in the whole sorry saga, it hasn’t come without a personal cost in terms of his performances on the field.

Certainly, Terry has been a shadow of himself in recent games, a sequence of uncharacteristically error-ridden displays culminating in the ease with which Diego Milito left him floundering to score Inter Milan’s opening goal in the Champions’ League clash at the San Siro on Wednesday night. It was only the latest evidence that Terry’s focus and concentration have been seriously eroded by recent distractions

It’s not for us to stand as judge and jury on the rights and wrongs of Wayne Bridge’s decision to remove himself from the troubled waters of the England scene. Of course, the temptation, hard to resist, is to regard the whole thing as a hoot, except that behind all the lurid headlines and unrepeatable jokes there are human beings and human feelings at stake, some of them involving persons of diminished stature, lest we forget. For now, we simply have to take at face-value Bridge’s belief that he couldn’t share a dressing room with Terry and assume that, since it was a decision he obviously didn’t make on a whim, it was equally unlikely to be one he felt he could reverse between now and June.

Saipan and ‘Grannygate’ argue that we have little right to indulge in schadenfreude yet you can’t help but marvel at the ingenious ways English football finds to mess up its international prospects. Glenn Hoddle stepping down because of his views on the transmigration of souls set the bar at a giddy height but, even though Sven’s wandering eye-glass gave him a good run for his money, the fallout from the latest soap script takes things to a uniquely absurd level.

In rock music, the standard PR explanation for a band acrimoniously splitting up is that it’s down to “musical differences”, even though everyone knows that the real reason is a multiple choice of drugs, drink, egos and money or, more often than not, all four combined. Now, thanks to Terry and Bridge – and with injuries to the saintly Ashley Cole and the fragrant Rio Ferdinand added to the mix – we can start using the handy euphemistic shorthand of “footballing differences” as an explanation for why, on the eve of a World Cup, the England back four seems determined to go its separate ways. Try it out on your kids the next time they ask you an awkward question about Fabio’s weird team selection.

With exquisite timing, Bridge’s announcement comes on the eve of Chelsea versus City, ensuring that for the next 24 hours at least, only news of an injury to Wayne Rooney could possibly shift it off the front and back pages.

It’s enough to make you pine for the metatarsals of yesteryear, when the world of football seemed a much simpler, if rather more boring, place.