Seriously though, he must be a little bit dim to post that brick.
Running scared
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Seriously though, he must be a little bit dim to post that brick.
He's not actually wrong, however, he may regret not exercising a little more caution when expressing the widely held view of the FA.Seriously though, he must be a little bit dim to post that brick.
At anytime has John Obi Mikel given any evidence or statement.
Looking at the pictures on SSN he certainly reacts to what Terry says.. and the look on his face shows disapproval of what he says IMO
IIRC Mikel, Dogma, Malouda and a couple of other black Chelsea players declined to give evidence. I will try and dig out the piece where I read this later.
Ashley Cole to announce his retirement from International football? Jump before he is pushed?
Nor does that passage actually state who did, there's an inference by mentioning several black players, that it was only black players refrained, for all I know hardly anybody signed. Not signing something proves nothing.Here you go:
What Terry's sympathisers have never explained is why, inside football, it was known well before the trial began that Didier Drogba, Nicolas Anelka, Mikel John Obi and Chelsea's Kick It Out ambassador, Florent Malouda, were not among those from Stamford Bridge who had signed statements supporting their colleague.
Nor does that passage actually state who did, there's an inference by mentioning several black players, that it was only black players refrained, for all I know hardly anybody signed. Not signing something proves nothing.
Cole is right by the way, but only a fudging imbecile professional footballer would post it on twitter. Bascially just begging the FA to fine and/or ban you.
Here you go:
What Terry's sympathisers have never explained is why, inside football, it was known well before the trial began that Didier Drogba, Nicolas Anelka, Mikel John Obi and Chelsea's Kick It Out ambassador, Florent Malouda, were not among those from Stamford Bridge who had signed statements supporting their colleague.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/sep/27/john-terry-racism-fa-ban?cat=football&type=article
Chelsea's Toxic Twins John Terry and Ashley Cole are an embarrassment to the game and their peers
Chelsea are champions of Europe, highly watchable pacesetters in the Premier League with an owner who loves the game and some of the most impassioned supporters around, but they have to get a grip of their Toxic Twins, John Terry and Ashley Cole.
By Henry Winter, Football Correspondent
12:00AM BST 06 Oct 2012
They are an embarrassment to the club and to the game that rewards them so handsomely. Chelsea need to order Terry to start apologising and Cole to stop tweeting.
Over the past decade, the centre-back and left back have been England’s most sure-footed defenders, invariably alive to danger, vital sporting qualities painfully lacking in their human armoury.
Having been found guilty of making a racist remark by an Independent Regulatory Commission, and then received “written reasons” dripping with condemnation, Terry would be a total fool even to consider an appeal. He cannot be that stupid, surely? Nothing would surprise in this unseemly saga, though. Privately, the FA admits there is no chance of Terry’s four-game ban being increased if his appeal fails but what remains of his credibility would be washed away in a further storm of derision.
Terry has built a career on defiance, an admirable attribute when games are turning against him, but now the whole game is turning against him. “This whole case is causing the game to implode,’’ remarked Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, who has tried to reason with Terry. Strong words.
Already unpopular in quarters of the professional game, Terry could become a pariah.
He is perceived as conceited, his character captured in the IRC report that described his expression when addressing Anton Ferdinand on Oct 23 as “disdainful” and “contemptuous”, not “injured” or “quizzical in the face of an unfounded allegation” (as Terry claimed).
Who is advising Terry? Baldrick? If there is nobody close to Terry with the gumption or common sense to tell him to say sorry to Ferdinand, to embark on a damage-limitation exercise sharpish, voicing his abhorrence of racism, then Chelsea must step in, pointing out that he is damaging them. Terry is letting a sore fester, risking infecting the rest of the club. “At the moment, he’s our captain,’’ said his manager, Roberto Di Matteo, a touch ominously.
Chelsea’s usually amiable director of communications, Steve Atkins, has taken to lecturing certain correspondents, this one included, on the tenor and content of their columns when he and his club should be focusing on extinguishing the inferno of two employees’ making.
Currently, Chelsea resemble a club short of leadership. The owner is silent (as usual), the board is inert and the captain is disgraced. How sad. They should be basking in the limelight, enjoying the afterglow of their European success and the warming feel of their joyous football.
The focus on Chelsea should be around the twinkling feet of Juan Mata, Oscar and Eden Hazard, but Terry and Cole have dragged the national spotlight on to their multiple character defects.
Cole’s reputation was smeared across a few pages of the judgment. He was effectively accused of changing his tune, of letting loyalty to a team-mate get in the way of truth’s journey into light. According to the IRC, Cole’s evidence “evolved”. Pity his intellectual capacities haven’t. In a remarkable fit of pique even by his prickly standards, Cole responded to the written reasons by pouring bile all over the FA.
I nearly swerved off the road when I heard what Cole had tweeted. He had not even read the full reasons, simply reacting splenetically to the “captions” on the breaking news bar on the training-ground flat screen. At least he apologised.
So nimble and clever when closing down an opposing winger, Cole can be remarkably leaden-footed and dim-witted off the pitch. He has previous. He even shot an intern with an air rifle. He is worth many millions, a sportsman with lucrative contracts, and yet he unleashes a barb of a tweet at those in charge of discipline.
Cole seems to use Twitter as a catapult. Surely a charge awaits followed by a swift guilty verdict and fine? Deleting the tweet was an admission of an error. Cole could have been savvier, issuing a statement through the club, highlighting the technical errors made by the FA in bringing its case. Instead, Cole lashed out.
Cole and Terry are an embarrassment to their peers. Most Premier League players get through the day without uttering a racist remark at an opponent or launching invective at the guardians of the game. When footballing agnostics think of the Premier League they will associate it with Terry and Cole, with ignorance and arrogance, overlooking the altruistic elements.
The crassness of Terry and Cole will blind the critics to the £100 million a year the Premier League gives clubs and assorted initiatives outside the elite (with parachute payments on top).
They will not see the countless club community schemes, the number of players with their own private foundations, the constant visits to children’s hospitals and regular picture-signing sessions after training so that the myriad requests can be met. English football is a benevolent force yet its image is tainted by the likes of Terry and Cole.
They may be at ease with their toxic reputations. There is an inherent sadness here. Terry is still a fine centre half. Cole is still England’s best left back, albeit with Leighton Baines closing fast. As competitors in their chosen craft, Terry and Cole are brilliant performers. As human beings, they leave so much to be desired.
James Lawton: Chelsea are morally derelict in their ongoing support of John Terry
Chelsea abhor racism to a point, as long as it’s not their captain accused
James Lawton
Saturday 06 October 2012
The guilt drips poisonously through 63 pages of torturous legal documentation. The verdict is emphatic, the punishment is hardly a fly-swat and once again we have to wonder when we might next collide with something in English football that might just be mistaken for a hint of conscience.
If there is still such a thing, it's not likely to be found in John Terry's citadel of Stamford Bridge.
There, he is the man who can do no wrong. He is not JT the conniver, the reprobate, the author of gutter racist language, but the leader, even the emblem of their meaning. He is the untouchable who feeds on the love of his tribe.
Love, did we say? The quality of it can never have been so strained or one-eyed.
Terry gets a four-match ban for the cardinal sin of racial abuse – one more than had he twice kicked the ball away in frustration – and the game wonders if even his audacity will stretch to an appeal, another public washing of the soiled linen and the mutilated spirit of something which, while never perfect, once managed to get by without a regular dose of disinfectant.
Terry's colleague Ashley Cole, and main support witness, sends a message to the rulers of football which is at the same time so obscenely dismissive, so self-destructively arrogant, you speculate at what point, if ever, the swill of sewerage will abate.
When it is all sluiced on top of the central incongruity of that inadequate sentence you look in vain for the smallest sign of accountability.
Not, certainly, from the captain of Chelsea – who had to be shown film of his outrageous foul in a Champions League semi-final before retracting a mind-numbing version of an incident which would have been shocking from the rawest, most terrified recruit – and still less from the club which was crowned champions of Europe.
Chelsea now stand at the heart of an affair which scandalises, surely, every fair-minded instinct in the national game.
It is fascinating to know how the club will react to the latest behaviour of Cole but in the meantime it needs to be said that no organisation in football has ever more firmly placed itself in the dock on a charge of hypocrisy.
This is Chelsea's official statement on the life ban imposed on Stephen Fitzwater, a 55-year-old from Isleworth, west London, who yelled racial insults at Didier Drogba during the semi-final with Spurs at Wembley: "Chelsea Football Club and the overwhelming majority of our fans abhor all forms of discrimination and believe they have no place in our club or our communities. We would like to thank Chelsea fans for reporting this incident which occurred during the semi-final and others, as a result of which a number of persons have been banned for racial and abusive language."
Chelsea abhor it up to a point, of course, and just as long as their captain is not employing a phrase like "You f****** black c***". This, of course, isn't about justice or self-regulation or doing the right thing. It is tribal.
As you would expect, the Chelsea manager Roberto Di Matteo says "at the moment he's our captain and he's available to play".
Yesterday's FA report inevitably provoked suggestions that Chelsea had been involved in a form of cover-up in their attempts to make late orchestration of the Cole evidence but the niceties of this debate pale against the strong impression that Terry's captaincy is not already and not likely to be anytime soon a matter of urgent review.
When the FA stripped him of the leadership of England in the spring no one could say they performed the task adroitly, especially when the immediate result was the resignation of their £6m-a-year manager Fabio Capello. But if the FA was ham-fisted it was not morally derelict, which has to be the verdict on Chelsea's reaction to the FA verdict.
Chelsea's support of a man who has so single-handedly divided the football nation could hardly have been more implicit.
Some may talk of institutionalised loyalty but how do you separate that from a failure to recognise the line between right and wrong?
How is it abhorrent to hear racial cries on the lips of an anonymous fan and not when it is confirmed, by the weight of tightly argued legal submissions based on all available evidence, on those of a lionised leader?
It doesn't make sense, neither morally nor practically. A former chief executive of Chelsea once described the Premier League as a "bunch of one" but if the remark was scorned at the time, and proved crudely optimistic quickly enough, how much more damaging is such an attitude now when the good name of the whole English game hangs so perilously?
Chelsea have the most coveted prize in European football but now they attach to it the kind of ignominy another great football club, Liverpool, heaped upon themselves when they failed to understand all the implications of their blind support for Luis Suarez in that other case which was supposed to define the force and the depth of the FA's stand against the evil of racial abuse.
The FA justified the eight-game ban imposed on Suarez because his crime was more persistent but in its report on the Terry case the conclusion is unflinching. It is that the Chelsea captain made elaborate but unsustainable attempts to obscure the reality of what happened at Loftus Road last October.
When he did that he attempted to frustrate the FA's campaign to clear away an ugly relic. He sought to avoid the mildest form of the punishment his club handed, with such righteous indignation, to the obscure but malignant fan on the terraces of Wembley.
He didn't get away with it but his fall is hardly catastrophic. Four games, one of them possibly a League Cup encounter, can be no measurement of the offence we are told is one of the most serious in football.
You may say that in the end there are no winners – but that will not be how it feels when "JT", implacable in his self-belief, runs out to a thunderous ovation at Stamford Bridge. Like his team-mate Cole, he says he is answerable only to his own conscience – and maybe his own people. It is hard not to believe it is the defiance of not only the unrepentant but the damned.