Quintin Jardine's blog

Still on things more or less English, the vastly overpaid Italian who manages their national football team has just made himself a laughing stock by returning the captain’s armband to John Terry, a year after stripping it from him publicly, because of something that happened in his private life, and declaring that JT would never wear it again. In doing so he has insulted Rio Ferdinand, Terry’s appointed successor. Like Terry, Rio has baggage, in his case a missed drug test that cost him a long suspension,  and like Terry he’s moved on. Unlike Terry, he’s made himself a role model off the pitch, and for that he deserved better. He certainly deserved better than to have one of his teammates stuck in front of the media yesterday by the FA press office, to say what a mighty leader  JT is. (The facts that he wouldn’t get a game in many  other European international teams, and that he’d be fourth choice centre-back at Man U, don’t enter into it.) If it had been Wayne Rooney, Rio’s teammate, who said it, that would have had a more credibility, but he wouldn’t have toed the line, so they fielded a stooge instead.

When the man Capello was appointed to the England job, he was praised for his strict discipline, after the more lax regimes of Sven and Umbrella Man. Maybe so, but alongside discipline there is man management, and clearly he is crap at that.