Should He Stay or Should He Go?

By: Thad | July 20th, 2009

The logic of Manchester City’s long-running pursuit of Mister Chelsea England Captain Big Shot John Terry is finally beginning to come clear. It appears the strategy is to drag matters out so long that no one really cares any more what happens in the end. That’s the way to make a once-shocking move seem acceptable (if not inevitable).

Frank Lampard’s frank admission over the weekend that Terry may go and has a decision on his hands cannot have reassured anyone at Chelsea. But while Chelsea fans (the same ones who would have been happy to take Steven Gerrard from Liverpool not long ago) complain about the brazen raid for JT, and footballing purists quite understandably issue disturbed statements about The Dearth of Loyalty, The Evil of Money and so forth, one angle has yet to be explored: the ambivalence many Manchester City supporters feel about the prospects of John Terry becoming a lighter shade of blue.

For some (including myself) the ambivalence is rooted in being at heart a purist who wants to believe that certain players BELONG at certain clubs and that there is something unnatural about club captains uprooting themselves—even though the phenomenon of the academy-to-retirement one club player is now exceedingly rare.

Other City fans just don’t LIKE John Terry very much. They don’t think of the brave England captain who might one day deliver a huge trophy for the country—they think of Terry leading a swarm of Chelsea players in berating the referees. While Terry probably isn’t near the top of many City fan’s most hated opponents list (indeed he’s not even the most hated Chelsea player—that probably would be Drogba), some just don’t like him. That’s not really the case with any of City’s other summer signings—Tevez and Barry in particular were certainly widely admired while plying their trades at their previous clubs.

Other City fans worry about the impact Terry’s arrival may have on Nedum Onuoha and Micah Richards. Conventional wisdom has Nedum trending up and Micah trending down as a footballers (not sure that’s right, but that’s a common view), but both have enormous potential as centre halves. (Richards would like to be a right back for club and country, but his attacking abilities aren’t as yet convincing enough.) Bring in Terry and Lescott, and even if Richard Dunne leaves the two youngsters will suddenly be on the bench after being regular starters in the previous campaign.

Finally, some may simply doubt whether 30 million pounds—even 30 million from a seemingly bottomless fund—is just too much to pay for an aging centre half who is not that much better than Richard Dunne. And speaking of Dunne, he’s still a strong favorite among some fans, and some will feel discomforted by Hughes openly saying in effect that what we’ve got at central defense and in the captaincy/team leadership department just isn’t good enough.

All these considerations together make the case for ambivalence about the Terry deal. And yet the other side of the argument can’t be ignored: the fact that signing the England captain would mark a huge change in perceptions of the club, the hope that Terry might come fired up about a new challenge and be a key leader in getting a group of players new to the club and to each other going in the same direction, and the reality that Terry is a terrific footballer. Even Alex Ferguson, in otherwise dismissive comments about City this week, said he’d go after Terry too if he were in City’s shoes.

Yet the fact is that while a successful signing of Joleon Lescott would receive almost unanimous approval from City fans, not everyone is so excited about Terry and a few (including, famously, Noel Gallagher) are actively rooting for a deal not to come off.

To go back to our first point, some of us at this point are too fatigued by the whole thing to care too deeply how it turns out, and/or too giddy from the slew of signings already made to get too perturbed if capturing Terry proves a stretch too far at this point. And as we have seen, if Terry does stay where he is, City fans will have plenty of rationalizations they can cite in assuring themselves that it’s all for the best.