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The John Terry Appreciation Thread

ForeverCarefree
in General Chelsea FC

Featured Replies

9 hours ago, Kev123 said:

Chelsea still held his contract. Could also say technically yes lol

When people make lists of one club men, they often don't include JT because of the loan. 

Most people using that to discount Terry are kids writing lists adding their own criteria for what to qualify and what not to. Simple fact is that Terry has been employed by Chelsea FC since he was 14. But yeh I do see how with that criteria some would view it otherwise

 

http://www.footballtop10s.com/10-one-club-men/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2607656/John-Terry-greatest-one-club-men-A-salute-footballs-loyal-servants.html

http://www.squawka.com/news/one-club-players/240334

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/dec/02/love-john-terry-loathe-chelsea-manchester-city

 

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Love John Terry or loathe him, an unignorable career is winding down

Barney Ronay
Barney Ronay
John Terry will miss Saturday’s trip to Manchester City and for the first time in the Abramovich era his absence is not, for Chelsea, a source of fretful speculation
 
John Terry
 ‘John Terry’s absence through injury for a game as big as Saturday’s lunchtime trip to Manchester City is suddenly not really an issue’. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

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Friday 2 December 2016 13.59 GMT

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Aman from the Daily Telegraph once told me an interesting story about John Terry, Fabio Capello and one of those informal chit-chats England managers like to have with journalists. This one took place a few years back, when Terry was having one of those off periods when he seems to be slightly falling to pieces, panels flapping, hinges rusting, grabbing at the passing shirts like a man groping for the light switch in the dark.

Someone asked why Capello kept picking Terry when his form was poor. The answer was simple. Yes, there were quicker, fitter players. But when Capello and his men looked around the dressing room before kick-off they usually found Terry was the only England player not frozen into silence, bowed with angst or – in the colloquialism used – “sh*tting it” under the weight of the England shirt.

Terry was unafraid. He made the others less afraid. You can see it, can’t you? No matter where you stand on the John Terry moral universe, he would still be a pretty good person to, say, come with you on the train to Birmingham to help give a PowerPoint presentation to an aggressively sceptical sales conference audience. Or to go out on a sky dive with, just the two of you up in some howling fuselage above the Arapaho National Forest, the japes, the backslaps, the emergency chute slung away – “Don’t need it, mate” – JT hurling himself out first into that screaming void still talking about Lewis Hamilton or The X Factor. “I’m coming, John. I’m coming with you. Catch me. Catch me, John.”

This ability to inspire from the front has been surplus to requirements during the current Chelsea run of eight wins and seven clean sheets. Just as for the first time in the Abramovich era, Terry’s absence through injury for a game as big as Saturday’s lunchtime trip to Manchester City is suddenly not really an issue, no longer a source of fretful speculation.

The news this week is that Conte plans to “phase out” his captain, with the suggestion Terry could even be off to Shanghai Shenhua in January. In a bizarro-world twist, Shanghai Shenhua are managed by Gus Poyet, the player Terry replaced to make his Chelsea debut in a League Cup tie against Aston Villa 18 years ago, a sign, perhaps, of some late 1990s Chelsea Valhalla out there in the glare of the new world. Maybe Jody Morris and Michael Duberry are also in town and everyone’s off to Boujis later with Dane Bowers.

Either way, the signs are clear enough. Terry will turn 36 this week. He is by five years the longest serving current player at any Premier League club. He’s still out there: still leading, still captaining, still legending. But after 18 wild, glorious years the sense of an ending is now impossible to ignore.

John Terry, the centre of attention after the Champions League final win against Bayern Munich in 2012, for which he was suspended but put on his kit to claim the trophy.
 John Terry, the centre of attention after the Champions League final win against Bayern Munich in 2012, for which he was suspended but put on his kit to claim the trophy. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

Before we get lost in more formal goodbyes closer to the time, there are perhaps three things worth saying about the Terry years. First: hate him, loathe him or support Chelsea, this has been one of the great, unignorable English sporting lives of the current century. Terry has been relentlessly visible throughout the creation of a modern‑day powerhouse. Should Chelsea win another league title this season, they will be unarguably English football’s premier force since 2004, when Terry became captain and they first began to spend in earnest. In total Terry has now been present for 64% of Chelsea’s total accumulated silverware since the club were formed in 1905 as a fill-in for the empty Fulham Road stadium. This is in part Conte’s challenge: a first trophy outside the main span of the Terry Supremacy.

There has already been a change of tone and texture. The current three-man defensive wedge is mobile and aggressive. Whereas Terry has become more minimal with age, sitting deep, playing flatter, taking the air out of the game. In Chelsea’s last title campaign, he committed 13 fouls all season in the league, and made just over one tackle per 90 minutes.

He could perhaps have been a more striking, more expressive player in his best years. He might have used his ease on the ball to push his team forward: in 2011 Terry was rated the third most accurate passer in Europe; he still has more career goals than Andrés Iniesta. Instead he has pared back his game, playing within his limits and becoming an irresistibly familiar presence, the one constant through Chelsea’s modern triumphs those great, beaming hollering Terry features, victory sealed with the standard shots of triumphant post-match JT striding about shirtless, invariably cropped at the waist to give the unnerving impression of a man so committed to the cause he’s just played the full 90 minutes bullishly, unapologetically in the nude.

John Terry with QPR’s Anton Ferdinand during the Premier League match at Loftus Road in October 2011, which led to Terry’s ban for using racist language
 John Terry with QPR’s Anton Ferdinand during the Premier League match at Loftus Road in October 2011, which led to Terry’s ban for using racist language. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA

So much for the good times. The second thing about Terry is, of course, his toxic mistakes, his wider unpopularity. The scrapes, the splashes, the priapism: this is no more than lurid detail. But the FA ban for using racist language during a match will remain an indelible stain. The court case alone provided an extraordinary glimpse into the dismal internal monologue of the professional game. Terry has apologised and admitted that his language was completely unacceptable He is at least right there.

Beyond this, as the waters start to close above his head, the most striking thing about Terry is simply his basic presence in extraordinary times. In a way Chelsea have been a case study, an outlier for the eviscerating changes in English football. Billionaire ownership, the large-scale bartering of success, the bolting on of a new, aggressively burnished brand to our creaky old Victorian community centres: there is in principle something deeply odd and uncharted about this.

Just as being a billionaire is in itself inane – a process of being continually replete, existing within a sealed world of chinchilla‑skin helicopter rides and seven-star homogeneity – so the billionaire’s project club is also an inane idea and entirely anti-sport, a sanding down of edges and imperfections and thrilling variables into cold, hard, cash‑bought certainties. This is not sport. It’s not football. It doesn’t actually have to work at all.

Football can survive most things. But not the moment supporters stop caring about their club and its players. It is a challenge that is yet to hit but that always lurks just beyond the fringes and the fury. At Chelsea the age of Abramovich has worked so far, both as a spectacle and as a coherent whole that still feels like the same coherent whole. At times, at least in those raw early days, this has felt like it was in large part because of Terry’s vividness, his persuasive spirit, a player who has been not so much the brains or the heart of his club as its bowels, the hard colonic centre that ensures Chelsea have through it all still smelt like a football team.

 
     

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  • 01

    Won't comment on Terry's personal life. Will only note that I once saw him head a ball off the line at the bridge that left both sets of supporters amazed. Huge scramble in the box, volley came in that left Cech stranded and Terry leapt in the air as he was moving to his right. However, the kick came arcing in toward spot on the line he had just left. Somehow, mid-air, he managed to contort his body and flick the ball clear. Not comparing the two, but only every saw Michael Jordan do anything similar. Terry could be depended upon to defend the goal with his life, but he also brought skill and athleticism to the game.

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  • 01

    Saw him getting sent off for hacking down Bale twice at WHL.

    Good times..

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    On 11/27/2016 at 11:31, Kev123 said:

    Chelsea still held his contract. Could also say technically yes lol

    They did, however a one man club list is only available for players that basically never left the club on loan. Like Giggs or Totti, but the Chelsea fans will always regard him as a one man club and one of the greatest ever captains.

    36 is quite a career already.. I think he should become a pundit next..  Only gary neville is quite ok in that industry, the worst? it's undoubtly charlie nicholas, so f**king bias...

    2 hours ago, Zeta Orionis said:

    Nah he'd be wasted as a pundit, he needs to be coaching the next generation of defenders coming through the club

    This is the next best step for JT. He's smart and a born leader.

    Happy Birthday, JT!

    CAPTAIN, LEADER, LEGEND.

    He's also celebrating 15 years since he first wore the captain's armband.

    Edited by Jezz

    John Terry has been told that this will be his last season as a player with Chelsea as the club begin the process of finding another role for him at Stamford Bridge. During informal and cordial talks, the captain also reassured Chelsea’s board that he does not want to leave in next month’s transfer window — despite lucrative offers from China — and that he is planning to end the season at the club where he has spent his entire career.

    http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/no-new-chelsea-deal-for-terry-8w5sqxlwz

    o captain my captain, not surprising but still a bit bittersweet, here's hoping he ends his legendary chelsea career with another premiere league medal around his neck

    and go get that chinese $$$ next season cap

    He gave us everything he could, and at this point even though i would love to see him play until the ends of my days he can't. Age and everything involved in it has caught up, he is still an important figure and he will probably leave for a big money move. 

    End of an era.

    For me our best player ever. And the best captain and leader a club could ever have.

    All good things come to an end and to be honest, giving JT another season would have looked like charity. He will be missed but the way Conte has got us playing, hopefully he won't be missed quite as much as many of us feared.

    The timing is good, lets just hope he can go out on a real high and hold that PL trophy aloft.

     

    JT - Captain, Leader, Legend.

     

    To be honest if i think without the sentimental context we should have probably let him go last year as his performances fell of a cliff, but if he can go out lifting his 5th PL title then it can't really be written any sweeter, can it? Would be even better if it's all done before the last game so we can him JT (and Ivan as surely he isn't get a new deal either) a huge goodbye at The Bridge.

    Shame he will never get to start in a winning CL final mind but he's got his medal.

    I guess a lot will depend on whether he fees he has another season or 2 in him playing abroad. He's always talked about the fairytale retiring at Chelsea. 

    I would hope that the club will do all they can to keep him in another role. 

    I think clubs in general need to do abit better at keeping their legendary players around the club. We've got Lampard, JT, Drogba, Cole and Ballack who all should be involved in the club somehow. 

    He deserves a role at the club, his team talks are legendary. 

    Straight in as number 2 to Conte ? - I believe he was doing his badges so he qualifies

     

     

      

      

    If this is the end for him, I want to see him lift another EPL trophy one final time!

    I hope the club finds a way to retain him in a non-playing capacity beyond his playing career. LEGEND!

    So this is it huh?

    Captain leader LEGEND JOHN TERRY you are never gonna be forgotten

    The best captain a club could ever have

    He's Mr. Chelsea after all <3

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