Capello has made an appalling mess of the John Terry scandal and now he's paid the price with Bridge quitting, by Oliver Holt
By Oliver Holt
It is not often that Fabio Capello has appeared foolish during his reign as England manager but he is looking pretty dumb today.
Not just because a couple of days ago he was adamant Wayne Bridge would join up with England on Sunday.
But also because he has made such an appalling mess of his handling of the whole sorry affair of the disintegration of the friendship between Bridge and John Terry.
It was evident to anyone who knew anything about the situation that sacking Terry as England captain three weeks ago would not fix anything.
Terry being captain was never the problem for Bridge. Terry being in the squad was the problem for Bridge.
Terry just being there, being in the same room, was the problem and Capello was not prepared to banish the Chelsea skipper from the squad altogether.
So he made a gesture. An empty gesture aimed at appeasing the media and the public. And now he is reaping the rewards of what he did.
Not only has Capello lost Bridge, who may have been his best left back in South Africa if Ashley Cole doesn’t recover from injury, but he has destabilised Terry as well.
He has conjured up the worst of both worlds and when Bridge quit England yesterday it was a worrying sign that Capello has badly misjudged the mood of his squad.
By linking the players’ private lives with their professional lives, he has also effectively put a price on each of their heads. Nice work, boss.
Bridge knew all that. He is not stupid. He knew that Capello had not lanced the boil by sacking Terry. He had merely irritated it.
He knew that if he went to the World Cup, the hunger for gossip about the ongoing relationship between him and Terry would never be sated.
He knows how the media works. He knew there would be a clamour for pictures of him and Terry together on the training pitch.
Possibly even paparazzi perched on the slag heap overlooking the England practice pitches in Phokeng with their long lenses constantly trained on him and JT.
He was aware that even the minutiae would be lapped up. Whether the pair of them had exchanged glances, whether they’d shared a table, whether they’d been on the same side in PlayStation match-ups.
Bridge hated the idea of that and he hated the idea of the effect it would have on the rest of the England players.
As he said in his statement yesterday, he feared that his presence in South Africa would be divisive.
He knew the Bridge-Terry soap opera would be a distraction and so he decided to remove the distraction by removing himself.
Some people are criticising him already, saying he should just get over it and get on with his life and seize the opportunity offered him by Cole’s injury.
But it’s not that simple. There are bitter emotional issues at the heart of Bridge’s resentment towards Terry that go beyond Terry’s alleged relationship with his ex-girlfriend.
It is easy to say that Bridge should be able to separate professional duties from private dislike but a lot harder to do it when the World Cup squad could be closeted together for six weeks in South Africa.
Let’s not forget, either, that Capello set the precedent when he refused to separate the private from the professional when he sacked Terry as captain.
Instead of calming the situation, Capello merely inflamed it when he took that action.
If he had backed his captain and said that whatever happens in a player’s private life is not relevant to his performance on the pitch, things might have been a lot different.
That would have damped down the flames of scandal, not fanned them. But Capello chose a different path and Bridge’s decision yesterday is just the start of the heavy price the England manager will have to pay.
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