Watching Terry's trauma was an intrusion too far

Matthew Norman
23 May 2008

No one shackled by the bonds of patriotism to England is a newcomer to the ravaged features of the penalty shoot-out villain-victim.

We have been there time and time again since 1990 but not even with Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle in Turin have we witnessed desolation on quite the epic scale suffered by John Terry on a rainy Muscovite night.

"I had to turn off the telly," reported a friend, a fan of neither club. "I wanted to see the trophy lifted, but when the camera dwelt on him like that I just couldn't take it. It felt too much like an intrusion into private grief."

Usually with the man who misses the decisive kick (and that was Terry, not Nicolas Anelka), the look is the same.

It's the look of frozen disbelief, shared by fans of the defeated team, when the mind cannot quite compute the fact. You feel that if you can just stay very still and concentrate very hard, you can cause the closing moments to be replayed to give the opposite result.

But with Terry his entire face was diminished, his appearance changed from lairy gangland hanger-on to forlorn seven-year-old arriving for his first night at boarding school.

It was gruesome to behold, and cruel beyond belief even by the standards of the cruellest of all sports.

Only in football, thanks to the extreme difficulty of scoring a goal, does the better team often lose, and I suppose this immorality goes a long way to explaining its fiendish addictiveness.

Chelsea were that better team on Wednesday, although not by much. Their start was atrocious due entirely to Avram Grant's idiotic error in leaving Michael Essien at full-back to face Cristiano Ronaldo alone.

Making the mistake was bad enough, but for failing to rectify it long before Essien greeted Ronaldo's goal like an art lover gazing at a Leonardo in the Louvre, he should be sacked.

United might have been three up before the splendid Frank Lampard nabbed that unmerited, momentum-reversing equaliser, and Chelsea deserved to win for the startling absoluteness with which they imposed their will on such gifted opposition after half-time.

Had Didier Drogba been a less diffident onlooker for all but two moments - the sublime strike that smacked a post, and the sub-normal strike that smacked a cheek - they surely would have done so.

Even then, they had it won after Ronaldo had reaffirmed the curious paradox that in shoot-outs it is generally the greatest talents (Socrates, Platini, Baggio, etc) who blow it. Anelka and Salomon Kalou went AWOL during the first five kicks, a la Paul Ince in Euro 96, so the moment of truth fell to Chelsea's yeoman warrior.

Whether his slip altered the ball's trajectory by a millimetre is too banal a detail to dwell on, and even the defeat itself seemed almost trivial, at least to this neutral, as the camera dwelt with such sadistic languor on that crumpled, little boy face.

Here was a man anguished to the edge of a nervous breakdown, the barrier between sporting melodrama and nasty voyeurism well and truly breached.

The penalty shoot-out is a despicable entity that simply should not decide matches that could so easily be replayed.

Its outcome is predicated on the traumatising, for the entertainment of the watching masses, of a man who ran on to the pitch for a game of football and trudged off it psychologically scarred beyond endurance.

Keegan's loyalty to Barton is purely selfish

Given that 97 per cent of the sample wouldn't dream of wearing a shirt even in freezing Helsinki on New Year's Day, their opinion isn't worth bothering with.

But Kevin Keegan's counts far more (although less perhaps than that of Dennis Wise) and, apparently, he is sticking by the obnoxious little bleeder.

Managers always do with useful assets, however repulsive, but it's still disappointing because, while he may have the tactical nous of a weevil, few have ever doubted Keegan's decency.

He might argue that being loyal to Barton is an expression of that quality, but it isn't. It's pure self-interest, and far beneath his dignity.

Skipper will be spot on if he learns from Bernhard's sinking feeling

Returning with no apology to John Terry - right now, frankly, it's hard to think about anything else - the question I cannot shake off is the one that flashed into millions of minds the split second his penalty cannoned off that post and into the crowd.

Can he ever recover? In the highly unlikely event that he might read these words (one suspects he won't look at a newspaper for a very long time) they would come as no consolation, but I believe he can.

The only sporting precedent I can find for his level of desolation comes from 1991, when Bernhard Langer stood over a five-foot putt on the 18th green at Kiawah Island in South Carolina.

After three days of unusually vicious competition, even by Ryder Cup standards, Langer had to sink it to retain the trophy for Europe. It was, I think, the most pulverisingly pressurised single moment in sporting history and the putt, of course, sadly slid by.

"He's finished," I said to my wife of three days (we were honeymooning in Massachusetts and she'd just returned from an errand with Bourbon and Big Macs. She knew what she'd lumbered herself with. Oh yes, she knew). "He'll never recover from that, no one could," I added.

Little more than 18 months later, the Teuton God-botherer was being eased into one of those hideous green jackets after winning his second US Masters. Whether Terry can emulate Langer remains to be seen, but there is at least some hope.

Jinxed Radcliffe still in running for London gold

So that's that for Paula Radcliffe. Whether or not the misdiagnosis of a stress fracture of her thigh bone despite two MRI scans contributed to the problem, and regardless of her insistence that she has a "90-100 per cent" chance of being fit for Beijing, she has about the same prospect of running the women's marathon as the late comedienne Hylda Baker.

For all the bravado, one suspects she knows, y'know, that she'll be stood there, or possibly sat there, in a commentator's box when the time comes, and you could shed a tear for this most adorable of British sporting stars.

It is just rotten luck, and all one can hope is that for London 2012, when at 38 she will still be in a female marathon runner's prime, she might just do the unthinkable and evade this wretched curse.