What price captains?

Published : Jun 14, 2008 00:00 IST

The role and power of the soccer captain has diminished in direct ratio to the power of the manager.

“By you he’s a captain,” said a sea captain’s mother to another mother, in an old joke, “by me he’s a captain, but by captains is he a captain?” It recurred to me when in Trinidad, Fabio Capello appointed not just one but two more captains to those he had already invested with the armband for his England team. A day later, it was known that the captain of the Italian side taking part in the finals of the European Championship in Austria and Switzerland, Fabio Cannavaro, would have to drop out, after being injured in training. Which always seems to me the saddest way to be sidelined.

Cannavaro, short for a centre-back but highly mobile and intelligent, of course, captained Italy to their World Cup win in Berlin. Yet, with all respect to a talented player, who began so well when his long through pass set up Gianfranco Zola to score the winner in a World Cup eliminator at Wembley, you couldn’t help but wonder how much difference his absence would make to Italy as a captain rather than a footballer.

After all, for many years the Italian habit was to treat the matter of captaincy with almost cynical indifference. The captain was appointed purely on the basis of which player had won the most caps. I remember way back in the 1950s a ludicrous situation when two players, the then Fiorentina full-backs Aldo Magnini and Sergio Cervato, had won exactly the same number of caps. How to resolve the problem? The short and simple answer was to give the armband to Magnini since he had won one B cap more than Sergio Cervato!

As for England under Fabio Capello, the armband changes hands, or arms, with such speed that it is like a game of pass the parcel. The role, or supposed honour — so much strange fuss being made about it in the English Press — has so far been conferred on Rio Ferdinand, Steven Gerrard, John Terry, David Beckham and Gareth Barry. These last two having the captaincy for half a game each, while England, with eyes on the distant 2018 World Cup, grovelled in the hot sun to the ineffable Jack Warner, kingpin of CONCACAF and magical survivor of a host of embarrassing accusations. Who cut his usually relentless, pompous and shameless figure, it seemingly having been forgotten that only a few months ago, he had excoriated English football in the crudest terms.

As to the England captaincy, Capello’s behaviour suggests that he himself places little emphasis on the role. The idea that he has been experimenting to find the best captain possible holds little water. When John Terry — who is indeed a forceful and influential captain with his club Chelsea, whatever the tears he wept in Moscow — was given the armband, Fabi suggested to compensate him in some measure for the disappointment of his penalty miss in Moscow.

Beckham, of course, had captained England before, but his choice and his captaincy seemed part of the dubious plan to win friends and influence people in Trinidad. Ferdinand’s choice was very strongly criticised in some quarters on the grounds that a player who had missed his drugs test and been suspended for eight months and been embroiled in various other controversies off the field could scarcely be upheld as a role model, but Ferdinand himself insisted that he had turned over a new leaf. For that matter, some of John Terry’s night time behaviour in clubs has hardly been exemplary. Steven Gerrard is probably the best possible choice, a player of dynamism and commitment, not to mention talent, who leads Liverpool by example. And can lead England too, provided always he is not stuck out on the left-flank, as he so absurdly was by Capello in the first-half at Port of Spain.

The truth is, however, that the role and power of the soccer captain has diminished in direct ratio to the power of the manager. Today coaches and managers in first-class football tend to lay down the law, and there is little scope for a soccer captain, wholly unlike a cricket captain, to do much on his own initiative. There is nothing wholly new about this. Many years ago, one of the finest natural and most influential captains of his day, Danny Blanchflower, found himself dropped and relegated to the Tottenham Hotspur reserves because, in an FA Cup semifinal against Manchester City, he had dared on his own initiative to move his big centre-half, Maurice Norman, into the frontline in quest of goals. But Tottenham lost.

The irony of it was that Spurs then had arguably their worst manager in living memory, one Jimmy Anderson. Of whom one of their greatest managers Arthur Rowe, whose push and run Spurs teams won the second and first divisions in successive seasons long ago, once said to me, “When I was playing for Spurs, Jimmy Anderson was the third team trainer, and that’s what he ought to be now.”

Blanchflower, in fact, was a superb captain both of Spurs and the marvellous Northern Ireland team which knocked Italy out of the 1958 World Cup eliminators in Belfast and so contested the finals in Sweden. An elegant, creative, highly-inventive right-half, Danny would talk fascinatingly for hours — as he often did with me — about the strategies and skills of the game. He, in fact, made a perfect partnership with Peter Doherty when Peter managed Northern Ireland, having been a dazzling Irish international inside-left at a time when the team never got anywhere.

Danny’s career overlapped with that of another splendid captain, a few miles away, with Arsenal at Highbury; that wily and inspiring left-half Joe Mercer, whose age and injuries had caused him to temper his game, by comparison with his exuberant years with Everton and England, but whose influence on the team at large was immense.

The Italians have a significant saying, ‘un allenatore in campo’, a manager on the field, a captain in fact who carries out his manager’s orders. In the great days of Total Football, Holland’s Johan Cruyff and West Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer did far more than that. But you could see them, even then, as the shining exceptions who proved the present rule.

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