Ferdinand was asked to demonstrate precisely how he had gestured towards Terry, writes DANIEL TAYLOR
ON THE pavement outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court, a lone Chelsea fan in a replica shirt and baseball cap held up a life-size cardboard cut-out of John Terry and tried to attract the attention of the small army of photographers jostling for position behind the metal fences.
Inside – up the stairs, turn right past the security guys and through the two sets of double doors – Terry sat behind the glass-walled dock of courtroom one. Wearing a pale grey suit, salmon-pink tie and polished shoes, he could have been dressed for a summer wedding. Instead, he was face-to-face with Anton Ferdinand, the opponent he called a “f**king black c**t” while playing for Chelsea in a Premier League match against QPR last October.
It was the row, ultimately, that led to Terry losing the England captaincy – although he still played in Euro 2012 – which, in turn, brought about the dispute between Fabio Capello and the Football Association that saw the Italian resign as national team manager. And it all started from a dispute over a penalty-kick that was never given.
Ferdinand was angry that Terry thought he should have been awarded one; Terry barged into him. The two players swapped insults. Terry waved his hand in front of his nose, as if to indicate that Ferdinand had bad breath. “Handbags,” they agreed after the match. Banter, football stuff, shake hands and keep it on the pitch. But then it got serious. Ferdinand was shown some YouTube footage and told he was trending on Twitter. It had become “global news”, as he put it. By the time court case 1103985595, listed as “John George Terry 07/12/80”, had finished for its first day, it was difficult to recollect how many times, even roughly, the word “c**t” had been used. Forty? Fifty? One hundred? More?
The only certainty was that it was going to be a difficult day for newspapers, radio and television when it came to their asterisk and bleeping policy.
Early in his evidence, Ferdinand was unsure about whether or not he could swear in court. “It’s a serious issue,” the prosecutor Duncan Penny told him. “Please do not worry about the language. What did you call Mr Terry?” Ferdinand replied: “A c**t.” And so it began.
At times Ferdinand could be seen looking to his mother, Janice, and other relatives in the front row of the public gallery. Along from them sat Chelsea’s chairman, Bruce Buck. Representatives from the football anti-racism and discrimination organisation Kick It Out, and the Football Association were also among the assorted media. The court had doled out tickets in the manner of a football club distributing press passes, and the queue of reporters turned away at the door was substantial.
They missed an extraordinary day in which Ferdinand was asked at one point to demonstrate to the court precisely how he had gestured towards Terry on the pitch. He did so with a clenched fist, bending his elbow and delivering a pumping action. Asked what it was supposed to signify, Ferdinand replied: “A shag.”
And whose alleged shagging? That was covered, too. Terry’s relationship with the partner of Wayne Bridge, his then Chelsea team-mate, provided the backdrop. “How can you call me a c**t?”, Ferdinand said he had shouted at Terry. “You shagged your team-mate’s missus, you’re the c**t.”
That word again. “When someone calls you a c**t, that’s fine,” Ferdinand said. “When someone brings your colour into it, it takes it to another level.”
Terry could be seen taking down notes. At the end, he left with a large file of his legal team’s paperwork under his arm. It was only a couple of weeks since he was being acclaimed as one of England’s more impressive performers at Euro 2012. Before that, he had lifted the Champions League trophy with Chelsea, despite not playing in the final. Now he stands in a criminal court charged with using racially insulting words.
His defence, we learned, was that while he did use the offending words, they were merely a “sarcastic exclamation”, and he was responding indignantly to Ferdinand wrongly accusing him of racism on the pitch. Terry said he was angry at Ferdinand “questioning me being a racist”.
Outside, as the rush-hour traffic went past on Marylebone Road, the cardboard cut-out of “JT”, as he was often referred to, had been badly propped against the court building’s wall. It looked worn out.
* Guardian Service
