• John Terry’s club and country managers back defender
• Fabio Capello may wait to name new permanent captain

Fabio Capello is sure that John Terry will not retire from international football despite being stripped of the England captaincy by the Football Association. The head coach may also appoint a temporary captain for England’s next game, the friendly against Holland later this month, before deciding on a long-term replacement, with Glen Johnson, Frank Lampard and Gareth Barry among those in line behind the Italian’s current favourite, Steven Gerrard.

After Terry was stood down from the captaincy by the FA on Friday morning, the prospect was raised of the Chelsea captain walking away from international football completely. But Capello is confident that this would be anathema to Terry, believing that he will wish to continue playing for England despite now having lost the armband twice.

Terry was removed from the role by the Italian in February 2010 due to revelations about his personal life. The head coach has drawn on how Terry played on after that incident as well as his knowledge of the defender’s resolute attitude to conclude that Terry will not quit.

Regarding his replacement the vice-captain Gerrard is the natural successor and provided he stays fit and continues to play regularly for Liverpool after a prolonged injury lay-off the midfielder should lead England against Holland on 29 February.

Capello also has Barry and Lampard in mind, though he is conscious that the latter is no longer a regular starter for Chelsea, and neither he nor the Manchester City midfielder are automatic choices since Scott Parker’s emergence. However, the Italian still admires both players and with Wayne Rooney banned from the first two matches of Euro 2012, and with a three-month gap until England’s next match after the Dutch friendly, against Norway in Oslo, Capello may wait until then to assess fitness and form regarding before deciding who will lead England in Ukraine and Poland.

While Parker and Johnson also have outside chances of being made captain, Capello is yet to speak publicly about the removal of Terry and the fact that the decision was taken over his head by the 12-member FA Council. He may well do so before England next meet up in around three weeks to clear the air ahead of the Holland friendly though if Terry does play on the issue of team unity is bound to linger.

Rio Ferdinand, Anton’s older brother, spoke for the first time since Terry lost the captaincy on Saturday stating that he was unconcerned whether the Chelsea defender played or not in Sunday’smatch against Manchester United at Stamford Bridge.

There had been speculation over whether Ferdinand would shake his fellow England centre-half’s hand now Terry has been charged of making a racial slur at Anton, a charge he will deny at Westminster magistrates’ court on 9 July. But a knee injury has ruled Terry out of the game and Ferdinand said: “I couldn’t care less if he played or not. I just think about playing for Manchester United and winning the game. I let the media talk about it, go on about it and create the storm. We are footballers. That is where we are best. That is where we enjoy being. The result and the performance of our team against theirs was definitely the most important thing for me.”

Of the furore’s effect on his brother, Ferdinand said: “Anton is my little brother. We have grown up together and I have looked after him when we were kids. If something is going to affect him and hurt him, I am always there as a shoulder to lean on. In moments like this, when things are so public and you can’t really say anything, it can be frustrating.

“For my family, yes, it has been tough. My brother has not brought any accusations to anyone. He is not the accused. But he has had to sit there and take abuse from some small-minded people, which has been very disappointing.”

Meanwhile, André Villas-Boas suggested that Terry’s capacity apparently to thrive on adversity has in a perverse way suited Chelsea, and the manager sees no reason why the same would not apply to England, should Capello continue to select the centre-back. “For us, we benefit,” the Portuguese said. “Hopefully for his country it will continue to be the same. I’m not saying it fuels him, that he needs negativity, but he has been outstanding.”

John TerryFabio CapelloEnglandChelseaJamie Jackson
guardian.co.uk

Football has fought a long campaign to fight prejudice in the game, but the reaction of two clubs to recent allegations has been shortsighted and damaging

The pictures above were taken less than five months apart. The first shows Liverpool lining up before their pre-season friendly against Valerenga on 1 August, the players holding aloft signs reading “Show Racism the Red Card”, a response to the shooting and bombing attack by the far-right gunman Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers, last July.

The second is part of the club’s officially sanctioned public response to the decision by the FA’s independent tribunal to ban Luis Suárez for eight games after finding him guilty of racially abusing Manchester’s United’s Patrice Evra. The contrast is extreme, the contexts, admittedly, make for a risible comparison. But somewhere between these images is a fault line down which the disconnect between football’s flagship position as a beacon against racism in British society, and what actually happens when a major institution is confronted with evidence of such behaviour in its own ranks, has tumbled this week.

It is probably no more than the coincidence of random events that sees two high-profile cases of alleged racial abuse played out alongside each other. Suárez and the accusations against Chelsea’s John Terry are separate if similar incidents and using one to predict the outcome of the other is a speculative dead end. What does and should bear comparison, however, is how both have been handled by the clubs involved from the moment the accusations became public, and how this squares with what has been a consistent and laudable campaign by virtually the entire body politic of British football to eradicate racism, sectarianism and, latterly, Islamophobia from its ranks over the last 20 years.

As its players became rich beyond imagination, as its core fanbase found itself priced out of gleaming stadiums, as the oligarchs snaffled up clubs for fun, as the ability to watch games on television was closed to those unwilling to pay through the nose, football’s publicity machine has required a narrative to shield it from well-founded charges that the game’s values have descended to little more than a brazen assault on the pockets of a captive fanbase.

Most big clubs run well-established charitable programmes and star players, largely enthusiastically, make themselves available for various hospital visits or publicity events for community projects. But against charges of increased alienation from normal society, football has had need of a well-structured counter-narrative. It is little exaggeration to say that in the past decade, anti-racism campaigns have formed the principal plank of the game’s efforts to present itself as a force for cohesion and solidarity in the often uneasy melting pot of British life.

This is not to deride those efforts as a cynical exercise. The atmosphere inside grounds is unrecognisable from the 1980s, where the sense of incipient violence and exclusionary hostility made attending a football match a dangerous proposition for most people of colour, and black players found abuse from the terraces and the thinly veiled prejudice of coaches a constant adversary. Campaigns such as Kick it Out and Show Racism the Red Card would be justifiably enraged at the notion that they are merely part of a fig-leaf to mollify the perception of football’s deeper