Everyone makes mistakes
Posted on 08/02/2010Terry may still rule the roost at Stamford Bridge, but Rio Ferdinand will be the man to lead England at the World Cup this summer. Like virtually every other member of the squad, Ferdinand has had his misdemeanors, but it is time, says Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail, to forget his past mistakes and judge Ferdinand on his ability to lead the team.
So what is it going to be then? Do we continue down this route where every captain of the England football team must have lived a retrospectively blameless life, or are we to allow Fabio Capello to lance the wound of the last days of John Terry’s captaincy and move on?Do we judge Rio Ferdinand, the first officially appointed black captain of England, by crimes and misdemeanours from another century or do we accept that any man, every man in fact, will have a past and that it will include the odd episode of which he is no longer proud?
The choice is ours. We tear ourselves apart or reason that individuals must be allowed the capacity for personal growth.
Ferdinand missed a single drugs test, too, six-and-a-half years ago as you will no doubt grow sick of being reminded now he is England captain. Yet, if he has not transgressed since, if he has learned and moved on, surely there comes a time to allow him to escape the past, the way we would any professional who has messed up.
The alternative is to continue breaking butterflies on wheels, the spectacle of which will tell more of us than it ever will of them.
Ferdinand's appointment is a significant one, and a landmark in the fight against racism in football, says Oliver Kay in The Times.
You can say what you like about football and footballers, but if, as has been made clear of late, the captaincy of the England team is one of the highest offices in the land, it is hard to imagine too many other positions of such prominence where the appointment of a black man would pass unnoticed and unheralded.It was certainly not at the front of my mind upon hearing on Friday that Rio Ferdinand was England’s new captain in succession to John Terry. But, in a season when rumblings have been heard about institutional racism in club boardrooms with regard to the small number of black managers employed, it seems like a cause for celebration — perhaps precisely because of the lack of attention it attracted.