John Terry celebrates Chelsea’s Champions League win. Photo credit: Julian Mason http://flic.kr/p/c2r4WL
The background
Chelsea and England defender John Terry was cleared of a racially aggravated public order offense at Westminster magistrates’ court on 12 July. It was alleged that Terry had maliciously called QPR’s Anton Ferdinand a “f****** black c***” during a match on 23 October last year. The offending words were uttered by Terry. He admitted that. His (successful) defence was that he had used them as a “sarcastic exclamation” to deny saying them in the first place.
The fallout from John Terry’s court case showed no sign of abating over the weekend when Manchester United Rio Ferdinand, brother of Anton, was forced to defend his response to a tweet which referred to Terry’s black teammate Ashley Cole, who told the court Terry was no racist, as a “choc ice.” Ferdinand insisting the phrase he used on Twitter was not a racist term. The term is commonly understood to mean “black on the outside, white on the inside,” said The Independent. Ferdinand deleted the original tweet but later insisted that the term was slang for “someone who is being fake.”
On Saturday night, Cole moved to calm down the situation regarding the comments made on Twitter. A statement issued through his lawyers said: “Ashley Cole has been made aware of the discussion following comments appearing on Twitter and wishes to make it clear that he and Rio Ferdinand are good friends and Ashley has no intention of making any sort of complaint. Ashley appreciates that tweeting is so quick it often results in offhand and stray comments.”
Embarrassing for the sport
Matt Dickenson of The Times (£) suggested that “the sport has been embarrassed” by the trial. “Let us not get too po-faced and sanctimonious about swearing, but the casual nature of the insults – and I am leaving out some of the unprintable ones, ‘bad breath’, ‘your mom did this…’, ‘fat goalie’ – was embarrassing for the game,” insisted Dickinson, who added, “yes, there is swearing in all sports … and none of this comes as shock, but to have it portrayed in sterile atmosphere of a court was unedifying.”
“Football’s five-day version of the Jeremy Kyle Show cast the game in a deeply ugly light. It showed its vocabulary to be depressingly small and nasty,” sighed Paul Hayward of The Telegraph.
Important step in the war against dangerous spite and prejudice
Terry’s trial is “an important step in the war against dangerous spite and prejudice,” insisted Paul Hayward of The Telegraph. “It may look now like a monumental waste of time,” acknowledged Hayward, “but the John Terry saga needed to go to court as a warning to footballers that racial language should never leave their mouths, either as an insult or as ‘sarcastic exclamation’ …”
Verdict leaves society in a ‘dangerous position’
Writing at The Observer, Natasha Henry, a sports journalist for The Voice, Britain’s biggest black newspaper, said that the sarcasm defence “leaves society in a dangerous position.” Terry being found not guilty, said Henry, has “wider implications” for the sport and the black community as a whole: “Is it acceptable to use racially charged language, if it cannot be proved that you did it with malice? That doesn’t sit right with me. Those three words in that order are not acceptable … Surely the words themselves are bad enough that the context should be irrelevant?”
Football Association simply must act
The Football Association “must act,” insisted Garth Crooks at The Guardian’s Comment is free. “The Football Association still has to consider one very important matter. By Terry’s own admission he accepts the words ‘fucking black cunt’ were said. His lawyers successfully argued that the manner in which this was said was misunderstood. But I believe it was wrong of him to say these words under any circumstances – and though Terry has been found not to have committed a criminal offence, the FA must now decide whether the former England captain should be charged for contravening its own rules,” argued Crooks. “Some players have told me that a failure to act would only endorse what they have always felt: that black people have no place in this game other than as minstrels performing on a stage,” lamented Crooks, who said, “what football fails to realize is that there is an entire generation of black players who feel the game has failed them. They will not stand for abuse, from either players or fans, any longer. If the Football Association does nothing, on the evidence it already has, then the impact on the game will reverberate for years to come.”
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