England stars go head-to-head: Ferdinand v Terry

Rio Ferdinand happy to put bling image behind him as he focuses on football

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

But the intensity behind his eyes and in his voice when he raises the subject provides more than a hint of desperation to be heard out. "OK, I like a nice watch, drive a nice car and wear nice clothes," says the man who, if Ryan Giggs starts tomorrow evening on the bench as expected, will lead Manchester United into the Champions League final.

"But being bling means spending money on willy-nilly things, having no respect for the game and it was the sort of thing I was accused of. To me, that is unwarranted. But people have assumptions about the way you are." Ferdinand suggests, in the way he has just drifted from past to present tense, an insecurity and he does have reasons to fret. It is four years since the Red Issue fanzine declared, with customary aplomb, that Mancunian Reds found "the whole wannabe-gangsta, faux-rapper, Peckham wideboy, lothario shtick that Rio's so good at a total turn-off". The experience in 2005, of being booed by his own supporters after he was photographed at two restaurants in April that year with Peter Kenyon – the former Manchester United chief executive who had signed him for the club but was by then with Chelsea – evidently still lives with him, too.

The boos represented his "worst time" at United, he says, and though he has always insisted that Kenyon just happened to be around when he arrived to meet his agent, Pini Zahavi, he admits the encounter, at a time when he was stalling over a new contract, was a mistake. "In hindsight it could have been avoided but you live and learn," he says. "I was always going to sign for Manchester United and I have done."

Ferdinand has learnt his lesson where contracts are concerned. United's confirmation last week of a deal which will keep him at Old Trafford until 2013 was a far cry from last time and he seems destined to assume the club captaincy from Giggs, in time. But set against that sense of growing maturity is the suggestion in the minds of some – albeit unproven – that it was the Ferdinand of old who organised the notorious United Christmas party at the Great John Street Hotel which ended with one player, Jonny Evans, being arrested over a rape allegation which has since proved unfounded.

Ferdinand has not been willing to discuss the party until now, but he is indignant about the way his role in it has been characterised – more evidence, he feels, of his sometimes wretched struggle to be understood. "People chose me as the person who did [organise] it," Ferdinand says.

"You just have to accept being scapegoated at times and I don't come out and fight my corner – I leave it to other people if they want to do that. I know what I have done and what I am like. But I do wonder why my name keeps cropping up. I have been involved in misdemeanours in the past and I'm not going to lie – I'm no different to anyone else in liking a good night out. But I hadn't a clue where these things come from."

The events of December are what Ferdinand moved north to escape from. Unwanted headlines at West Ham had included the tabloid exposé of another party, in which he, Frank Lampard and Kieron Dyer filmed themselves partying with a number of women in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. "It was a conscious decision to move out," he says. "I got out because I was enjoying the finer things in life rather than the football."

It seemed significant that Ferdinand evaded many of the unwelcome headlines of his Elland Road team-mates at the start of this decade and when you consider his past nine months on the pitch it is hard not to see more development. The England captaincy, handed to him by Fabio Capello in Paris two months ago, is highly likely to be his permanently come August and those who consider him to have been the key to United's title include Mark Hughes – the man who may just be United's next manager. "He drags people along with him and I've been really impressed," Hughes says. "He is more focused than he used to be – an exceptional football player."

Ferdinand's community work has also been more abundant than perhaps any of the current Old Trafford crop since his low point in top-flight football – that decision, on 23 September 2003, to skip a random drug test at United's Carrington training complex in favour of a chauffeured trip to Manchester, coffee with his old West Ham mate Eyal Berkovic and a spot of shopping. In April last year, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair made Ferdinand an anti-gun and knives ambassador and he has also been involved with the Damilola Taylor Trust and anti-racism and child literacy campaigns.

A choreographed rehabilitation, some cynics might sneer. But Ferdinand is, with the possible exception of Owen Hargreaves, the most erudite of Sir Alex Ferguson's players and an individual whose life experiences – he attended school with Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager who was murdered in south London in 1993, and grew up close to where the schoolboy Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death in 2000 – transcend all the rest put together.

"My mum was a babysitter when I was growing up," Ferdinand says. "She always had kids around her and I have a younger twin brother and sister – they are twins. I am five years older and now I have children of my own. That's why I have always felt comfortable doing work around kids and I get on well with them. Kids are not judgemental. They are there to aspire to what we are, footballers or someone in the public eye. They want to ask genuine questions."

When they ask him what it takes to make it, Ferdinand quotes an individual whose hopes will be with Chelsea tomorrow night, Frank Lampard Snr, who, when he and Frank Jnr were learning their trade at West Ham, told him: 'You get out of the game what you put in.' "Those words still ring true," he says. "I wouldn't make any claims for myself but this is the most consistently good football I have played."

Lampard's late mother, Pat, was also an important individual in his life. "She took me in when I used to stay round there at weekends," says Ferdinand, whose texts to Lampard around the time of Pat's death confirmed an enduring relationship between the two of them. "She used to make great breakfasts on a Sunday and I've got fond memories of her when I was over at their house."

So now to Moscow – and a moment of destiny with John Terry – the fellow central defender with whom he is fighting it out for the England armband. "Me and JT have a bit of rivalry," Ferdinand admits. "But whoever the manager deems right to be England captain, the other one will shake his hand and say, 'Well done'." That said, if Ferdinand does get the nod it will be one more reason for the world to see a different side of him. "To be talked of as a likely England captain, you can't put that into words," he says. "Who would have thought when I was playing five-a-side in the playground that I would become captain of England? If that cannot push you on to become a better player or person, then I don't know what can."

John Terry, the throwback, shrugs off the aches and pains for one final effort

By Sam Wallace

If John Terry is on the winning side tomorrow night, there are no guarantees that the Chelsea captain will be able to fulfil the last act of a long and gruelling season: specifically, hoisting that big silver cup above his head. For a player patched up, injected and numbed to the pain all season, the last part to go has been his right elbow which, in his words, "popped out, then popped back in" after a collision with his team-mate Petr Cech in the last Premier League game of the season against Bolton.

It would not be a Chelsea trophy presentation without Terry and where would that club be without their captain, the man whose passion for training ground pranks simply knows no boundaries? The man who has coined every Chelsea nickname from "Lampsy" to "Baly", who organises the paintballing expeditions and who contests every players' pool tournament as if it were a Champions League final. The man who breathlessly relates all these important training ground developments and more in his famous programme notes, which are always signed off with that endearing, if slightly innocent, exhortation: "Come on the Chels!"

It is no wonder that most Chelsea fans feel as if they know Terry. It is he who is the link back to a dim and distant past when Bjarne Goldbaek was considered a big signing and the Champions League final was for other clubs. Terry is pretty much the only part of old Chelsea that has kept pace with the new as first the board then players, managers and staff have been brushed aside by the Roman Abramovich revolution.

The Chels, as Terry would say, have never had it so good nor come this far in the Champions League before. "I look at the squad of players we have got, I've seen the changes over the years and I don't think people realise how important this is for Chelsea," he says.

"It means the world to me to be in the final, it is an achievement in itself, but beyond that I really want to get my hands on the trophy. I'm desperate to do it. I know how much it means to the club, to the fans, I've got a great rapport with the fans, I feel we are on the same wavelength because we all know that people say we cannot be a big club until we've won the European Cup. This is our chance to go out and do it."

Curiously, given he has reached the final, this has not even been a great season for Terry. He has stumbled through a series of injuries including a broken toe in pre-season, a fractured cheekbone in September and three broken bones in his foot in December.

He had a major row with Jose Mourinho the night before the former Chelsea manager was sacked, which was misinterpreted in some quarters as the reason Mourinho was sacked. Then he lost the England captaincy and soon after that he fell out very publicly with the prickly Dutch coach Henk ten Cate on the eve of the Carling Cup final.

When his elbow went against Bolton, his first thought was that matters had just taken a turn for the worse again.

"I've had a lot of injuries, but that has got to be one of the most painful," he says. "I thought I'd broken my arm until it settled down a few hours after the game. But at the time, I thought: 'Shit, I'm going to miss the final.' I've said to Petr Cech all season, 'Come out, and if you have to go through me and the striker to get the ball, just do it.' That is what he did, so I can't complain. He did what I've been telling him to do for three years. As long as the ball got cleared, which it did, and we didn't concede, which we didn't, everything else is just bad luck. And as it has worked out, I'm going to be OK."

Since then he has been on the trampoline in his back garden with his kids, so the elbow cannot be that bad. He might now be Chelsea's most iconic player but what Terry would be less willing to admit is that, as a kid from the same Barking council estate as Bobby Moore, he was a Manchester United fan. So much so that Sir Alex Ferguson came close to signing him to United's youth teams. Terry would travel from Essex to Manchester in the same club car as David Beckham, five years older.

Chelsea won that battle and now Terry is considered Abramovich's closest contact at the club beyond the manager, Avram Grant, and one day he will doubtless be offered the chance to manage this team with his own brand of straight talking.

"A few home truths" is how Terry describes the squad's discussion after the Carling Cup final defeat to Tottenham which could have derailed Chelsea's season. "We spoke our minds," he says. "We might have upset a few people, we might have upset each other, and what was said in that room will stay there and go no further, but we worked out how to improve things. We are together day in, day out, and sometimes it can be a bit niggly. That happens at football clubs, but we sorted it."

Ten Cate remains a figure on the outside but Terry has undoubtedly formed a partnership with Grant and his respect for the long-serving assistant manager Steve Clarke is obvious. He admits that he has played most of the season at less than full fitness but has come to regard that as part of the challenge.

"It's amazing what you can get through, you just get on with it," he says. "You do it and then you think: 'Oh, that's sore'. At the time it is all part of being a footballer."

This was a man who, when Chelsea played CSKA Moscow in November 2004, wore flip-flops for a squad tour in a freezing Red Square. He is accustomed to hardship.

The strange thing about Terry, however, is that, for all the tough-guy business, he can cut a skittish, anxious figure on the pitch sometimes. He pulls his socks up repeatedly during lulls in the play with a fussiness that borders on obsessive.

In the changing room before games he will superstitiously not allow a ball to touch his feet. Having the England captaincy taken away from him evidently hurts him deeply and it will not be lost on him that his main rival for the job, Rio Ferdinand, will be on the opposite side tomorrow and the England manager, Fabio Capello, will be in the stands of the Luzhniki Stadium.

"Yes it has been hard at times," he admits, "but you can't dwell on it because three days after the France game [when Ferdinand was chosen as England captain] we're playing again for Chelsea and maybe Capello is watching that game so you cannot be disheartened, you have to take it on the chin. For a day or so, you do get worried and question your place in the side or your captaincy, but that is natural. You want to get out there and prove that person wrong because I still feel I am the right man for the job."

That is the subtext for tomorrow's game, albeit a distant second to the trophy: as well as United v Chelsea there is also an element of this game being about Ferdinand v Terry for England's captaincy. But that is not what bothers Terry. He says that Chelsea have been reborn late in the season, that players are hitting form. "With this one, whoever takes it to the other team is going to come out on top." And he says he will not have any trouble smiling through the pain if he does have to raise the trophy at the end of the evening.