Adam Dennehey WAFU manager
Think about this for a second. Who would have thought at the start of the season that the biggest incident of the English football season in Fabio Capello resigning as England manager because of an incident at Loftus Road.
No disrespect to QPR but Loftus Road is not in the top 20 grounds in the country and would hardly be thought of as a ground that a major story of the season would occur at. However as we all know, that’s exactly what happened.
We all know that John Terry is due to stand trial after the upcoming European Championships this summer, amid allegations that he racially abused Anton Ferdinand back on October when QPR beat Chelsea in a fiery encounter.
Of course Terry was caught mouthing something on camera five minutes from full-time at the game and as a result, several months after the incident this week he was stripped by the FA of the England captaincy.
Predictably perhaps Capello was far from happy that the FA decided to strip Terry of the captaincy without consulting him and something had to give, which it did in some style yesterday.
Whether you think Terry is guilty or not, or whether you think Capello was right to resign or whether the FA were wrong in stripping the Chelsea man of the captaincy, one thing is for certain it’s shaken up the football season.
And it’s all down to one cameraman’s bit of luck that he caught Terry mouthing something five minutes from end just as QPR’s Paddy Kenny was about to make a clearance up-field.
Some may argue that it’s not luck as cameramen are going to in breaks of play focus on key players. That is a niche for them, which is a skill that they taught early on in their career and after all at the time Terry was the England captain.
Because of that, in breaks of play interesting/leading figures on the pitch will get shown in situations like that by the match’s television producer as after all, viewers and fans want to see the biggest characters and names when they watch or go to a game.
Had QPR’s Clint Hill for example in that same game had been mouthing something, then it’s highly unlikely that the cameraman at the game who caught Terry, would not have zoomed in on Hill because with all due respect to the defender he’s a nobody in media-terms.
So rounding up the debate, it’s incredible that a 10-15 second clip capturing a footballer mouthing something in the closing stages of a game has ultimately led to a renowned and world-class manager calling it a day in one of football’s biggest jobs.
It’s a small world and one which has a great habit of always throws up strange scenarios. God only knows what that camerman today is thinking, knowing that something that he caught on film that he might thought was ‘meangingless’ at the time has turned out to be the backdrop for arguably not one but two of the biggest stories to have happened this sesaon.
By Adam Dennehey @ADennehey87
