This is Why Rio Ferdinand Should Be England Captain

John Terry’s armband understudy tore down England’s WAG-laden World Cup 2006 in yesterday’s press conference. Prepare to read and nod in agreement:

“If I’m honest, we became a bit of a circus in terms of the whole Wag situation,” said Ferdinand. “It seemed like there was a big show around the whole England squad. It was like watching a theatre unfolding and football almost became a secondary element to the main event.

“People were worrying more about what people were wearing and where they were going out, rather than the England football team. That then transposed itself into the team. That’s said in hindsight. At the time, we were caught up in the bubble ourselves. Being somewhere like Baden-Baden, walking around the town, there were paparazzi everywhere, our families were there. When you step back and look back at that, it was like a circus.

“I’m not going to tell the other players what you should or should not do. But I just think that, as a squad, we were a bit too open, going out in and around Baden-Baden, and probably had too much contact with families. That’s just my opinion. Some players may think they’d rather have that contact with their families. But you’re in a tournament and you don’t get to play in many tournaments in your career. To give yourself the best chance, you have to be focused. Having the families around and the paparazzi that were following us, it was all a bit too close and the football wasn’t really separated from it all.

“This regime is very water-tight. This squad’s in a different frame of mind to the ones I’ve been in for a while. We’ve got a very business-like state of mind, and that’s come from the manager and his staff. It’s a new way of thinking. It feels as if we’re going in the right direction. I don’t want to speak too soon, but you can see we’re at the start of something and, hopefully, there’ll be bigger rewards than what we’ve had in the past. Everyone’s very focused and tuned in to what we want to achieve.”

And yes, this is the same Rio Ferdinand who was “merking” his teammates, so he’s very veyr far from
innocent. But this little speech makes it pretty clear that we now have a new, mature Rio Ferdinand who’s capable of captaining England, both tonight and in the future.