El Capitan

There has been the usual media circus around the JT/England Captaincy issue and to be honest unless you're Fabio or JT himself you probably think that the right decision has been made.  Without going into it too much I think that the FA had very little choice, obviously you're innocent until proven guilty etc etc, but it wouldn't look great if JT led England through the Euros and then was convicted of a racially motivated crime...I think what further backs the decision is that JT is now considering refusing to play for England again showing above anything else that for him it wasn't about representing and leading his country into battle, but more about the money, status and his own ego and to be honest, as good a defender as he is, I hope he does retire.

So now the debate starts s to who will replace him as captain come the summer...but why is it such a big debate?  Have we lost sight of the job of the captain?

When you're a kid its simple, the best player in the team is usually the captain...lets face it, at 12 years old its very difficult to give someone the captains armband on the basis of experience (having said that, do they still have captains at youth level?).  This pretty much continues up until players join the adult ranks, its at this point when the captaincy waters have become somewhat muddied.

So what makes a good captain, more than a few people will say that the captain should still be your best player, others should say it should be the most vocal player on the pitch, should it be the highest earner or the longest serving player or should it quite simply be the oldest?  Personally I don't think the first two alone are good enough reasons, just because you happen to be the best player on the park doesn't necessarily mean you're the most popular or respected.  Similarly if you happen to be vocal on the pitch it shouldn't matter if you're the captain or not, you'll still feel the need to constantly provide a running commentary of the game to/at anyone who'll listen...and even those who won't.

The Italian national side pick they're captain based on the most capped player in the team, this makes sense, it takes away the egocentric side of the whole process, the captain hasn't been chosen through any analysis of strength or weakness just a simple counting process.  This will invariably lead to consistency within the camp, since the top capped player will probably still have the most caps even if he misses a few games through injury, after all, at international level its not like there's a game every week.  So why can't we do it like that for England?

Obviously at club level this theory gets a little more complicated...should the captain be the player with most appearances for that particular club, or in their career in general?  What we need to look at now is the role of the captain;

• Conduct the coin toss.
• Choose ends.
• Be the teams point of contact with the ref.
• Occasionally introduce the rest of the team to the Queen.
• Sit awkwardly next to the manager before important games telling the gathered journalists that its a game of two halves, you're in contract negotiations, you love the club and you're not expecting it to be easy.

Thats it...as much as people want to hang more onto the role, that is it.  All those players who have been handed the captaincy to stop them leaving aren't the smartest going...football is one of the few careers where a promotion like that won't give you more money.  At the end of the day you could take the Liverpool captaincy off Stevie Gerrard and no doubt he'd be fuming, but he'd still go out there and play exactly the same as if he was wearing the armband.

So whilst the mass media scramble to get the big "Exclusive" in revealing who the next England captain will be, lets just sit back, relax and laugh as they analyse every squad member, probably name every squad member as the new captain (just to cover all bases) and then be up in arms if/when they get it wrong because we know how pointless it is.