By now, John Terry is no longer relegated to innocuous headlines. The man, after all, has lost his job. Terry, over the past week, has kept the rumour mills agog. Cause after Tiger Woods, here came another potential Baba in the woods!

And oh boy, what a baba John Terry turned out to be!

If Woods had his numerous attachment files popping out one after the other in true kiss-and-tell style, the good ol’ Brit boy had settled for only one too-hot-to-handle lingerie model. Who in fact, turned out to be his wife’s ex-best friend. Who’d also happened to have had a close encounter with one of his team mates at some time. Life, you said. Six degrees of separation or less, I’d say!

So, what’s the big deal about?

That John Terry happened to be the England team football captain? That he’d had a million swooning over every move he made and another sighing over the ones he didn’t?

Or that he had a huge fan following keeping a tab over him, his life, his diet, his wardrobe etc. And also his indiscretion(s)! The world’s coming closer than you think!

That his interest with a fellow teammate over a shared same object of affection brought about a mini-emotional tsunami of sorts? Or that his wife and his lover were friends, at one time. And it was all a CLOSER, Jude law, Julia Roberts style kinda situation!

Does it really matter?

Was betrayal a bigger crime than infidelity here?

Or was the standard he’s got a glad-eye-syndrome that most married men, and now increasingly women in a role reversal of sorts, worldwide, are accused to suffer, to be blamed? While feminists have slammed his behaviour as the typical, “married, but itchy” syndrome, loyalists feel that it’s more a professional hazard than a personal trait. That most successful and glamorous sportspersons, who otherwise have the world at their feet, are often fuelled by this elusive chase for the unknown in their not-so-public-lives.

Would the world have really sat up and noticed his indiscretions if Terry hadn’t been the Chelsea star? Would it have been recorded otherwise? Don’t people we know and friends we care about often find themselves in not-so-conventional relationships that would be difficult to define within societal norms? Have you never ever counselled your friends and given them spiel like “the heart hath its reasons that reason never knows…”

Aww, come on! At least this guy is hot. And dishy! An absolute viewing pleasure, if you compare him to the geriatric Indian septuagenarian and octogenarian politicians and their not-so-exciting private lives that we’d been subject to. Like most of his European counterparts, he can also create magic with his legs. Strictly on field, I speak. Forget the volley of abuses, that’s an occupational hazard!

So, what has made Terry the bad boy?

That he slipped up? Or that he admitted to his indiscretions?

Why is it that we want our heroes to be a cut above the rest? Why do we have the perverse pleasure of seeing them strive to have perfect lives that we know we could probably never have and only aspire to?
And get upset when we realise that they too, have feet of clay?

Objectively looking, Terry still has a lot of game left in him. If in a corporate backdrop, he came up for appraisal, the bosses would let him off with a warning and “has got potential, can do better” kinda assessment.

So if the game’s changing as the world is, why can’t Terry be given a second chance?

This post originally appeared here