The first decision awaiting Sven-Goran Eriksson’s successor as England coach will be who to appoint as his captain. It shouldn’t take too long to work out

Forty years ago a footballer from Barking who could lay claim to being the best defender in the world lifted the World Cup. History could be about to repeat itself. Bobby Moore, the captain of the England 1966 squad, remains an iconic fixture in the pantheon of world football. John Terry, from the same part of the East End of London as Moore, is rapidly carving his own monument to greatness.

Indeed, if Sven-Goran Eriksson’s England win the World Cup this summer, then the biggest difference between Moore and Terry is that the former was the captain of the side.

That is something that should change after the World Cup: Eriksson is leaving and the new coach, unlikely to leave the armband with current incumbent David Beckham, will have at least one easy decision to make.

Terry himself, while paying due respect to Beckham, believes he “has the qualities to be captain of England”.

Those qualities are in clear evidence in the way he leads his club side Chelsea. He has previously captained the England Under-21s and even had charge of the full national side for seven minutes when Michael Owen, standing in for Beckham, was substituted at the end of England’s 2-1 win over Poland at Old Trafford in October.

Terry’s most vocal backer for the captaincy is the former England captain who, in style of play, he most closely resembles. Moore was too graceful for Terry’s brand of firefighting. No, the Chelsea man is cut from the same block of granite as Tony Adams.

Adams, the great Arsenal captain of the last decade, believes Terry is ready for the captaincy right now and points to the situation before Euro 96 as his point of comparison. David Platt was a popular, if not exactly inspirational, captain – much like Beckham. Terry Venables, then manager, took a gamble and gave Adams the armband. England were transformed and stormed to the semi-final, only to lose to Germany on penalties. Adams was a colossus. Terry, he believes, could have the same impact in Germany.

“Some people are natural captains,” Adams said. “If it was for tiddlywinks I’d be captain, and it’s the same with John. I would imagine that every team that John has ever played for made him their captain.”

Terry was certainly born with that captain’s gene. “I like to be a leader,” Terry said. “On the pitch I’m very vocal. If someone needs to get told, they get told: it doesn’t matter who they are. It’s something that has stuck with me since I was a kid.”

Eriksson’s assistant Tord Grip has also identified the similarity between Terry and Adams and has hinted that the Chelsea defender may be in the frame in Germany if something happens to Beckham. “He’s probably better on the ball than Tony Adams,” Grip said, “but as a leader he’s the same type of player. John Terry is a leader. He’s captain at Chelsea and is still very young. He can one day be captain of England.”

The likelihood is that Terry will be confirmed national team skipper when the new coach gets his feet under his desk. For now, Eriksson has most often relied on Owen and as a stand-in for Beckham, and in Germany he may not want to disrupt the squad by favouring one of the rival heirs to the throne: Terry, his club team-mate Frank Lampard, or Liverpool’s Steven Gerrard. “I know that John Terry is a captain, Gerrard is a captain, probably Rio Ferdinand,” he said. “Even if you don’t have an armband you can act as a captain. We should be very happy we have lots of captains in our team.”

The fact that Terry is even in contention for what he perceives as the greatest honour to be bestowed on a player is down to a certain Portuguese man of war. Jose Mourinho has turned Terry from a foot soldier into an officer, a leader of men. Before Mourinho arrived on the scene at Chelsea, Terry was a solid centre-back but with seemingly no chance of breaking the Ferdinand-Campbell axis at the heart of the England defence. Eriksson now considers Terry his first-choice defender.

In retrospect, Terry finds his earlier lack of tactical sophistication embarrassing. “I look back at games on Chelsea TV from when I first came in the team and some of the things I did, I cringe,” he said. “You see things you did five or six years ago, giving the ball away so cheaply, not pressing for the ball, but with the presence of the fans, you feel strong and don’t realise you are doing that.”

Marcel Desailly, the World Cup-winning French defender, must take some of the credit for the way he nurtured a young Terry in the early days, helping him develop his potential. Desailly evidently saw something others did not – much of the attention at Stamford Bridge at the time was lavished on Jody Morris. Graham Rix, then Chelsea youth team coach, remembers Morris as “much the better player of the two, the player we thought would go on and represent England”.

Terry was a ponderous defensive midfielder before his switch to the centre of defence, while Morris was a darting, clever little playmaker, heir to Dennis Wise. When Terry takes the pitch in Germany this summer, Morris will be resting up after a disappointing season with Millwall.

Morris’s failure to live up to expectation is almost certainly down to his conduct off the pitch. Terry almost went the same way. After a fight in a private club in West London four years ago, Terry and Morris were charged with assault and affray. They were subsequently cleared but Terry was tarnished and was not considered for the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea.

That Terry managed to avoid the fate of Morris is down to his personal resolution. Under Claudio Ranieri he became an important, committed, passionate player for Chelsea, and an international defender. But it was under Mourinho that he stepped up another level and, in the words of his coach, became “the best defender in world football”.

On his arrival at Stamford Bridge, Mourinho let it be known that he would make either Frank Lampard or Terry club captain. Concerns that Terry’s decidedly English style of defending would fail to endear him to the Portuguese coach were wide of the mark: Jose picked Terry and that act of faith has had him trying to repay his manager ever since.

“The manager has been magnificent,” explained Terry, who won the PFA Player of the Year last season. “I cannot speak highly enough of him. He has helped me so much as a player. The training sessions he put on are really interesting. From the first day he arrived I’ve been looking forward to training, to learning new things.”

The most important thing for Terry is the way the habits of the Special One have rubbed off on him. Mourinho is famous for his diligence and attention to detail and while most players like to forget a game after it is finished, Terry has learned to share his mentor’s passion for gruelling self-analysis. “I now look at every single match,” Terry said. “It might take a couple of weeks sometimes but I study each one to see how I can do better. I have developed a really strong concentration on the pitch, which is weird because off it I can’t do it for five minutes. I’m hyper off the pitch but on it I’m a different person.

“I still make mistakes but back then I was making mistakes and getting destroyed. But talking about big individual mistakes, I hope I’ve taken them out. I am my own biggest critic, watching games and rewinding them.”

Mourinho is fulsome in his praise for such an attentive student. He has grown a genuine bond with his captain: after winning the title, the pair shared a glass of champagne in the manager’s office, mulling over what they had just achieved. When there is a hint of player discontent, it is telling that not only does Mourinho put the rebels down, but Terry will also come out to speak for the dressing room.

The relationship has not been without problems: Terry’s reportedly gambling £25,000 a week did not sit well with the moral Mourinho. However, the manager knows that excessive gambling is rife in British football culture and there was no way he was going to make Terry a public scapegoat. No, for Mourinho what matters is Terry’s ability to lead the team.

“He’s inspiring in the way that he’s a winner,” Mourinho said, “he wants to fight every game so when he is in the team he is a plus because he can influence people with his spirit.

“We gave the answer about what we think of him when we gave him an incredible contract for the future. The reason you pay him so well is because he deserves it and he is so important for us. I said a few weeks ago he deserves every coin of his new salary and I think that is the perfect explanation.”

ENGLAND’S BOYS IN BLUE

Terry is not the only Englishman to have been improved by Jose Mourinho’s coaching prowess. Indeed, if England are victorious this summer, the nation will owe the Special One a debt of gratitude.

Frank Lampard was already a rapidly improving player when Mourinho arrived, but if anything the Portuguese increased the flight of his trajectory. The manager has convinced Lampard, a bright individual, that there is little beyond his talents. He recognises Lampard’s need for belief – when Lampard emerged at West Ham he was abused and taunted, derided for only making it because his father was a coach at Upton Park. And no one instils confidence better than Mourinho.

“It’s only in England that he gets the recognition he deserves in terms of winning individual trophies,” Mourinho said. “He is the best player in the world – because he plays every game. There are other great players in the world of football but they play well once a month. This man is top every game and I wouldn’t swap him for any other player in the world. I don’t know a weak point where he can improve – I just hope he carries on playing like this.” Not a bad endorsement.

Mourinho has been different in his handling of Chelsea’s other England midfielder, Joe Cole, realising that this was a player who needed tough love. After scoring a crucial goal against Liverpool in October 2004, Cole must have thought his manager a convert to his talents. Instead Mourinho criticised Cole for coasting after he had scored. “Joe has two faces, one is beautiful and one that I don’t like,” Mourinho said. “But I can improve him, and he wants to learn.”

To Cole’s credit he knuckled down and worked, driven by his confessed fear of being sold. Having being applauded for his tricks and skills – “playing for the crowd”, as Mourinho has it – since his time as the child genius of English football, it has taken time for Mourinho to convince him that this really does not matter in the long term. Cole has stopped being a circus attraction. Mourinho has made him into a football player.

As Terry explained: “The most important thing you can bring to international football is success at club level. We take that confidence, that winning mentality, with us to England.”