KEY POINTS:
If John Terry is on the winning side on Thursday (NZT), there are no guarantees that the Chelsea captain will be able to fulfil the last act of a long and gruelling season: specifically, hoisting that big silver cup above his head.
For a player patched up,
injected and numbed to the pain all season, the last part to go has been his right elbow which, in his words, "popped out, then popped back in" after a collision with his teammate Petr Cech in the last Premier League game of the season against Bolton.
It would not be a Chelsea trophy presentation without Terry and where would that club be without their captain, the man whose passion for training ground pranks simply knows no boundaries? The man who has coined every Chelsea nickname from "Lampsy" to "Baly", who organises the paintballing expeditions and who contests every players' pool tournament as if it were a Champions League final. The man who breathlessly relates all these important training ground developments and more in his famous programme notes, which are always signed off with that endearing, if slightly innocent, exhortation: "Come on the Chels!"
It is no wonder that most Chelsea fans feel as if they know Terry. It is he who is the link back to a dim and distant past when Bjarne Goldbaek was considered a big signing and the Champions League final was for other clubs.
Terry is pretty much the only part of old Chelsea that has kept pace with the new as first the board then players, managers and staff have been brushed aside by the Roman Abramovich revolution.
The Chels, as Terry would say, have never had it so good nor come this far in the Champions League before.
"I look at the squad of players we have got, I've seen the changes over the years and I don't think people realise how important this is for Chelsea," he says.
"It means the world to me to be in the final, it is an achievement in itself, but beyond that I really want to get my hands on the trophy. I'm desperate to do it. I know how much it means to the club, to the fans, I've got a great rapport with the fans, I feel we are on the same wavelength because we all know that people say we cannot be a big club until we've won the European Cup. This is our chance to go out and do it."
Curiously, given he has reached the final, this has not even been a great season for Terry.
He has stumbled through a series of injuries including a broken toe in pre-season, a fractured cheekbone in September and three broken bones in his foot in December. He had a major row with Jose Mourinho the night before the former Chelsea manager was sacked, which was misinterpreted in some quarters as the reason Mourinho was sacked.
Then he lost the England captaincy and soon after that he fell out very publicly with the prickly Dutch coach Henk ten Cate on the eve of the Carling Cup final.
When his elbow went against Bolton, his first thought was that matters had just taken a turn for the worse again.
"I've had a lot of injuries, but that has got to be one of the most painful," he says.
"I thought I'd broken my arm until it settled down a few hours after the game. But at the time, I thought: 'Shit, I'm going to miss the final.' I've said to Petr Cech all season, 'Come out, and if you have to go through me and the striker to get the ball, just do it.' That is what he did, so I can't complain. He did what I've been telling him to do for three years. As long as the ball got cleared, which it did, and we didn't concede, which we didn't, everything else is just bad luck. And as it has worked out, I'm going to be OK."
Since then he has been on the trampoline in his back garden with his kids, so the elbow cannot be that bad. He might now be Chelsea's most iconic player but what Terry would be less willing to admit is that, as a kid from the same Barking council estate as Bobby Moore, he was a Manchester United fan. So much so that Sir Alex Ferguson came close to signing him to United's youth teams.
Terry would travel from Essex to Manchester in the same club car as David Beckham, five years older.
Chelsea won that battle and now Terry is considered Abramovich's closest contact at the club beyond the manager, Avram Grant, and one day he will doubtless be offered the chance to manage this team with his own brand of straight talking.
"A few home truths" is how Terry describes the squad's discussion after the Carling Cup final defeat to Tottenham which could have derailed Chelsea's season.
"We spoke our minds," he says.
"We might have upset a few people, we might have upset each other, and what was said in that room will stay there and go no further, but we worked out how to improve things. We are together day in, day out, and sometimes it can be a bit niggly. That happens at football clubs, but we sorted it."
Ten Cate remains a figure on the outside but Terry has undoubtedly formed a partnership with Grant and his respect for the long-serving assistant manager Steve Clarke is obvious.
He admits that he has played most of the season at less than full fitness but has come to regard that as part of the challenge.
"It's amazing what you can get through, you just get on with it," he says.
"You do it and then you think: 'Oh, that's sore'. At the time it is all part of being a footballer."
This was a man who, when Chelsea played CSKA Moscow in November 2004, wore flip-flops for a squad tour in a freezing Red Square. He is accustomed to hardship.
The strange thing about Terry, however, is that, for all the tough-guy business, he can cut a skittish, anxious figure on the pitch sometimes. He pulls his socks up repeatedly during lulls in the play with a fussiness that borders on obsessive. In the changing room before games he will superstitiously not allow a ball to touch his feet.
Having the England captaincy taken away from him evidently hurts him deeply and it will not be lost on him that his main rival for the job, Rio Ferdinand, will be on the opposite side on Thursday and the England manager, Fabio Capello, will be in the stands of the Luzhniki Stadium.
"Yes it has been hard at times," he admits, "but you can't dwell on it because three days after the France game [when Ferdinand was chosen as England captain] we're playing again for Chelsea and maybe Capello is watching that game so you cannot be disheartened, you have to take it on the chin. For a day or so, you do get worried and question your place in the side or your captaincy, but that is natural. You want to get out there and prove that person wrong because I still feel I am the right man for the job."
That is the subtext for Thursday's game, albeit a distant second to the trophy: as well as United v Chelsea there is also an element of this game being about Ferdinand v Terry for England's captaincy. But that is not what bothers Terry.
He says that Chelsea have been reborn late in the season, that players are hitting form.
"With this one, whoever takes it to the other team is going to come out on top."
And he says he will not have any trouble smiling through the pain if he does have to raise the trophy at the end of the evening.
- INDEPENDENT
