Rio Ferdinand has agreed to put aside his acrimonious differences with John Terry and Ashley Cole to appear on the same team for a charity game with the two footballers he came to regard as sworn enemies during the criminal trial that brought some of England’s highest-profile players into a damaging race case.
Ferdinand will line up in a back four alongside Terry and Cole as part of the Match for Children, to be staged at Old Trafford on 14 November, when the former Manchester United defender will share a dressing room with the player who was caught on camera shouting “fucking black cunt” at his younger brother, Anton, when Chelsea played at QPR in October 2011.
Terry was acquitted of the charge of racial abuse when he appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court in July 2012, where Cole gave crucial evidence on his behalf, but a later Football Association charge was proven and the Chelsea captain was banned for four matches as well as being fined £220,000. The case in effect ended Terry’s international career and led to Fabio Capello’s resignation as England manager because of the Italian’s grievances with the Football Association’s decision not to let the accused player continue as captain while the case was pending.
Ferdinand’s relationship with Cole, once a close friend, was shattered by the court case, and brought a separate disciplinary action when the dispute escalated on Twitter. Ferdinand appeared to endorse another user describing Cole, then at Chelsea, as a “choc ice”, a slang term meaning someone who was black on the outside but white on the inside.
Three years on, the three former England internationals have all agreed to take part in a match, in aid of Unicef, when Sir Alex Ferguson will manage a Great Britain team, captained by David Beckham and also featuring Jamie Carragher, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, David Seaman, Michael Owen and Andy Cole. On the opposite side a Rest of the World XI, led by Zinedine Zidane and managed by Carlo Ancelotti, will include Ronaldinho, Luis Figo, Patrick Vieira, Cafu and Patrick Kluivert.
Edwin van der Sar and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer will also return to their old ground for the charity event and Ferdinand’s involvement suggests a possible change in his attitude; he had previously condemned Terry and stated that he would never speak to Cole again.
Ferdinand’s book, published last year, made it clear there was still lingering animosity. “Cole, who’d been a good friend of mine and had known Anton since he was a kid, betrayed that friendship,” Ferdinand wrote. “The biggest idiot of all was John Terry who could have saved everyone a lot of pain by admitting immediately that he had used the words in the heat of the moment but was no racist. I think that’s probably what happened and what the truth is. We would have accepted that but he never gave us the chance.”
