Read Online #2Sides: My Autobiography by Rio Ferdinand - Free Book Online

in South Africa. He was treated like shit for decades. He went to prison for 27 years. And yet he found the strength to forgive the people who did that to him. How did he do that? Because I find it impossible to forgive or forget the pain John put my family through. That was the heart of the matter. Whatever he had or hadn’t said became almost a sideshow. I sat there thinking: he was my mate, my teammate, we played 30 or 40 games for England together. We’d competed against each other for years. We weren’t best mates but we were football buddies. And he just sat there and watched as my brother went through all this because of his stupidity. That was the betrayal.
    I would still have been happy to play for England with him. But that possibility got lost in the grey areas of my relationship with the FA. We’ve had good and bad times over the years, the FA and I. They banned me for eight months over missing a drugs test in 2003; they fined me £60,000 for my ‘choc-ice’ tweet. But they eventually did the right thing by banning John for four matches. Personally, after everything that happened, I thought he should’ve got the same punishment as Suarez. But at least the FA showed they weren’t happy with what happened. In fact, giving Terry a ban at all was quite a strong and bold considering he hadn’t been convicted in the court case.
    But then it got confusing again because the FA let him play for England. What message did that send? What I didn’t like was that people then automatically assumed that if he played for England, then I couldn’t play for England. They seemed to think we couldn’t be on the same pitch together. But it wouldn’t havebeen a problem for me. I’ve played with people I didn’t like for years. There were people at Manchester United I wouldn’t go for a drink with, would never call or text. But I played with them. You’re professional about it. If a person can help me win, I’ll play with him no problem. It’s not like we have to go for dinner together. I would probably have gone to see John and said: ‘Listen, we’re never going to be mates again, but let’s just work together to make England a better team.’ We would have had a working relationship, and it would have been fine. But no one ever asked.
    I found that pretty extraordinary because I’d let it be known. People around the club would ask: ‘Would you play with him?’ and I’d say: ‘Yeah. I ain’t got a problem.’ I wanted to win and play for England. Hodgson should at least have asked: ‘Could you play with John Terry?’ If I said ‘No,’ then, OK, they’ve established that Rio is out of the equation – or John Terry is out of the equation. Then they can pick one of us. But that conversation never took place!
    I just think it could all have been handled much better. But I never showed my hand over it because I don’t want people to see I’m feeling bad. People think I’m happy-go-lucky. If people asked how I was feeling I would go: ‘I’m alright, man. I’m cool.’ Then they’d go: ‘but don’t you think John Terry is a better player than you?’ That shit hurt. I want to play for my country and I should have had 100 caps. Then, eventually, when I sorted out my back problems, and I was playing
really
well, a clamour started for me to be back in the England squad. At that point, at the very last minute, just before Euro 2012 Roy Hodgson comes and says he wants me be in the squad!
    That was another case of bad communication – and bad timing. I’d had an injury that almost finished my career but had managed to sort it out with a regular course of injections. I then had to schedule those injections and, since I was no longer being picked for England,I’d chosen the international break. Just before one of those, all of a sudden, Roy Hodgson asked me to come back to the England squad. At that moment I had to say no because of my treatment. People said I rejected England but that wasn’t the case at