Robbie Savage is entitled to his view – and John Terry is wrong to try to belittle him for it

At the shoulder of Robbie Savage I never expected to stand. On myriad grounds our Robbie is anathema to the way I see the world. The narcissism, machismo, football philosophy, the get-stuck-in mentality, the finesse deficit in touch and argument, all these things I find disagreeable. Let’s not mention the hair, long or short, the degree of exaggeration offends my aesthetic values.

But in one important point he is right, and John Terry is wrong. Opinion counts, not the attributes of the person delivering it.

Terry’s refusal to accept Savage’s critique is the opposite of just, which makes it prejudice. That Terry does not like, appreciate or rate Savage as a footballer has no bearing on the validity of the argument presented. And, by making his feelings about Savage the grounds on which to dismiss his opinion, Terry was guilty of rank snobbery.

Elitism in football is as ugly as it is in society. Savage, as he relayed in a thoughtful deconstruction of Terry in his Mirror column, might not have had the career of Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand or Jamie Carragher, but he was good enough to enter the Manchester United academy, the FA Youth Cup-winning class of ’92 no less, play 346 Premier League matches and represent his country 39 times.

Compared with the many millions who have laced boots as a kid, played for their school, a Sunday league side, etc, that’s a body of work. It probably puts Savage in history’s highest football percentile, and way closer to Terry than he is to the rest of us. But this is to enter Terry’s orbit.

So here I am on the same side of the couch as Savage, which is awkward since I find his laddish posturing massively irritating. The dumbed-down, banter-led commentary into which Savage falls so easily is a wider problem for the football audience. Comparison with the examples in cricket and rugby, where former players articulate their past experience in a way that adds to the picture, shames the pap churned out by most football pundits.

Savage is not alone in this, and in one surprising exchange that gave me pause he engaged me on this point via Twitter. I’m afraid I did a Terry, dismissing a view he advanced with some hauteur, never expecting to be picked up on it.

Savage defaulted to the traditional British position, claiming that Team A, in order to gain a foothold in one particular encounter, needed to put themselves about more, let the opposition know they were in a game. I don’t recall the match or the detail of my high-handed putdown, but I do remember being moved by his response to my Twitter insult.

Savage challenged my representation of what he had said and then asked me how I thought he might do better, if indeed I was right about the poor quality of his observations. He said he wanted to improve and took his work as a pundit seriously.

I was struck by the humility in his tone. His point was genuine and reasonably made, and exposed my prejudice in writing him off as some ex-player ploughing the niche D-list route to minor cult status without the capacity to see the nuances in the game. I suddenly felt a degree of admiration for a bloke who was stretching himself in the pundit’s role and masking inadequacies the only way he knew, by falling back on the crude dressing-room code of merciless piss-taking.

Who was I to peer down on a working-class lad trying to better himself? Going beyond his experience and his competence cannot have been easy. He was wide open to caricature from on high. Savage will never be to my taste, but that does not make him my inferior, or Terry’s, in football’s endless debating chamber. If his argument is sound, then let its force carry the day.

The nauseating, sycophantic applause that greeted the belittling of Savage by Terry offended me more than any of his fashion tics and was mob behaviour of the worst kind. Savage is an easy target, an overly groomed Beau Brummell of the terraces, and too reliant on appearance to make an impact. In this “show-us-your-medals” arena Terry simply has the bigger guns.

But last week Savage shifted the ground, altered the rules of engagement, hit him square on the chin with the purity of his thought, and left Terry with nowhere to go other than to retreat into the lingua franca of the dressing room and declare his dad bigger than Robbie’s.

Right, I’m off to get my quiff ironed and my eyebrows threaded. Sorry, Robbie, only joking!