One can only imagine the extent of the negotiations that took place last week on the Iberian Peninsula, as Steve Bruce and John Terry played golf and afterwards sat on the hotel balcony, looking into the azure sky, bright pink and hot and sticky, like two huge salmon fillets slowly baking in the sun, locked in a game of cat and mouse, a mental chess match, Terry opening as white, obviously, and Bruce responding with the Sicilian defence, sparking a painstaking battle of intellects, of which man would be the first to break.

“John, would you like to play for Aston Villa next season?”

Bruce proposes, Merlot in hand and flipping off his Nike sliders to raise his two cinderblocks for feet up onto the balcony side. His stomach has escaped the ambitious confines of a light blue linen shirt. He looks to the horizon as he waits for the answer that he knows is coming, as though the very balance of reality itself rests on the words he is about to hear.

“No, not really mate, to be honest”

Terry responds, quickfire, between sips of a pint can Stella Artois, his mind elsewhere, eyes drawn towards the infinity pool beneath their perch, in particular a woman sunbathing, topless but face down, and he can’t properly see her chest but my word is he trying his best to picture it.

“What about if we give you a lot of money?”

“Ok then”

And with that, Troy lay in ruins and Hector fell at the feet of Achilles.

A much older, fatter, battered, face like a late-period Picasso, Achilles.

John Terry to Aston Villa makes a lot of sense in the grand scheme of football, in how things generally tend to go, as a big name past-his-prime-player joins a big name past-its-prime-club desperately trying to claw its way back into relevancy by throwing money at everything and somehow making it all a lot worse. It is exactly the kind of move that will go one of two ways, not good or bad, but either aggressively fine or outright catastrophic. There is never an in between for this kind of deal, a bit like putting half your money on red and half of it on black, you can’t really win, you can only lose.

And this isn’t to say I do not want John Terry. Early-period Kyle Picknell would have literally (figuratively) killed a baby for John Terry in the claret and blue, winning an infinite number of headers in an infinite number of universes with Martin Laursen and Olof Mellberg, my Pro Evo 5 Master League team brought to life except without the OG OP frontline of Obafemi Martins and Adriano.

For a while, John Terry was comfortably the best defender in England, and it could have been the whole of Europe had Alessandro Nesta never been born. Rio Ferdinand is always accredited as the pre-eminent ball-playing centre-half of the 00s, and in truth he only gets this title because Terry’s playing style is unfairly associated with all those edge-of-the-box blocks where he momentarily transforms into the gigantic Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters and just fucking absorbs everything; Bill Murray, Bill Murray’s stupid fucking particle gun thing, the whole of New York City.

The defining image of John Terry, for me at least, is that infamous head-first heat-seeking missile of an attempted block against Slovenia in the World Cup in South Africa.

John Terry fucking launching himself face-first at the hard earth because he doesn’t want a ball to go into a net that much he would literally rather suffer facial reconstruction than let those bloody foreigners score a goal. John Terry almost breaking his arm. John Terry in the land of apartheid, in a stadium named after Nelson Mandela doing the most John Terry thing imaginable and hurting himself on purpose for a game of football.

Has there every been a player more FOOTBALL than John George Terry?

Not football, the kind that David Silva and Luka Modric and Cesc Fabregas play, but FOOTBALL, the kind that your Dad shouts at you when you’re 12, all GET STUCK IN, REFEREE HAVE A WORD, I AM SO FUCKING INVESTED IN THE OUTCOME OF THIS CHILDREN’S FOOTBALL MATCH I COULD PHYSICALLY DIE RIGHT NOW AND STILL TELL YOU THE SCORE AT FULL TIME.

The answer of course is no, and for evidence I only need to draw your attention to one his other defining moments.

Slipping as he takes a potential Champions League winning penalty and as his boyhood dream evaporates before his eyes, as if that wasn’t agonising enough, still managing to hit the post, and then just sitting there, alone, on the wet Moscow turf balling his fucking eyes out in the brace position you’re told to get into if your aeroplane is about to crash into the Pacific Ocean.

And then, as though the photographic negative, joining his teammates to celebrate a Champions League final he didn’t play in, dressed in full Chelsea kit.

He was of course widely mocked for both, which I honestly think is a bit of a travesty because first of all, REAL MEN CRY TOO YOU KNOW, and second of all, because dressing up in a full football kit, for any reason at all, is a beautiful thing.

John Terry is the kind of person who had to be talked into wearing a suit at his own wedding, only changing out of a full Chelsea kit at the last minute after a heartfelt plea from his future Father-in-law, but still leaving his Umbros in the car boot and keeping his shin pads on under his trousers as he walked down the aisle, “just in case”.

Both images help portray the contradiction at the heart of John Terry’s existence, the stereotypical council estate, white chalk on brick, no-nonsense defender except he wears his socks above his knees, can spray passes off both feet and picks up trophy after trophy after trophy like they’re pound coins clanging out of a fruit machine. It never really made sense that John Terry was as good as he was; a genuinely world class footballer who went about every game as though it was at 9am on a Sunday, played in an actual bog with no corner flags and no net and he was going to sit in the social club and drink pints of Carling for ten hours afterwards. He just belonged out there. It wasn’t a job.

A man so FOOTBALL if you took him for a blood test he’d come back with a new type of 0-0.

A man who, for all his limitations as a person, will always care more than just about anyone else. After watching Gabriel Agbonlahor masquerade as a professional footballer, then as a club captain, and even as a living breathing human life-form for over a decade now, I think I’m ready for John Terry.

Secretly, I always was.