James Lawton: Terry looks a little Moore like a great England captain

John Terry will never be Bobby Moore, the greatest captain in the history of English football. He will never have Moore's extraordinary capacity to live at the heart of his team while at the same time being utterly separate in his aura and his knack of reading problems before they occurred.

But Terry is suggesting that he might just be the best England captain since "Mooro" and if there was any doubt about this potential, or the wisdom of Fabio Capello's choice of him for the role after months of private debate earlier this year, much of it surely dissolved in Berlin's Olympic Stadium this week.

There were two striking aspects of Terry's contribution to England's impressive victory over Germany. One was his willingness to completely exonerate the embattled goalkeeper Scott Carson after they both contributed to the ghastly confusion which might, in less secure days, have wrecked an inexperienced team's chances of a well deserved victory. The other was his absolute determination to solve the crisis with the force of his leadership and, as it happened, a typically bold and successful assault on the German cover at a set-piece.

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When we put Moore into any football equation there is of course a duty to do so with extreme caution. However after saying that, it might not be too sacrilegious to make one point of comparison. It is that the urgency with which Terry recommitted himself to the battle after the disaster of the lost goal, his overwhelming assertion of his responsibilities to the team, did trigger a specific memory of the great man.

It was of a crucial phase in the least meaningless match England is ever likely to play against Germany – the 1966 World Cup final.

The team, and the nation, were plunged into doubt when Ray Wilson, a defender of phenomenal application, made the only serious mistake that any of his old team-mates can recall.

Perhaps confused by the call of his goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, Wilson jumped early and his header had no power as it rolled to the feet of Helmut Haller, whose long shot took a deflection as it snaked past Banks.

Sir Bobby Charlton is vividly precise about the extraordinary galvanising effect this early setback had on his young captain.

"I had been given the job of focusing on the threat of Franz Beckenbauer," Charlton recalls, "but when I edged the ball away from him into the path of Bobby Moore it was plain that our captain was reacting quite ferociously to our loss of the goal. Bobby, as was mentioned so many times it might have irritated a saint, was not the quickest mover but it always seemed to me he never made a single step on the field without knowing where he was going, and to what purpose, and surely he had never shown such authority as in this moment.

"He charged the German lines before being brought down by Wolfgang Overath and even the award of the free-kick only served to emphasise his urgency. I ran to his left to give the option of a short pass but Bobby had seen another possibility, one well practised on the training field of West Ham United. He dummied to pass the ball to me but he had only one target, a gap that had opened up in the German cover. Geoff Hurst ran into the space with perfect timing to send the ball into the top corner of the net.

"I have studied the film many times and always when I see it I'm reminded that this was so much more than one piece of inspired opportunism. It was the result of a fine understanding between team-mates, fine technique and above all, an attitude of mind – the mind of a captain who knew that he had to shape events when his team was down.

"All goals ultimately have the same value, but this one sent out the most crucial message – we had slipped behind for a few minutes but we had not lost control of ourselves or the match. It was the gift of a great captain."

Roll forward 42 years to a "friendly" in Berlin and you may say that what happened in the Olympic Stadium cannot be compared to Moore's influence on the momentous affair at Wembley. But in one sense it can. What Moore did was seize back momentum and belief and, however you want to balance the weight of the separate occasions, that too was precisely what Terry did this week.

There have been times off the field when the Chelsea man has not exactly carried himself in the style of a football statesman. But then Moore was quite frequently less than angelic. His England manager Sir Alf Ramsey on one occasion felt obliged to place the captain's passport, with all the heavy implications, on his pillow before he returned late to the team hotel after breaking curfew.

Clearly when Capello came to choose between the rugged authority and commitment of Terry, and the superior but sometimes dreamy brilliance of his partner in central defence, Rio Ferdinand, he settled not on the better talent but the greater psychological strength.

In Berlin that judgement was another, but far from the least, confirmation that in his run of five straight victories the England manager is applying much of the criteria Ramsey brought to his team-building.

Capello is not saying when he reached his decision, but a fair guess is that it was the day Ferdinand appeared to lose his head in a ferocious battle at Stamford Bridge, while Terry tried to make peace without ever compromising the force of his drive for a notable victory.

It is academic now. If Terry was certainly highly culpable at that terrible moment of breakdown at the Olympic Stadium, his redemption, unlike that of the unfortunate Carson, could scarcely have been more profound. Not only did he score a superb winning goal, he came off the field with a total absence of triumphalism – either personal or collective.

What he liked about the performance was the sheer energy and confidence of his team-mates, how they were as willing to run into the hard and hurtful positions late in the game as they were at the start. In this, though, Terry's example had been relentless.

But can he really be the best captain since Moore? It remains no more than a possibility, given the weight of character and natural competitiveness of some of his predecessors, most notably Bryan Robson, Alan Shearer and Kevin Keegan, and the fact that if Capello is making brilliant progress, he would be the first to admit that he is still in the foothills of significant achievement.

Yet Terry has unquestionably made a serious pitch for his place in the history of the national team. His eagerness to play in Berlin, despite injury nags, was luminous in a week when the club and country issue trundled once again into the headlines, and when he was on the field every gesture indicated that indeed playing for his country occupied a huge place in his own priorities.

In such a mercenary age as this, it is a statement that is bound to warm the heart of most any football patriot. It also helps that few English players have ever quite so detested the possibility that they might lose.

Löw and hate: German press

Bild

How much is Joachim Löw to blame? The main topic of conversation in offices and at get-togethers today will be how much blame Jogi [Löw] should bear for the horrific flop against England? Basically we had a bad day. The whole formation just didn't work, the passes weren't precise enough. We had too much hunger for the ball and too little order.

Die Welt

The capitulation at the close of the 2008 international season showed that the young midfield players have been overstretched. The missing Michael Ballack and Torsten Frings were the winners. No wonder the national coach Joachim Löw rolled out the red carpet for the two former rebels.

Frankfurter Allgemeine

We didn't have the maturity to beat England but national coach Joachim Löw showed himself to be a graceful loser: "England was the better team for the whole game, we caught them on a bad day. Our positioning and our organisation were bad and we lost the ball several times just through our formation."