He's married, and has twin three-year-olds. Terry has thrown the otherwise stoic island nation into turmoil with revelations he cheated with the (now-former) girlfriend of a teammate. It's not the first piece of scumbaggery he's indulged in.

The Wall Street Journal dress muckraking as anthropology and showcase some salacious details in a story today. Terry is not very nice — he taunted American tourists after 9/11, he filled a beer glass with urine then dropped it, he parked his Bentley in a disabled spot and gave unauthorized tours of his team's training ground for $16,000 a pop. (On separate occasions — this was not just a really bad day.)

All that was fine, the WSJ point out, because the team have been winning a lot of late, under manager Fabio Capello. But then the High Court went and lifted an injuction revealing that Terry had been schtupping "lingerie model Vanessa Perroncel." This cheating was especially bad because a) Terry is high-profile, wedding-pictures-in-magazines, married, b) because he and Perroncel had a child together he got Perroncel pregnant and then arranged for an abortion and c) because she already has a child with Terry's former club and country teammate Wayne Bridge.

There's kind of an attitude in England that loutish behavior is fine, especially for sportsmen, who are just being lads etc. But apparently, when you begin sexing up the girlfriend of a colleague, you cross one of those odd moral lines that are pretty arbitrary really. Thus Terry may have to resign the captaincy (and probably join Tiger Woods in sex therapy).