GARETH Southgate caused a stir last season when he revealed that he was thinking of ditching the role of club captain at Middlesbrough.

Boro skipper George Boateng wasn’t getting regular games so, rather than give the armband to any one permanent member of his first-team, Southgate seriously considered dispensing with the role altogether and relying instead on the combined leadership qualities of the “tribal elders” in his dressing room.

In the end he appointed Emanuel Pogatetz, the Austrian who volunteered to do the job anyway. But the Boro boss had raised an interesting point which a number of his fellow managers – Gary Megson included – didn’t necessarily dismiss out of hand.

Do teams actually need captains? Well not if he’s a loose cannon like William Gallas, who was quite rightly stripped of the Arsenal job after not only causing unrest in the Gunners dressing room but controversially lifting the lid on it in what he claimed to be an “off the record” chat with a journalist. Good captains don’t rock the boat. What they do is lead by example, inspire, galvanise and, as John Terry showed in Berlin last week, articulate their support for their team-mates – even if that means taking the heat when the pressure is on.

I suggested recently that Fabio Capello might have been wiser to have handed the England captaincy to Rio Ferdinand, judging by the way the Manchester United defender impressed when Terry missed the qualifiers against Kazakhstan and Belarus.

I thought the Chelsea man had let himself down and done the Respect campaign an awful lot of damage when he reacted angrily to being sent off for his rugby tackle on Manchester City striker Jo at Eastlands in September.

But Terry’s performance last week – both on and off the field – was exemplary. He handled all the pre-match controversy over the various withdrawals with expert diplomacy and a degree of common sense, headed the matchwinner, then did his best to deflect attention from Scott Carson by accepting responsibility for the mix-up that gifted Germany their goal.

If Gallas, pictured, is looking for lessons in the art of captaincy, he should just take a glance down the King’s Road and see what a top job his opponent is doing. But, judging by his attitude and some of his comments, I doubt that he thinks he’s done anything wrong in the first place.