John Terry had something of an epiphany a few years ago. It dated back to Covid, when he was assistant to Dean Smith at Aston Villa, and an unnamed player in the squad had gone off the boil. Terry’s response had been to rip into him.

We should note at the outset that this is a story Terry himself once told as part of the learning curve on his as-yet unsatisfied ambitions to become a manager.

The key part of the tale came from Smith’s view of the rollicking, which was a suggestion to his No 2 that maybe he ought to ask the player if everything was OK at home. So Terry did just that, and over breakfast the next morning it transpired there were issues: the guy had a new baby, hadn’t seen his parents in a while, and it was all getting a bit much.

Once they spoke, the player’s performances in training improved substantially and a lightbulb had switched on in Terry’s mind.

‘You need a touch nowadays, a soft side,’ he reflected.

That little snippet prompts a couple of thoughts today. One was the need for a somewhat obvious point to be made to anyone with desires of becoming a modern manager; the other is that soft touches are evidently a perishable commodity, because Terry still has a habit of arriving on the scene of a crisis with all the subtlety of a house brick through the window.

Which brings us to this week and Terry’s contribution to the great Chelsea debate.

If you saw his most recent social media offering, posted in the wake of Liam Rosenior’s sacking on Wednesday, you’ll know he went in hard.

His ‘worry’ for the club’s future was shared, and so too his concern that European football will be lost to this dizzying shambles of a season. His projection is that, should they fall outside of qualification, the best players might soon be sold and their chances of getting an elite manager have all but gone.

He was probably right on all of that, by the way, and doubtless it will have played well to those who still dangle his banner from the Matthew Harding Stand. But the point that gained greater traction was the one reserved until the second minute of his recording: on the subject of him being brought into the fray, there has been nothing. Crickets.

That there hasn’t been much of a clamour for such a bat signal to appear on the clouds over Cobham was apparently irrelevant. For now, there is only silence outside of his social media notifications and certainly no summons from Calum McFarlane’s caretaker crew.

‘I am not sure what Calum’s backroom staff is going to look like, I have not had a call, I have not had a message,’ he said.

Nostalgia can offer a warm hiding spot in football when the present is full of chaos. It can be a comfort blanket, a curse and a solution – for Manchester United, it has provided all three in this season alone.

At the Chelsea of BlueCo, those songs for Roman Abramovich speak to the same conversation, even if they are wildly selective in which parts of his past they wish to revisit. But the Terry situation, such as it is, is uniquely strange.

Aged 45 and three years removed from the end of his last assignment under Smith at Leicester City, he currently occupies a peculiar middle ground at Stamford Bridge – adored by fans for his boundless contributions as a player and captain, but held at arm’s length by those who have any say. For instance, look at his coaching role within the Chelsea academy.

He has a pass to get in the building at their Cobham HQ, which we understand he uses a few days a month to work with the kids, and based on his latest social media post he was headed there again on Thursday.

But it’s a distinctly part-time gig. And from the side of BlueCo, that is convenient - Terry is kept close enough to fend off any suggestion of a legend cut adrift, but deeper involvement, especially around the first team, is said to be as unlikely on their watch as a resurrection of the Titanic.

Why? That might be even more obvious than the occasional application of soft touches to people in the workplace, whether it’s the Anton Ferdinand affair, other affairs, or the more recent approval, subsequently deleted, of a Rupert Lowe post proposing the banning of the burqa. Clubs are glass houses at the best of times and bricks and glass don’t always mix – many executives appear to view Terry as simply untouchable.

What often goes under-reported is that Terry has put himself forward at clubs lower down the ladder. He is also understood to have tried his luck with the Saudi Arabian gold rush three years ago, which was a link he denied, much to the bemusement of a source who heard the interest from the horse’s mouth.

Time will tell if the inertia holds. But there are players who highly rate Terry’s contributions as a coach – he was influential over Jack Grealish at Villa and mentored Reece James at Chelsea. Having worked under Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Guus Hiddink and Antonio Conte, and kept hand-written notes on all of them, he knows how to put on a session.

But the coincidence will likely not be lost on Terry that in a month when Frank Lampard led Coventry City to the Premier League, he has been unable to leverage his own gilded playing career into opportunities of his own.

Does he carry too much baggage or is he too unwilling to drop far enough? The perception within football suggests both are a factor and it cannot bode well that even the club which knows him best are largely disinterested.

For Chelsea, the existing problems are significant and embedded deep within a flawed structure. They are run by prospectors and talent flippers. The regret for Terry is that they might sooner turn to a dolphin on their next attempt to get it right.