Grace and Danger: John Martyn - ten years gone

If ever there was a combination of contrasting words which perfectly encapsulated someone it's "Grace And Danger", the title of John Martyn’s 1980 ‘divorce album’. For, as it transpired as his career unfolded up until his death at the age of 60, ten years ago today, he was grace and danger epitomised: writer of songs of an almost ethereal beauty and yet capable of the most preposterous damage to himself and those around him.

Much is made of Martyn’s self-destructive predilections, principally drink and other substances, and to look back pictorially over his musical career - a journey that progresses from beautiful, tousle-haired, slightly buck-toothed 20-year-old to grizzled, great bear of a man, performing from a wheelchair, the result of having his lower right leg amputated as the result of a burst cyst - is to watch an at-times agonising evolution. Pity, however, is the last thing Martyn would want or have expected.

He was, at times, as blasé about his condition as those things that led to it. This might sound reckless but to say it was belies the complexities that Martyn surrounded himself in, indulged and even encouraged. And that’s if you’d even heard of him. My frustration with Martyn has always been his lack of fame: despite being feted by the likes of Eric Clapton (whose cover of May You Never, Martyn’s lullaby to his son, was a useful royalties earner) and his great friend Phil Collins, amongst other A-listers, Martyn sometimes seemed to welcome obscurity, an aspect that confounds as much as it frustrates those who’d wish, now, posthumously, he were more than just “acclaimed singer-songwriter, John Martyn”.

It’s too easy to dwell on Martyn’s weaponised dysfunction as a means of labelling him, but he truly encapsulated grace and danger. Perhaps turning a blind eye to the danger, I choose to focus on the grace, and for this he remains, resolutely, my musical hero. I can’t think of an artist who, over 44 years and 22 studio albums and over 30 live and compilations, produced such a prodigious, exquisite canon of work that could both pick you up and bring you down when you are sad, as well as envelope you in a warmth much like his own lyric to Go Down Easy, “You curl around me, like a fern in the Spring”. He was also a master of reinvention and experimentation: coming out of, first, the Scottish folk scene and then, by way of the legendary London folkie hangout Les Cousins (referred to by many, phonetically, as “Lez Cuzzans”, as if run by a bloke called Leslie, as opposed to the more exotic French name it actually bore…), Martyn emerged from his first, somewhat Arran-sweater-and-fingers-in-ear folk albums, to explore the realms of jazz, reggae, rock, funk and even trip-hop. And just when you thought you knew one of his albums, along would come another live release or compilation with completely new arrangements of familiar songs, each as invigorating as the original, and often dependent on whether they were recorded as a full electric band, or a solo acoustic set, or one of many tours with his longtime sparring partner - sometimes literally - Danny Thompson.

In my first encounter with John Martyn’s music I had no idea how much it would become a predominating soundtrack in my life, more than any other artist (including Bowie). Nor would that first encounter reveal the small personal connection I had with Martyn. The encounter came one Wednesday evening in the early 1980s when Gary Crowley had Phil Collins on as a guest on his Capital Radio show. Collins requested Sweet Little Mystery, a song from the Grace And Danger album, on which they had both worked. There is something of a bittersweet irony about this fact: their collaboration came at a time when both were going through painful divorces. With his first marriage irretrievable, Collins started working at home in Shalford, Surrey, on the demos that would eventually launch him as a solo superstar. Martyn, going through a very painful divorce to Beverley Martyn (with whom he is co-credited on the 1970 albums Stormbringer! and The Road To Ruin), came down to stay and work on songs with for what became Grace And Danger. “I’d turned my master bedroom into a studio,” recalls Collins, “and there was a phone on the floor. We both took it in turns to call our relative partners. There’d be all kind of shouting matches going on. It was very creative, because Face Value came out of that.” “We were both going through the same emotional trauma,” Martyn told Q magazine. “There was vast amounts of going down the potting shed together and weeping. I’d phone Beverley and it would be ‘aaargh’, then it would be Phil’s turn. We were both making ourselves terribly miserable, and then playing and singing about it.”

Such was the raw nature of many of the tracks on Grace And Danger that Island Records supremo Chris Blackwell was reluctant to release it. In fact, it would be almost a year late when it eventually appeared ("I freaked,” said Martyn in 1981. “Please get it out! I don't give a damn how sad it makes you feel. It's what I'm about: direct communication of emotion.”). Many will say that Grace And Danger was Martyn’s last great album. It was certainly his last for Island. What followed in the 1980s were a procession of records that took Martyn further away from his folk origins. His next album, Glorious Fool, saw Collins take on production work, and there was a notable shift towards a more mainstream pop-rock sound (for which Collins has frequently been blamed, wrongly). Clapton was drafted in to guest on one track, a reciprocation for his May You Never cover. Perhaps the next run of albums - Well Kept Secret (1982), Sapphire (1984), Piece by Piece (1986), The Apprentice (1990) and Cooltide (1991) didn’t do Martyn as much justice as his more feted releases, Solid Air (1973), One World (1977) and Grace And Danger. And while there was a tendency towards 80s over-production - more synthesisers and less of the acoustic-guitar-and-Echoplex-wooziness of his 70s releases - the essence of John Martyn’s music remained throughout. Sometimes it’s better to listen to some of the many live recordings from this era to hear his soul, not to mention his gift for rearrangements that could transform any element in his body of work, to the extent that you might now own myriad versions of the same song, and yet consider them different pieces altogether.

But to return to that midweek appearance on Capital Radio by Phil Collins, his choice of Sweet Little Mystery led to my ‘discovery’ of Martyn himself, and that tiny personal connection I had. Not being old enough to have heard Martyn’s seminal 70s work, I started buying his albums in, perhaps, the agreed order - Solid Air, then One World, then Grace And Danger. And then, in 1992, a curious compilation came out, Couldn’t Love You More, featuring reworked versions of some of his best songs, like One World, Head And Heart, Could've Been Me and Man In The Station. In hindsight, the album has been slated for revisions that rendered some songs a bit too AoR. But with contributions from, again, Collins and Clapton, plus David Gilmour, it’s a lovely piece of work. It was around the time of Couldn’t Love You More’s release that I made a startling discovery: Martyn had been born, Ian David McGheachy, on 11 September 1948 in my home town, the London/Surrey suburb of New Malden. Growing up, nothing famous happened to or in New Malden, with the exception of Jimmy Tarbuck living in the posh bit, Crackerjack's Jan Francis being spotted now and again in Boots, and a backdrop of one of the town's twin 60s office blocks appearing as a backdrop to Bless This House. And yet, briefly, someone who was fast becoming a musical hero of mine was actually born there! Nothing would knock this from the top of my pile of things I’m most proud of, not even discovering that Bowie launched the Ziggy Stardust tour at The Toby Jug pub in nearby Tolworth, or that Clapton himself went to school in neighbouring Surbiton and signed his contract to join The Yardbirds in a New Malden boozer.

When Martyn’s parents - light opera singers - separated, the-then five-year-old Iain moved to Glasgow with his father. To all intents and purposes, he became Scottish, but once McGeachy became Martyn, he would flit for the rest of his life between Glaswegian and somewhat Mockney accents with impressive ease. In Glasgow the teenage Martyn developed a love of folk music, acquiring an insane talent for the acoustic guitar, and eventually falling under the influence of local folk musician Hamish Imlach. Iain gradually became John, as the prodigious youngster evolved his craft. “John Martyn” was adopted as a stage name, an adaptation of the Martin guitar company (whose acoustic instruments would become intertwined with Martyn’s signature sound in the mid-70s). “Iain David McGeachy” had been deemed too Scottish, so something more neutral was needed: “In those days there was no traditional scene as such,” Martyn told biographer John Neil Munro for his terrific book Some People Are Crazy: The John Martyn Story. “You had to be American-sounding. I was more influenced by American music than Scottish music, so the name Martyn was [friend and later agent, Sandy Glennon’s] idea - it had to have the ‘y’ in it , to sound posh.”

That, then, was the start of a career that would baffle as many as it would enlighten. Martyn’s back catalogue from the early days is worth listening to, if only to hear the folkiness gradually disappear. By the time Solid Air came along, with its title track, a paean to troubled friend Nick Drake, defining Martyn’s ethereal, weed-influenced sound, as well as uniting him with lifelong mucker and bass player Danny Thompson, Martyn was already moving into a more progressive sound. Over the years I’ve devoured Martyn’s work with every studio album he released, and every compilation and box set, some like the epic Island Years box set requiring help to bring home, such was the copious amount of material it contained. I make no exaggeration when I say that if the house burned, this - and my own Martin D35 guitar - would be the only two possessions I’d leap from the bedroom window clutching. Listening to the Island box - remember, he was only on the label for a decade or so - is like repainting the Forth Road Bridge: when you eventually reach the end you’ve got to start at the beginning again. It is that lavish, and that stuffed with live recordings and alternative takes that are the very essence of record collection curation.

There is so, so much more I could write about John Martyn in this post - good and bad - but I and you would be here all week. In some respects, I simply implore anyone who is either unfamiliar or unaware of him to go and spend an evening on Spotify. Or, better still, go and actually buy his records. His death, on January 29, 2009 was sad but, perhaps, not unexpected, even though he’d only turned 60 the previous September. Unlike the ’27 Club’ - Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse, et al - Martin had survived into late middle age against the odds. He’d imbibed forbidden substances copiously, worked his way into drunken brawls and escaped worse, and been appalling to the women in his life. He’d changed from angelic-voiced youth to a wheelchair-bound amputee. The cyst that had burst was, possibly, caused by Martyn having stood heavily on that particular leg on stage over the years. In that there is a bitter irony: an artist sometimes criminally overlooked and under-appreciated, whose final album - which was finished by others after his death - was Willing To Work, the ethic that ran through the 44 years of his recording and performing career, one which never saw him soar to the wealth of so many of his musical acolytes and collaborators.

Somewhere on the Internet you can hear a recording of an extraordinary piece of radio from the day John Martyn died. Danny Baker, then doing a daytime show on BBC Radio London, had just come in to the station when he was told the news. “I almost turned around and went back home,” he said when he went on air, breathless and decidedly downbeat. “This news has knocked me for a loop,” he intoned before commencing a couple of hours of playing only Martyn’s music, while reflecting on the huge influence he’d had on him. It’s extraordinary because Baker was being delightfully self-indulgent. But probably only he could get away with an improvised two-hour show featuring music from just one artist, one who could hardly be thought of as mass market, either. And yet the reverence of the broadcast matched that you’d reserve for the Queen’s passing, or a national treasure of unblemished significance.

I’d hate John Martyn to be remembered for being niche, but that’s just my own frustration that a man whose music has embellished my life like no one else’s wasn’t better known, or more successful. Yes, he was, perhaps, a muso’s musician, someone that former NME journalists like Baker can wax endlessly on, while others with their heads firmly in the clouds of broad popular music wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground. Martyn’s music touches me today, and the happy coincidence of him being the New Malden brother I never had is nothing more than that, a happy coincidence.

But I’ll leave you with this one thought, of many more that I could commit to the keyboard: shortly before his death, Martyn received an OBE in the 2009 New Year’s Honours list. It would have bemused as much as anything. But 12 months before, the BBC gave Martyn a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, with the gong handed to him by his great friend Phil Collins. “Folk” just doesn’t do his musical canon justice, but in its award citation, the BBC described his “heartfelt performances have either suggested or fully demonstrated an idiosyncratic genius.” I’d say that nailed John Martyn perfectly. RIP.

Sarri seems to be the hardest word - part 2

Since my post on Monday, in which I tried to examine the wisdom of Maurizio Sarri questioning the mentality and motivation of his players, the Chelsea head coach has continued in this vein by questioning the leadership skills of Eden Hazard.

"I don't know," the Italian said at yesterday's press conference ahead of tonight's EFL Trophy semi-final second leg at Stamford Bridge. "At this moment he is more an individual player than a leader. He’s very important of course as he’s a great player and he can always win the match in two minutes, sometimes in one minute, but at the moment he’s not a leader. He’s a great player, one of the best in the world."

Now, with Hazard arguably one of the best players in the world, if not at least in England, and with speculation about him moving to Real Madrid continuing to swirl about like the snow flurries outside my window, you might say that Sarri is taking an even bigger risk by drawing any negative focus on the Belgian. Clearly, though, Sarri knew what he was saying, why he was saying it, and when he was saying it.

"I think we need to react on the pitch, all the rest is nothing," Sarri had said earlier in the presser when asked about how his team will respond to his criticism of the team after their dismal defeat to Arsenal last weekend. "We need to discuss our problems. The first step, if I want to improve, is to accept the mistake otherwise its impossible to improve. It’s a normal discussion for improving." But, in talking about the kind of reaction he's looking for, the question of leadership emerged. "It depends on the atmosphere around the players," he said, "but we have some players with the characteristics to be a leader, such as Azpilicueta, David Luiz, so I think they can help all the other players to get the right mentality."

Hazard can be a confounding figure. There's no doubting his brilliance, but sometimes it can be dimmed, either because his box of tricks gets stifled by defenders, or by the player himself dropping down a couple of gears. Sarri, and Antonio Conte before him, should share some of the blame in this. Playing Hazard as a false 9 is clearly not what the player wants to do and, equally clearly, when he's played as a target man when there's little dropping in for him, it would be understandable for Hazard to get frustrated. But is that necessarily a leadership issue? When Chelsea had a spine of leadership - Čech, Terry, Lampard, Drogba - the authority and effect was tangible. Today, it's patchy. Azpiliqueta is a great defender and a worthy captain, but he's no John Terry. Likewise, David Luiz has passion aplenty, and when he's not making silly mistakes, evokes some of the blood-and-thunder JT used to exude. But there is something lacking throughout the current team. Jorginho was brought to Chelsea by Sarri to act as his lieutenant, but his influence in the holding role has faded of late, and with the manager stubbornly refusing to rotate his No.5 (ideally by playing Kante there), the midfielder has offered little in the way of being the engine room.

So what, then, is Sarri's expectations of Hazard? And why has he chosen to rattle the Belgian's status just as Chelsea are hoping he will shun Real Madrid's interest and sign a new contract? Obviously, reverse psychology can't be ruled out, but again, it seems an extremely high-risk strategy where Hazard, precariously poised over a new deal, is concerned. Perhaps, though, "leadership" was the wrong choice of words. Perhaps Sarri was getting at something else. Earlier this week Hazard made an alarming admission to France Football magazine, saying that he's been a source of frustration to his past managers...and will continue to be so. "I didn’t just frustrate Conte," he said. "In my career, I’ve frustrated all my coaches. And with Sarri, once again, I frustrate him. They think that I need to mark more, do more of this and more of that. And the next coach that I have, I’ll frustrate him as well."

Hazard is, however, a consummate wind-up. His ambiguity over his Chelsea future has been conveyed playfully, with a trademark twinkle in his eye suggesting that the witty and bright Hazard is just messing around half the time. Probably only he and his agent knows where he wants to go, or even where he will actually end up. Which brings me to tonight's game against Tottenham. If Sarri wants to get a reaction out of any one player with this fixture, Hazard is probably the player to poke with a sharp stick.

Hazard, you’ll remember, was in the thick of it two years ago when Spurs blew their Premier League title chances at Stamford Bridge. "We don't want Tottenham to win the Premier League; the fans, the club and the players," he said before the ill-tempered 2-2 draw in May 2016 that ended Spurs' hopes of preventing Leicester City from winning the league title. Hazard's stunning 83rd-minute strike brought the scores level...and led to temperatures boiling over. So, with Sarri looking for a reaction, both from the Arsenal defeat but even from the painful 3-1 loss to Spurs in the league in November, a defeat that ended Chelsea's 12-game unbeaten run, it's possible that the Italian coach is engaging in some mind games with his mercurial Belgian.

Quite how Hazard will react remains to be seen. If, tonight, Hazard is again played out of preferred position in the false 9 role, he may well continue to go through the motions. Without the newly-signed loanee Gonzalo Higuain, and with Álvaro Morata seemingly on his way back to Spain, if Sarri chose to start with Olivier Giroud up front and have Hazard play in from the left, his preferred position, he might just get the positive response he's looking for. But, as has now been well documented, Sarri's reluctance to try something as adventurous might mean that, until Higuain can be integrated, Hazard might stay, unhappily, in the middle, and now with his own coach questioning his seniority, too. Not good, really...

Sarri seems to be the hardest word

The expected response, when asked by one's other half when walking through the door after a victorious Saturday afternoon's football watching, is to grin inanely and be largely effervescent. But that’s just not the football fan. Sometimes we just cannot be satisfied. Thus, the other Saturday, my ever-loving girlfriend was met with a distinct "meh” when I showed up after Chelsea's 2-1 win over Newcastle United.

Because, apart from a couple of well taken goals from Pedro and Willian, there wasn’t much else to enthuse about. Which sounds bitter, I know. We won, they didn’t. However, it's not about being greedy, about being the spoilt fan of a monied, so-called "elite" club. It is about why things just don’t feel right at Chelsea at the moment. Fast forward, then, to the aftermath of last Saturday's appointment at the Emirates. A keenly poised fixture, if ever there was one - a London derby, fifth hosting fourth, two managers in their first terms trying to change things around, and so on.

"I have to say that I'm extremely angry, very angry indeed," was the quote of the game, and it came not from an exasperated fan, or the Arsenal had coach, Unai Emery, a man still trying to win over a section of the Arsenal faithful. No, it was  Chelsea's Maurizio Sarri, smarting - and then some - from a 2-0 defeat, a defeat he attributed "...to our mentality more than anything else, our mental approach. We played against a team which mentally was far more determined than we were. And this is something I can't accept."

This has been a theme creeping into Sarri's assessment of his side in recent weeks. Despite resolutely maintaining fourth place in the Premier League, Chelsea's performances have grown frustratingly limp, with fans and football writers listing an ever-growing litany of complaints: Eden Hazard being played somewhat ineffectively as a 'false 9'; N'Golo Kanté being pushed into the right of midfield rather than the holding position in which he won league titles with both Leicester and Chelsea; Jorginho, Sarri's trusted on-field lieutenant at Napoli, being given the holding position as a fulcrum role, and not quite pulling it off; senior club players like Willian and Pedro blowing hot and cold, and Marcos Alonso defending like he just can’t be bothered any more; and then there’s the slavish obedience to Sarri's possession obsession, resulting in defenders and even a supposedly attack-minded midfielder like Ross Barkley engaging in tippy-tappy triangles that rarely break over the half-way line. Sometimes it’s been habitually wayward David Luiz who, to his credit, has suggested a "sod this!" attitude and come bombing forward to loft a ball into one of the attacking midfielders (itself a noteworthy statement, given the lack of a prolific striker in the ranks).

This might sound like a reappearance of my Monday Moan, so named during José Mourinho's final months at Chelsea when, from the opening game of the 2015-16 season until his dismissal the following December, Chelsea were stubbornly frustrating week in, week out, and it was impossible not to rant on a Monday morning while angrily travelling to work. With Sarri, things haven’t got that bad: with Mourinho, Chelsea, with largely the same players, slumped from League champions to at risk of relegation in an alarming four months. That’s not at risk at the moment, which suggests that this is a matter of relativity. For the manager to be blaming his players' mentality is surely a reflection on him as a coach? He and his staff train the players and motivate them, sending them out to do battle with self-belief and a plan. But from the stand or from the sofa, Chelsea's players seem to be lacking both or at least a Plan B.

The prospect of Gonzalo Higuain arriving in the next few days to replace the [hopefully] outbound and moribund Alvaro Morata will hopefully be more than a sticking plaster to heal an annoying but not fatal cut. If any player has demonstrated a poor mentality, to use Sarri's words, it’s been Morata who, even after scoring has looked more in need of a phone call to The Samaritans than the traditional group hug from his team mates. Funny, he's never looked quite right at Chelsea, and that ridiculous £60 million fee probably didn’t help. Higuain has, at least, a relationship with Sarri, and in being a proper centre forward, and one with muscle, too, he might go some way to restore the attacking approach that worked so well when Diego Costa was marauding defenders and goalkeepers. We shouldn’t get too carried away, though. Higuain will not be a silver bullet. Balls will still need to get to him, which means that if Chelsea's defenders are still dicking about, passing to each other as if still warming up for a training session at Cobham, Higuain will soon get tired of waiting.

Sarri, however, is certainly not convinced that Higuain is the answer, and his increasingly tetchy rhetoric is the kind we’ve heard before from Chelsea managers...and it usually doesn’t end well. "The club knows what I want, I’m sure they are doing their best," he told Sky Italia at the weekend. There’s no suggestion that this was a dig at the club, but the fact he has had to mention the club's prime role in player acquisition several times has been more than a defensive move. "But, he added, "whoever arrives will have difficulties with the mentality of today." Again with the mentality thing.

During his explosive post-match presser on Saturday, Sarri commented on how his players were "extremely difficult" to motivate and cannot be changed. A quite bizarre admission when you think about it. This is a team that went 12 games unbeaten and, even if they’ve lost four of the 11 games that have followed that run, shouldn’t be lacking the urge to win more. Sarri is not Antonio Conte, whose tough training regime from the beginning threatened to exhaust his players, nor Mourinho, whose Mourinho-ness led to “palpable discord”. No, Sarri is a man who, despite the absence of trophies in his managerial career (a career that includes a large period coaching in the lower leagues of Tuscany before anything more senior in Italy) was appointed to manage one of the top teams in the Premier League, barely three weeks before his first competitive game, and who has had to go from a standing start at a club with a notoriously low tolerance of failure. So we should cut him some slack. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that his obstinate possession approach and reluctance to make changes in a game until it's almost too late (a trait he he shares with his compatriot predecessor) means that if it ain’t working, it continues so. This, in turn, leads to players getting frustrated, which leads to players effectively downing tools.

It’s been pointed out frequently recently, in context of Chelsea’s performances, that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Watching Ross Barkley, a player you used to think had a bit of grit about him, inside the Chelsea half with his back to the Newcastle goal and repeatedly exchanging short passes with Luiz and Alonso, was certainly maddening. After 34 competitive games so far this season, it would be nice to think that even the players had grown tired of this repetitive madness. We remain to be comvinced they have.

If, as Sarri suggests, the problem is more mental than tactical, then the responsibility is still his to change things. "We played against a team [Arsenal] which mentally was far more determined than we were. And this is something I can't accept," he said on Saturday. "We had a similar issue in the league game at Tottenham. We spoke a great deal about that loss and our approach at the time, and I spoke to the players, and I thought we'd overcome this issue. But it appears we still have this issue and we still seem to lack sufficient motivation and being mentally solid and our determination. So I'm not happy, I'm really not happy." Significantly, Chelsea's next opponent are Spurs, in the EFL Trophy semi-final second leg on Thursday, a tie in which the Blues trail by a single goal. Having the manager talk about "a group of players [that] are extremely difficult to motivate" ahead of a sensitive tie with Chelsea's old foe is extremely worrying, even if his comments were intended to get under those players' skins. To give Sarri some credit, he wasn’t throwing his players completely under a bus with his comments. "But I couldn’t possibly say I am not responsible as well, in part at least, for the mental approach. That's something we have to share," he said during the presser. But he also highlighted his team's lack of ruthlessness, especially in the final third, a statement hinting at the value of bringing in a forward like Higuain.

Using a press conference to fire up underperforming players is a notoriously risky business. Many will have preferred Sarri to kept his comments to the team conference room at Cobham. "It's a huge, huge gamble from Sarri's point of view," said Rio Ferdinand on BT Sport after the Arsenal game. "He's looking for a response and rightly so. [But] doing it publicly in a presser after a game, it's questionable because these players have been through this with a couple of managers, and the managers get gone." Certainly his rant revealed some home truths. "A player at this level can't be afraid to face up to their responsibilities, or coming to speak to the coach about issues or mistakes they've made," he said. "If they were afraid of that, they shouldn't be playing at this level in the first place. The players and I talk very openly about what's happening. I'm the person responsible for the team, of course. So that means we have to discuss issues, and it's important my players have the attitude I'm asking them to have. If they don't have that, they shouldn't be playing at this level." Which could also be interpreted as a dig at the Chelsea board who bought the players.

I had no real view on Sarri when Chelsea appointed the Italian in the summer. The consensus was that he must have been doing something right at Napoli if they were only trailing Juventus by reasons of the Turin juggernaut's relentless dominance of Serie A. We read Sarri's somewhat fairytale backstory, that he’d given up a career as a commodities broker to coach in Tuscany. And yet here he was, being appointed by Roman Abramovich, a man with exacting standards of expectation, who even fired a manager as genial and as successful as Carlo Ancelotti for not quite matching the league-and-cup double of his first season in charge. Sarri seemed like a gamble, but one thing we Chelsea fans have learned from the managerial hire-and-fire merry-go-round is that in Roman we trust (though last summer he was somewhat distracted by visa wrangles with the British government). Having a go, publically, at players is hardly a last roll of the dice. But unless something - a change of tactics, a detonation of motivation under the players, fresh blood...something - comes along, questions about Sarri's longevity will be inevitable. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the "What if?" conversation has already cropped up during Chelsea board meetings. Because when discord becomes palpable, there is usually only one outcome...