Taking your breath away, again

Picture: Paramount Pictures

Looked at from a cynical angle, Top Gun: Maverick is something of a corny knock-off of the 1986 original and chock-full of not-so subtle references to the iconic Tony Scott blockbuster. But looked at from an objective, Friday-night-at-the-pictures punter's point of view it is literally breathtaking.

Just like the original, there were plenty of holes that you wouldn't have to be a pedant to spot: for the 1986 film plane spotters like me couldn't help noticing that the ‘aggressor‘ planes used by the Top Gun school combat instructors were exactly the same as the jets used by the unnamed foreign adversary (i.e. American F-5s). In this long-awaited update things are a little more plausible, albeit with generous amounts of licence to let the undoubted star of the show look ridiculously good.

Picture: Paramount

And he is. It's not clear what Tom Cruise does to remain Tom Cruise, but apart from a few lines around the eyes, he is - and I am speaking here with nothing but envy - insanely unaged. Yes, the teeth, yes, that grin, yes, the helmet-free motorbike riding while wearing the white T-shirt/leather jacket/jeans/Aviators combo.

Like I said, you can waste time grumbling about the obvious nods to the original (the music cues, the set-up shots, etc) but that detracts from the sheer enjoyment of it all. Any review you read should - if not will - comment on the flying sequences, which are the best I've ever seen in any film depicting aerial combat. But there is also plenty of genuine, proportional emotional heft, particularly in the quasi-parental relationship between Cruise’s Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell and Miles Teller’s Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (I’ll let you work out why), and the brief but poignant appearance of Val Kilmer as the-now Admiral Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazinksky, with art tragically imitating life, if you've been following the actor's medical plight.

As you might expect, almost everyone else in Maverick who isn’t Tom Cruise is a supporting player, but you kind of expect that as you walk in through the door. Without giving too much plot away, Maverick is charged with teaching ‘the best of the best’ navy flyers to take on a daring mission in an unnamed “rogue state” with nuclear ambitions (take a guess - somewhere on the eastern coast of the Eurasian landmass...). Here Maverick is given a group of cocky pilots with call signs like ‘Hangman’, ‘Phoenix’ and, er, ‘Bob’, with a sceptical boss (somewhat inexplicably played by Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm), whom he mentors into piloting their F-18 Hornets to the absolute edge of capability for an operation of geo-political significance. And, of course, there is the obligatory love interest - Maverick has managed to remain unmarried, apparently into his late ’50s - provided by Jennifer Connelly, providing a grounding foil as San Diego bar owner Penny.

Which brings me to contemporary events. The protracted timing of Top Gun: Maverick’s release is the result of the  pandemic, but it arrives in a world with a very real war taking place, which makes for some uncomfortable points of reference on the screen. Early in the film Maverick is lectured by a superior (a typically steely-eyed Ed Harris) on the future of combat aviation being unmanned and without the need for thrill jockeys like Maverick. In Ukraine, drones have made the difference for both sides, with Russian air force jets notably less involved than would be expected. Thus, the sight of a fleet of cruise missiles being launched from a warship brings the film disturbingly close to events taking place right now in Eastern Europe.

Picture: Paramount Pictures

Again, though, disbelief requires suspension for the two-and-half-hour duration. Of course, no one (still) on a US Navy captain's salary would own a vintage P-51 Mustang (the plane happens to be Cruise’s own) or a hangar in the Mojave Desert full of classic motorbikes. But that is and always was the Top Gun vibe: the mixture of testosterone, stiff-necked military order, and a touch of the Southern Californian lifestyle. It’s entertainment, after all, and not a documentary. 

Nor is it a cartoon. Top Gun: Maverick exists in a genre all of its own, which is what makes the original an icon of ’80s cinema. It may well be something of a remake, but Maverick moves the genre on enough for fans of the 1986 film to enjoy afresh, and provide something utterly edge-of-the-seat compelling for those not even born back then.

Force of nature

It’s an accepted fact amongst the fanbase that the three Star Wars films Ewan McGregor made (confusingly, the story-establishing trilogy which came after the canon-establishing trilogy...) were not the best. Not that McGregor was directly at fault: blame, ultimately, resides with the saga’s creator, George Lucas, who wrote them. I’m not going to list all the faults here, but my principle gripe was that the scripts were awful and the quality control was somewhat off.

Since then, all things Star Wars have fallen into the hands of another galactic empire, Disney, which since buying the franchise from Lucas in 2012 has been Marvelising it with a 'universe' of sequels, prequels and other offshoots from the original Skywalker storyline. These have included films like Rogue One and Solo and numerous TV projects including the ‘space Western’ The Mandalorian and the interconnected Book Of Boba Fett. At a Star Wars convention this week it was announced that a much-anticipated third series of The Mandalorian will come to the Disney+ streaming platform next February, and another new TV spinoff, Andor - a prequel to the events of the cinematic release Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - will launch on the channel in August. 

However, before any of that, today we can add another entry to the entire canon: Obi-Wan Kenobi, a supposedly standalone series in which McGregor reprises his cinematic role as the Jedi master who tutored the young apprentice Anakin Skywalker in the ways of The Force before he succumbed to the Dark Side and became Darth Vader in Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith. 

Set ten years after that storyline - and before the old, reclusive ‘Ben Kenobi’ encounters Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film (now known canonically as Episode IV: A New Hope) - Obi-Wan Kenobi finds the Jedi exiled and living in a cave on Tatooine where he keeps a distant eye on the young Luke (whom we all now know is one of Vader’s twin children, the other being the future Princess Leia).

As with all of the Star Wars properties, Obi-Wan Kenobi will frame the classic good-versus-evil struggle, promising plenty of the fairy tale magic that first enamoured a generation of cinema-goers in 1977 and snared another with the prequels and sequels. The series starts from the premise of the Jedi Master coming to terms with the ‘loss’ of Anakin and his emergence as as the Galactic Empire’s ultimate enforcer, Vader.

© 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ All Rights Reserved

“We find Obi-Wan at the beginning of our story rather broken, and faithless,“ McGregor explained earlier this year, “and beaten - somewhat given up.” But, he added, the series is not without hope.Along the way in the six-part series we will meet the ‘Inquisitors’, a ruthless band of lightsabre-wielding hunters, tasked by Vader to track down his former Jedi mentor. That means, too, a reprise for Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin/Vader in the second two prequels, Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith, which saw the Jedi largely wiped out. Presumably, with Obi-Wan the only known Jedi in existence (along with Yoda, of course), the series will bridge the gap with A New Hope, though it’s not clear yet how. Disney+ is committing six episodes now in a “limited series”, although both McGregor and Christensen have said they’d be open to a second series. ”It was definitely conceived as a limited series,” director Deborah Chow said recently. “It is one big story with a beginning, middle, and end. So that's the way we've always approached it. The approach has always been that it is one full story.” 

Given that the series only covers a period ten years after Sith, and a full nine years before A New Hope, Disney certainly has plenty of scope to fill in the period of Luke’s adolescence (though best not worth getting into the technicalities of McGregor’s Obi-Wan ageing in nine years to become Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan). “It was made as a one-off limited series,” McGregor told Entertainment Weekly, following the company line. “And in a way, it does do what I wanted it to do in terms of bridging a story between [Episodes] III and IV and bringing me closer to Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan in A New Hope.” To which he added: “Would I like to make another one? “Yeah, I would like to make another one.”

Time, though, will tell how the fanbase reacts to this latest offshoot. The Mandalorian had a slow start in its first season, but warmed up in its second. The Book Of Boba Fett left many cold for the first half of its run last year, but it warmed up as The Mandalorian character was introduced as a crossover. Another neat segway to the original cinematic canon in The Mandalorian was a significant cameo by a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. ”It's nice to know that by all of our efforts in making this Obi-Wan Kenobi series, the fans are going to be stoked,” McGregor said. ”I think they're not going to be disappointed by it. Maybe some will, but you can't please all the people all the time. But knowing that people are going to be happy because of our work is a nice feeling.”

Picture: StillMoving.net for Disney

McGregor was not surprisingly tight-lipped as to how Obi-Wan Kenobi would develop, but gave some insight in his interview with Entertainment Weekly. “At the beginning of our story, we know that it’s ten years after Episode III. So we know that the Jedi Order have been all but destroyed, and everyone who wasn't killed in Order 66 has fled and is in hiding. Yoda and some of the other Jedi who Obi-Wan would’ve known and loved are unable to communicate with each other.”

“So [my character is] much closer to the Obi-Wan Alec Guinness played in that he’s on Tatooine and he’s a solitary man. He’s living as normal a life as he can so as not to draw attention to himself, because the Jedi are being hunted down to be destroyed and he will know that. And his last responsibility to his old life is to look over Luke Skywalker, who is with [Uncle] Owen and Aunt Beru [his guardians at the start of A New Hope], and he's doing that from a distance so as not to draw attention to their family in the moisture farm there.”

McGregor sheds a little light on the premise of the initial series: “I think Owen wants Luke Skywalker to have a normal childhood, to grow up in an ordinary way and not to be bothered by that. And also, there's the risk that, knowing that the Jedi are being hunted down, if Obi-Wan is found out and discovered, then [Owen] doesn’t want him anywhere near Luke Skywalker because they would also take Luke.” This suggests a plot line similar to The Mandalorian’s protection of Grogu (AKA ‘Baby Yoda’), which fits into the canon immediately after the defeat of the Empire in Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi.

Picture: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Disney

Time will tell how Obi-Wan Kenobi will play out, there’s no doubting the commitment of both McGregor and Christensen to the project, chastened perhaps by the criticism that befell their chapters in the film series. McGregor rewatched the entire Skywalker saga while Christensen went even deeper, watching all of the films as well as the animated series, The Clone Wars and Rebels, which introduced a number of key character and story developments to the overall canon, which have been touched on in the various Disney-era productions.  

Now older and wiser, McGregor and Christensen appear to have taken a healthy approach to the criticism of the prequel films as they reprised their roles for TV. “For the young stars, there was nowhere to hide. "I found it quite hard," McGregor, now 50, admits of the reaction to the prequels. “For [them] to come out and get knocked so hard was personally quite difficult to deal with,” said McGregor in his interview. “And also, it was quite early in my career. I didn't really know how to deal with that. I’d been involved with things that just didn't make much of a ripple, but that's different from making something that makes a negative ripple.” For Christensen, who was barely out of his teens when he was cast as Anakin Skywalker, he had even more to confiner: “When the films came out and the critics were very critical, of course that was a difficult thing,” he said recently. “Because you care so much about this thing that you've invested so much of yourself into. So, for sure, that's challenging.”

© 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™All Rights Reserved

McGregor takes the view that the audience who watched his Star Wars films will have now grown up, just as my age group watched the original trilogy and grew up. With that, he hopes, has brought a realisation that the new series has an opportunity to make a new contribution to the saga that spans more than 45 Earth years. It is, he says, one of hope as Obi-Wan heals the pain of losing Anakin, although it remains to be seen, knowing what comes in A New Hope, how much peace he will find. 

“When we last saw Obi-Wan in the prequels, he’s very emotional,” says the TV show’s writer Joby Harold. “There’s a passion to him. And when we get to see him again in A New Hope, he is the Zen master. That was the story that I wanted to understand - what had happened to Obi-Wan between the guy that Ewan had brought to life and the guy that Sir Alec Guinness brought to life.”. Over the next six weeks we will find out.

New horizons, and all that

© Simon Poulter 2022

So that’s it until August. Bar two European finals and the domestic play-offs, club football is on a break. Hard to say, with immediate hindsight, what sort of a season it’s been. Clearly, the Premier League has been about the galactic battle between champions Manchester City and Liverpool, which ended so incredibly dramatically on Sunday. I, by the way, was in my usual seat at Stamford Bridge where, bored by the moribund dead rubber being played out before us, the crowd became visibly more animated as news filtered through of City clawing one back against Villa, prompting most of the crowd to have their phones out for the remainder of the afternoon, as the 2021-22 Premier League title swung towards Manchester.

Chelsea will want to draw a line under this season and move on. Touted as genuine title contenders in August, and bolstered by the “missing piece of the jigsaw” in the £97.5 million acquisition of striker Romelu Lukaku, the campaign fizzled out as residual bouts of Covid, injuries and then sanctions imposed on Roman Abramovich following Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine conspired to reduce any sense of competitiveness for the reigning European champions in their home league. While it can be somewhat understandable that Chelsea’s players were unnerved by the corporate uncertainty surrounding the club in the final two months, sympathy only goes so far. I’ve been at companies undergoing M&A upheaval and it’s not nice, not knowing whether you’d have a job at the end of it. I, however, wasn’t a handsomely-rewarded football player, with an agent capable of simply extracting me to a new job seemingly at will.

In fact, these last couple of months at Chelsea, with the team just limping over the finish line in third place (yeah, I know, tell “third place” to Watford, Burnley and Norwich….), have shown up some of the inadequacies that Thomas Tuchel must address this summer, now that the uncertainty of the club’s ownership is being resolved, and the Todd Boehly-fronted £4.25 billion takeover has been cleared to proceed. Reports today suggest that the new owners will immediately provide £200 million of the £1.75 billion committed to club development to war chest a squad refresh. That in itself might sound greedy, seeing as it was only 12 months ago this week that Chelsea beat City to win the Champions League in Porto, but the indifferent performances of a tired and, in several cases, disinterested squad since April have underlined the need for Tuchel to address inconsistencies if he is to close the gap on Liverpool and City, which stretched to an 18-point distance between third and second place at season’s end.

First priority is the defence. With Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen leaving for Spain, and doubts remaining about captain César Azpiliqueta (not a vintage season for him in the final to be honest) and Marcos Alonso (the doubts in his case being that he simply can’t defend), Tuchel is going to have to rebuild from the back, as he did when taking over from Frank Lampard in January last year. But it doesn’t stop there: the once mercurial N’Golo Kante has easily lost a yard of his once legendary pace, and Jorginho is nowhere near as imperious in central midfield as he once was. In attack, Christian Pulisic needs to grow a pair and Hakim Ziyech needs to be more consistent every time he straps on his boots. And as for Lukaku…

Picture: Chelsea FC

There have been few shining bright spots in the Chelsea side I’ve seen this term: Mason Mount is the standout exception, and he was deservedly named Player Of The Season after last Sunday’s game against Watford. Reece James must have come a close second, despite being out for a long time, but his work rate and tenacity since coming back has regularly outshone many of his teammates. Oh, how Chelsea have missed James and Ben Chilwell marauding the flanks this term (what a welcome relief it was to see the left wing back make a brief cameo on Sunday).

Mount and James are, famously, products of Chelsea’s Academy, which gives some hope for the future that its long record of talented product can keep on delivering. Certainly, its output, and canny sales of players like Tammy Abraham to Roma, have partially offset some of the more expensive acquisitions like Lukaku, but the big question now is how far will £200 million go in refreshing the squad, and will Tuchel have time to bed in new players?

There is a sense that, despite last season’s European triumph, and even their appearance this season in both major domestic Wembley finals, the club’s lack of a Premier League title since 2017 is telling. Many hark back to the squad that won the Champions League in Munich in 2012, with that spine of Lampard, John Terry, Didier Drogba and Petr Čech which, while then coached by Roberto Di Matteo, had been largely formed by Jose Mourinho with Roman Abramovich’s money. There was a mental resilience about that generation that seems to have petered off in subsequent seasons. As much as it should be a source of pride that they’ve taken the current Liverpool to penalties in those two finals, the helicopter view is less favourable: Chelsea’s FA Cup Final defeat the other week was their third in a row, having been beaten in the showpiece in four of their last five appearances. Throw in the league performances - two fourth place finishes, a third and a fifth place since they actually won the Premier League in 2017 - and the hyper-critical might conclude that Chelsea lack the right stuff. However, Tuchel and even Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp have said that Chelsea have simply been unlucky, and that wouldn’t be an unreasonable appraisal of their fortunes over the last campaign.

They’ve also had to contend with a gruelling programme - a total of 63 competitive games, including the World Club Cup (which they won - their only silverware this season). Perhaps, then, the challenge for Tuchel’s new bosses is that he needs a stronger squad - not just in terms of numbers - but with greater competition for places. Easy to say that, I know: the Alex Ferguson mantra of ‘two quality players for every position’ is fine, until you start having to deal with uppity millionaires not getting games. And you could say that even when Lukaku is the only orthodox centre forward at Tuchel’s disposal, he still hasn’t responded to the opportunity, which in turn has led to his own dissatisfaction and players around him reluctant to pass to him. Kai Havertz has yet to win over fans, too, as the next great goal hope. Like his countryman Timo Werner, despite a brief renaissance, both Germans have toiled in front of goal, despite there being a lot of encouragement from the home crowd.

All of which points to pressure on Tuchel, but also on the club’s new owners. Now all regulatory hurdles have been completed the money people must move fast to close the Boehly/Clearlake takeover to ensure that Chelsea can formally register for next season’s Premier League and Champions League before their respective deadlines next week. On top of that, the UK government licence that has restricted the club’s ability to do any business since March means that their pre-season dealings will be starting relatively late. 

Transfer plans and contract renewals were put on hold by the sanctions, meaning that even the likes of Mount and James have yet to be tied down to must-sign new deals. “I cannot go on holiday, it’s impossible,” Tuchel told the club’s website. “There are too many things to clarify and have an opinion on. It’s not necessary to do everything in person but the first days [of the close season] I will be here anyway and around because my children are in school so the holidays will start with a bit of a delay.” Clearly, the resolution of the club’s ownership will come as a relief: “You could feel it over a long period of time,” Tuchel said. “We managed to put it aside and keep the focus but the longer it got after the international break, it had an impact on us and it still has. Let’s see when we will finally have the chance to act and make up because the disadvantage in terms of timing for the rebuild is big and we have to be fast and smart.”

© Simon Poulter 2022

Ahead of the Watford game, Tuchel told reporters that Chelsea need to “over-perform” next season if they are to close the gap with City and Liverpool and goals - both scoring them and preventing them being scored - will be his priority. “If we stick to [this] group then we will try to solve it with these players," the German said. “We need to produce more numbers because the numbers from our offensive players don't allow us to over-perform," he added. “I’m not pointing fingers, but we need over-performance from everybody and it's not over-performance if we have only single figures in scoring and assisting.” Notably, only Mason Mount ended the season with a double-figure goal tally.

“Is it necessary to bring more offensive players around the box to create more distractions, to create more space for each other? We will ask that question,” Tuchel said. “We are late because other clubs can take players. We have to be fast and smart as soon as the sanctions are lifted. There's a lot of work to do.”

Inevitably, the sports press is already slavering over where Tuchel might spend that £200 million, with Sevilla’s Jules Kounde, a target last summer, Leipzig’s Josko Gvardiol and Villarreal’s Pau Torres already emerging as names of interest. Even Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling is being whispered of, due to his exhaustive and unresolved contract saga, and the Wembley-born forward might prefer a return to the capital. Robert Lewandowsky has even been mentioned. Chelsea have, though, been there before in buying star players on the wrong side of 30. Under Lampard there was an emphasis on youth (hence the emergence of Mount and James, and to their chagrin, the marginalisation of Rüdiger and Alonso). Under Abramovich, the club even imposed a policy of giving over-30 players only one-season contract extensions, a reason for the uncertainty about Azpiliqueta’s future. That said, having discarded John Terry at the age of 36, Thiago Silva will be 38 in September and, frankly, can still put in a decent shift in the heart of defence.

Whoever comes in on the player front (and who goes), the pivotal figure at Chelsea will remain Tuchel. He has arguably been the club’s North Star this season: when the Ukraine/Abramovich saga unfolded he was the only club figure to face the public. As the ownership is finally resolved, Tuchel can satisfy himself that, on balance, he has kept things afloat when they could have gone seriously awry. Moreover, he is arguably the first head coach to outlast Abramovich. He has been, frankly, brilliant, though not always perfect. 

“It will be a super tough race,” Tuchel says of the season to come. ”Manchester United will be in the race, Tottenham will be in the race with Antonio Conte for sure, and we want to stay in the race. Liverpool and Man City do everything to even make their squads bigger and they set the standard so high. This is the challenge in which we compete.” With the right backing, and the right patience, Chelsea should come out of the traps in August with a new hope, hope that at one point a couple of  months ago, seemed at risk of being dashed existentially.

Gathering round the wireless, like the olden days

Picture: BBC

Some years ago, someone coined the expression “appointment television” to describe the communal act of everyone everywhere settling in front of the gogglebox at the same time to watch the same show. Whether it was the Christmas EastEnders shocker, the big Dallas reveal or some similar ‘water cooler moment’ of eyeball-corralling inducement, it was, in itself, the evolution of a similar phenomenon that occurred during the golden days of radio.

My parents’ generation would huddle around the Marconi at the appointed hour to listen to The Goon Show, Educating Archie or Hancock’s Half Hour, while my own age group would religiously tune in to Radio 1 on a Tuesday lunchtime for the readout of the new Top 40. It is all, perhaps, a lost art in this age of on-demand digital immediacy, where entire box sets can be binged in one go, and radio has fragmented across a mass of online stations.

All of which made yesterday’s experience both nostalgic and exhilarating in a manner I’ve not experienced since my teens, and a DJ’s first play of a new record by someone like The Police or The Jam: my stepdaughter Ella’s Solent University band, Inbound, released their debut single on Friday, and it was lined up for a first play on three radio stations - Southampton’s community outlet Voice FM, the legendary Gary Crowley’s BBC Radio London show, and the local BBC Introducing show for the Solent area. This led to the faintly hilarious sight of my wife and I, sat in a suburban car park on a Saturday lunchtime, hoping that the 5G connection wouldn’t drop as we waited with apprehension for the very excellent indie banger Something To Lose to break the airwaves for the first time. Quite understandably, there was a moistening of the eye - for my other half, you understand.

Here’s where the weirdness applied: it’s one thing to be excited with expectation at the promise of a new release from a favourite band (years ago, I was in the studio control room of Channel 4’s The Tube when U2’s With Or Without You was played on TV for the first time - with literally everyone agreeing afterwards that it had been a genuine hairs-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment); it’s another thing when, despite having heard a sneak preview (it’s helpful when your wife is the mother of the band’s bass player and lyricist), you’ve yet to hear a record from a brand new act blast out from stereo speakers in all of it’s high fidelity glory. I’ve not told my wife this, but even I had a lump in the back my throat, though I had to keep my mouth shut as I recorded the moment on my phone - a slightly shaky handheld shot of a car’s entertainment screen.

As if the lunchtime experience wasn’t emotional enough, the evening consumption was overwhelming. Not to the extent of more tears, just the breakout of utterly goofy grins on our faces, as Crowley - whose status as an eminent London tastemaker, was established back in the early 1980s as Radio 1’s then-youngest ever presenter - introduced Something To Lose just after 7.30pm. “We’ve got new music now from a young five-piece, literally on the first rung of the ladder,” he began. “They’re called Inbound and they sent me a terrific tune this week.” Cue more beaming. 

Just under three minutes later it was done. “Wow!”, came Crowley’s follow-up as the single’s outro reverberated. “How good is that?!” before adding “Got a feeling we’re going to be playing that one again…”.

You’d forgive us for replacing the goofy grins with open mouths, silent gasps and, yes, more moisture around the eyes. I’m new to this parenting lark. Not having children of my own, acquiring a pair of step-daughters - Ella is 21, her younger sister Meg is 17 - has opened an entirely new chapter of experiences over the last five years, as they’ve grown from teens to young adults. In fact, yesterday was quite the day for it, with us driving Meg to the first day of her first ever proper part-time job, before going off in search of that car park to listen to Ella making her broadcast debut. 

Of course, given my own professional origins and lifelong love of music, it’s been a source of immense pride that Ella has found an interest in it herself. Time and fortune will tell whether it becomes her future (and our retirement pension…). Realism will kick in: my joint-oldest friend is a professional musician of some note and an extremely high industry reputation, but even he is someone most people in the mainstream will have never heard of, despite being capable of selling out the Royal Albert Hall for three consecutive nights.

I’ve been around the business long enough in my own career to know that fame, fortune, adulation, financial success - whatever new artists are ultimately seeking - can be a long haul or simply unattainable. But that, thankfully, is not what’s on the table right now. Ella and her band have to first graduate the university that brought them together, and then do boring things like securing first jobs or future studies. But let’s not dampen the moment: for two minutes and fifty seconds, we all had a communal moment that could never be repeated, and for many will never happen at all.

Gary Crowley’s first play of Inbound’s Something To Lose can be heard online for the next 29 days at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0c3yvlr. For news and information about Inbound and where to stream the single, visit https://linktr.ee/Inbound.official.

Expectation management: the Subbuteo Final awaits

Subbuteo.com

The last time I blogged about Chelsea it was in the immediate aftermath of sanctions being imposed on Roman Abramovich following Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine, and the existential threat the UK government’s action posed to the club. Now that a consortium led by LA Dodgers owner Todd Boehly has agreed to takeover the club - still subject to government approval - scrutiny will turn to what happens next in terms of Chelsea’s evolution.

It is believed that the Boehly takeover will pay £2.5 billion for the actual club, with a further £1.75 billion committed to the club’s development, with that investment going on [hopefully] the rebuild of Stamford Bridge, as well as support for the much-vaunted Academy, and to the EWL champions Women’s team and their Kingsmeadow stadium, a mile or so up the road from where I live. What’s not clear, however, is what will be spent on new players for the men’s first team, the side going into the 150th FA Cup Final today for their only chance of silverware this season. That, in itself, is quite a statement for a club that has won five Premier League titles, the Champions League twice, five FA Cups and three League Cups, two Community Shields, the Europa League twice and the Super Cup once, and most recently the FIFA Club World Cup - all in the Abramovich era. Compare that with what came before: until the FA Cup win over Middlesbrough in 1997 there hadn’t been anything for over 25 years.

The conventional wisdom (i.e. what pub experts and the back pages perpetuate), then, is that Abramovich started the arms race that football's elite has either actively joined or aspires to. Thus, since the sanctions were imposed on the Russian, and tightly restricted the club’s expenditure to clear the path for a takeover by someone without ties to the Kremlin, visiting fans to Stamford Bridge have sung themselves giddy with choruses of “Where’s your money gone?” and “Just like the old days - there's nobody here”. This has been a gleeful baiting of the West London club‘s supporters with all the compassion you’d expect from football’s arch tribalism. Don’t worry, we reason with ourselves in the home stands, we’d be doing exactly the same if it was the other club under sanction. Harsh, but those are the rules of the football jungle.

For the last 19 years the pervading narrative is that Abramovich’s largesse has funded a conveyor belt of silverware, sanctioning the purchase of marquee signings to win them and charging successive managers with making those players work. Which hasn’t always gone to plan: Fernando Torres, Andriy Shevchenko, Adrian Mutu, Alexei Smertin, Juan Sebastián Verón, Mateja Kežman, Tiemoue Bakayoko, Danny Drinkwater, Ross Barkley are just some of the names on the list of expensive flops, which could easily populate a complete XI plus a subs’ bench. The jury is still out, too, on the £97.5 million spent last summer on Romelu Lukaku. And, of course, for each of these disappointments there has been a head coach fired for not getting the best out of them. Even club legend Frank Lampard, who ended up swimming against the tide amid rumoured player agitation behind his back. Another is Carlo Ancelotti, arguably one of the greatest club managers in the history of the sport, who was the model Abramovich coveted for the club he’d just acquired in 2003, but ended up firing for the crime of only achieving runners-up place in the Premier League in his second season, having won it in his first (along with the FA Cup).

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

Thomas Tuchel is, therefore, likely to be the first Chelsea manager to outlast Abramovich. It’s too soon, of course, to say whether he’ll stay at the club after the Boehly takeover completes - it’s possible that he might want a change, likewise, the new owners might want someone new. But it would be fair to say that things are likely to be a lot different in the new era. Last Saturday, at his first home game, Boehly would have seen the best and the worst of his new purchase. Lukaku somewhat justified his price tag with a goal from open play and a decisive penalty in the space of three minutes, demonstrating the muscular heft it was hoped the Belgian would bring to the conventional centre forward’s position. But then, in the final fifteen minutes, Boehly would have also seen a ridiculous collapse as Wolves cheaply clawed two back, the latter of which in the 97th minute. Although some normality would have been restored a few days later with a 3-0 away win at Leeds, you could have benevolently given Boehly some right to express buyer’s remorse at Stamford Bridge last Saturday. 

The truth is that Chelsea had, in preceding games, been slipping back into the sort of defensive indifference that had done for Lampard. Stupid, lazy, careless mistakes that allowed less-fancied teams to sneak through. Tuchel’s first task, in January last year, was to rebuild Chelsea from the back, damming the leaks and instilling resilience. By last May, they’d become European champions. Those same mistakes have been largely at fault for their form since April, which has at times been explained as a combination of tiredness and the uncertainty surrounding the club. Those, I’m afraid are just excuses. Defeat away to Everton, a draw at Old Trafford, home losses to Arsenal and Brentford - all with discernible basic defensive errors.

Here, then, is the first challenge for Boehly. Antonio Rüdiger has already confirmed that he’ll be off, having called a halt on contract renewal talks, apparently because a wage of £230,000 a week wasn’t enough. This week it was revealed that he’ll play for Real Madrid for a rumoured £400,000. Next out the door will be Andreas Christensen, who is believed to have signed a pre-contractual agreement with Barcelona. Even captain César Azpiliqueta - a couple of months shy of his tenth anniversary at the club - has appeared to be stalling on a contract extension, with the Catalonians also looking to take him on, too. While Christensen and, increasingly, Azpiliqueta, have become somewhat expendable (they’ve hardly been Chelsea's most effective central defenders) Rüdiger will be emphatically irreplaceable. The loss of three central defenders, too, will only expose the scant options that remain, which include the not-yet mature Trevoh Chalobah, the largely unfit-for-purpose at this level Malang Sarr, and Thiago Silva, who turns 38 next season, and despite still being one of the most viable centre-halves in football, surely can't go on at this level forever, and certainly can’t be expected to play week-in, week-out. 

While there are reserve options - Emerson Palmieri was sent out on loan again, along with homegrown prospects Ethan Ampadu and Jake Clarke-Salter - Chelsea’s productive Academy might also have other gems to follow in the footsteps of Reece James. Inevitably the club is said to be looking outside for fresh talent, with Sevilla’s Jules Kounde a target. But while the core defenders are a cause for concern, there are doubts elsewhere. Marcos Alonso has only been getting games due to Ben Chillwell’s long-term absence, but surely the Englishman, when fit, will see the somewhat inflexible Spaniard (who is hopeless as a defending wing-back) move on? Alonso is also one of a number of players with the end of their contracts in sight, meaning that de facto chief executive Marina Granovskaia - the highly regarded Abramovich acolyte who has pulled off some impressive player sales as well as acquisitions - will need to step up deal-making.

At the beginning of the season Chelsea were tipped as one of the sides to contend for the Premier League title, but as Manchester City and Liverpool have accelerated away from Tuchel’s side, its deficiencies - and not just the defence - have been laid bare. Chelsea have become too predictable: moves begun by wingbacks have laboured in the final third, pitching crosses from the corners that have rarely found anything like a target. Lukaku will no doubt be the lightning rod for that criticism - and he hasn’t always helped his case - but there’s been too much lack of inventiveness at times across the entire attack. Timo Werner and Kai Havertz - bought at a combined cost of £115 million - haven’t produced the goods, despite a recent resurgence. Then there’s the American national captain, Christian Pulisic, who clearly has abilities but only seems to produce them on occasion. Mason Mount has probably been the most effective attacking player (and is currently tipped to be the next captain if Azpiliqueta moves on), but has too often lacked the supply from central midfield, as Jorginho, N’Golo Kanté and Mateo Kovačić have toiled in the engine room. Oh, for the addition of Mount’s bestie Declan Rice!

All of which brings me to today’s little shindig at Wembley. When I was growing up, Chelsea-v-Liverpool was more a romantic proposition than it was sport. It was the classic Subbuteo combination - the blues against the reds, but in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool were pre-eminent in domestic and European football. Chelsea, on the other hand, were the faded glamour boys of West London, having gone from star-studded fanbase in the Swinging Sixties to Second Division strugglers on the verge of financial collapse (when away fans sing “Where where you when you were shit?!”, I know exactly where in Stamford Bridge I was…). Times have changed. Chelsea’s record over the last two decades has been eminently better than Liverpool’s, a source of partisan pride amongst the Bridge faithful, but where these two teams are, now, at the end of this season, with Liverpool fighting for not one but four trophies, and Chelsea apparently flying on fumes, makes for a stressful afternoon today at Wembley.

You could say that Chelsea have, in the Abramovich era, rather become the darlings of the FA Cup, having appeared in eight finals since 2003, winning it five times. Four of those eight appearances have been in the last five finals, which have only produced the one win, against Manchester United in 2017 in a somewhat underwhelming game. Still, though, in attempting to break their frustrating recent record, it should still be acknowledged that reaching the final of arguably the world’s most prestigious club competition is something to be celebrated. It is, to some extent, the outcome of the win-at-all-costs culture Abramovich instilled at the club, where even the cream of European managerial talent was considered expendable in the face of expectation.

So what does that mean for today? There’s no denying that Liverpool, competing for a quadruple, are facing a febrile Chelsea. Of course, that requires the cliche about the underdog being under less pressure, but for Thomas Tuchel, a win over Liverpool will lift the shadow that has grown over his team since their memorable win in Porto last year as sloppiness has crept in over the last couple of months.

Brothers in arms - Christian Pulisic and Mason Mount
Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

Beyond today, and the remaining two league fixtures, a new tomorrow beckons for Chelsea Football Club. Boehly must stem the outflow of players who, as soon as the sanctions were imposed, would have been on the phone to their agents. He must immediately suppress any uncertainty. In particular, he must retain the services of Granovskaia but, moreover, ensure that the club’s top talent is tied down to new contracts before they creep into the expiry zone. A priority must be the anchoring of Mount and Reece James, whose contracts may have two and three years, respectively, to run, but are players who would be coveted by anyone. And Boehly must also hang on to Tuchel, who has largely carried the club through these last three months of crisis, being the only senior figure to speak to the press as Granovskaia, chairman Bruce Buck and even technical director and former Chelsea goalkeeper, Petr Čech, have remained out of sight. You could argue that Tuchel’s opposite number and compatriot today, Jürgen Klopp, is the blueprint. It’s taken Klopp seven years to get Liverpool to where they are today, during which time Chelsea have had six managers.

There are those yet to be fully convinced that Tuchel is ‘The One’, but after that many changes of head coach it’s hard to actually say who or what would make the job definitive. All that I’ll say is that since the end of February brought Chelsea to a state of actual jeopardy, a period of stability is needed to address these months of uncertainty. That also means that Tuchel needs to be backed in the transfer market, allowing the arrival of fresh talent to replace either the malcontents or the misfits, and perhaps more critically, be afforded the time and patience to rebuild Chelsea into sustainable domestic title contenders. If not, Tuchel will be snapped up by, you name it, any of the European behemoths.

The other item on Boehly’s to-do list will have to be Stamford Bridge. With a capacity of just under 42,000, it cannot compete with the mega-temples being built elsewhere. Abramovich came close to rebuilding the club’s home since 1905 but abandoned the plan when he ran into politically motivated visa issues with the British government. The idea was to effectively reconstruct the stadium from scratch, constructing a new complex upwards from a deep foundation on account of the fact the ground’s footprint is bordered by the Fulham Road, a railway line and the Brompton Cemetery, and can’t go anywhere else.

Of course, there is the small matter of the Boehly consortium’s takeover getting passed by the UK government. But the fact that Todd Boehly has done proper due diligence on the club and its footballing challenges (and this week spent two days at the Cobham training ground meeting both the men’s and women’s teams) provides hope that the new ownership is serious about maintaining Chelsea’s status within the European elite. A win today will be the perfect springboard for the new era at Chelsea to kick on with. It’s just a shame that it’s the current Liverpool that stands in its way.

Still got the blues - Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall

Picture: ericclapton.com

On occasion I am inclined to regale anyone who’ll listen with my affection for and affliction to the area I grew up in, and to where I returned after galavanting around the world for two decades. This stems from the discovery, relatively late in life, that the south-west London suburbs of my origin actually had more going for them than I ever knew or even suspected as a child. I’ll spare you for another post, another time, the myriad musical connections to the area around Kingston-upon-Thames, but the one that always stands out is Eric Clapton.

Time’s mists have increasingly clouded the place Clapton holds in the pantheon of absolute rock legends, and while he is flesh and blood like the rest of us, the famous ‘Clapton is God’ meme, spray-painted onto an Islington wall somewhere in the mid-’60s - which may have been, then, just cheeky hype - was applied to a young man who, arguably, would turn British rock music on its head through sheer virtuosity alone. 

Clapton had barely left Surbiton’s Hollyfield School when he joined The Yardbirds in 1963, signing his contract in a now defunct pub in New Malden (actually, one once located just a mile from the house in which I was born). Having taught himself guitar, sitting alone on the village green of rural Ripley learning blues songs by the likes of Big Bill Broonzy, the teenage Clapton, armed with a Hoyer guitar bought from Bell Music in Surbiton, found an outlet in the riverside pubs of nearby Kingston. South-west London was emerging as the home of the English blues, with districts like Ealing and Richmond becoming a Mecca for young white locals channeling the music of America’s impoverished South. Within this realm, Clapton formed one corner of a triangle of Surrey-born guitar legends, being eventually replaced in The Yardbirds by Carshalton’s Jeff Beck, who in turn introduced another prodigy, Epsom’s Jimmy Page.   

By the summer of 1966 the 21-year-old Clapton had already been in two seminal bands (the other being John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers) when he joined a third, Cream, providing an excoriating platform for him to expand his God-given talent for blues-based rock guitar, becoming the most feted musician of his peer group, a friendly rival to the equally gifted Jimi Hendrix. Cream would last all of two years - the blink of an eye in musical history terms, but just as The Beatles were only an entity for, effectively, ten years, the legacy would last much longer.

That legacy was in effect last night at the Royal Albert Hall, the Victorian wedding cake that has effectively become Clapton’s spiritual home, having first played there in 1964 with The Yardbirds, and then memorably appearing there for Cream’s farewell concert in 1968. This was the fulfilment of a personal ambition of mine: year in, year out, tickets have gone on sale for Clapton’s May ‘proms’ at the venue only to see them snapped up in seconds, not helped by the old drum’s seating capacity of just over 5,000. And, yet, here is the guitarist that I desperately wanted to emulate, especially once I discovered his local origins. I even bought an Eric Clapton-signature Fender Stratocaster in the hope that it would make me play like him. But, strangely, in all my 54 years I’ve never found myself in the same space as the man himself. I wasn’t disappointed.

Opening with a gentle version of Gary Brooker’s Lead Me To The Water in tribute to the Procol Harum frontman, who died in February, Clapton and his now familiar band of supporting players (including singer and organist Paul Carrack, bassist Nathan East and keyboard player Tim Stainton), got straight into the blues with the Chicago standard Key To The Highway. In fact, this was to be, largely, a parade of Clapton’s best known songs - a funked up I Shot The Sheriff, followed by a personal treat for me, Cream’s White Room and, later, Badge and his signature interpretation of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. 

Indeed, it was quite refreshing for Clapton to use the show - which had, like so many others, been postponed by Covid (and let’s not go near his apparent conservative views on that subject…) - as a run through of what the crowd, which appeared to be largely in the guitarist’s septuagenarian age group, had come for. More contemporary songs, like Pilgrim and River Of Tears provided textured reminders of Clapton’s writing skills (albeit both being co-written with Climie-Fisher’s Simon Climie), as well as his underrated, soulful singing voice, highlighting a point that he isn’t just a raucous blues soloist. Indeed, that became even more apparent with the mid-show acoustic set, drawing on the 1992 MTV Unplugged performance that brought Clapton a new audience (and gave a notable fillip to the acoustic guitar industry), with playful versions of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out, accompanied by Andy Fairweather Low, and the old Charlie Chaplin/Nat King Cole chestnut Smile. Then the two highlights of that MTV special, the shuffle-arrangement of Layla and the still poignant Tears In Heaven.

A quick reset of the stage, and we were back to the electric Clapton, with the aforementioned Badge leading into the tender Wonderful Tonight (references to drunken buffoonery not withstanding, this was a timely rendition for my wife and I to enjoy on our one-month wedding anniversary...) and then back on the heavy pedal for Crossroads and another Johnson song, Little Queen Of Spades. Some in the  venerable Albert Hall crowd must have had advanced warning as to what came next, as from our eerie we sensed something of a stage rush (though clearly slowed by hip replacements, arthritis and other advanced-year hindrances) which heralded a second performance of the night for Layla, played out in its full Derek and the Dominos form, replete with its freewheeling coda. With that, and an encore of the Joe Cocker song High Time We Went - voiced by Carrack (a welcome opportunity for him to demonstrate arguably the UK’s finest vocal cords), the 77-year-old Clapton was off. There was little ceremony and, as had been the case for most of the night, no great interaction with the audience.

That appears to have always been his MO. Apart from the occasional brisk “thank you!”, and shoutouts to individuals in the band, Clapton has, from those teenage performances in the pubs of south-west London, through his legend building to now, mostly let his fingers do the talking. Like many of his other peers still going, here was proof that age is, broadly, just a number. I’ll admit that, as the world came to a halt two years ago, I wondered how many of these legends I would ever get to see again live. Clapton himself had suggested as long ago as 2014 that he might retire, as nerve damage to his fingers as well as other age-related ailments started to make performing less enjoyable. There was nothing, however, in last night’s display to suggest that he’s about to pull the plug on his 60-year career. 

In my last blog post (several weeks and a wedding ago) I came to the conclusion that Genesis had, finally, come to the end of the road, with their visibly aged and ailing lead singer. At the Albert Hall was  a guitarist (and Phil Collins’ former mucker) nearing his eighth decade and showing every bit of the fretboard dexterity that first blew the London music scene away in The Roosters, The Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers and then Cream before he’d even turned 21. 56 years on, that God-given talent is still there. Last night we cherished it.