Holding out for a villain, not a hero (yet)

Picture: © Danjaq, LLC and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. 007, James Bond and related logos are trademarks of Danjaq, LLC.

With a very real sociopathic lunatic threatening civilisation with very real nuclear annihilation, it's probably the wrong time to think about who 007 might be up against in the as-yet unnamed 26th ‘official’ James Bond film that Eon Productions is expected to start pre-production work on sometime soon. But that’s not stopping producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson thinking about who the baddie will be in ‘Bond 26’, as it is currently known.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter last week during a presentation dinner, at which Broccoli and her half-brother received the 2022 Pioneer Award from the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation, Broccoli said that they always consider what challenge Bond should face before anything else. “We always sit down with our writers, and we start by thinking about ‘What is the world afraid of?’,” she revealed. “We start by thinking about, ‘Who’s the Bond villain?’. We try to focus on that as the sort of uber story, and then we want to also look at Bond’s emotional life, and what he’ll be facing personally that he hasn’t had to deal with before. So he has two big issues in the films — one is the geopolitical one and the other is the personal one.

Wilson hinted that even the most up-to-date global dramas could be reflected in Bond 26. “Everyone thought that when the Berlin Wall came down it was all hunky dory [in the world] and there would be no stories to tell anymore. Well, that proved wrong. The world is so unpredictable and it’s a rich environment for storytelling.”

That won’t be the only response to change: with the death of the Queen, Bond will next be working for His Majesty’s Secret Service. “Bond worked for queen and country, and will now be working for king and country,” Broccoli told the Hollywood Reporter. “He was a very loyal servant of the British government. He’s a classical hero that cares about the world and cares about humanity more than his own personal desires. It’s a very sad time in Britain, obviously, it’s a big time of transition, but she certainly has left a very extraordinary legacy.”

Daniel Craig, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson and Michelle Yeoh at the 2022 Will Rogers Pioneer of the Year Dinner

Speaking of transition, there is still the small matter of who will play Bond next. “When we get to a point, like we are now, we have to think about the trajectory of the Bond films and the storylines and where we want to take them,” Broccoli explained. “So, that’s really the main focus at the beginning. Once we have a sense of where we want to go, then we’ll start thinking about casting.”

Broccoli and Wilson recently spoke to Variety and revealed the scale of arguably cinema’s most auspicious casting decision. “It’s not just about casting an actor for a film,” Broccoli said. “It’s about a reinvention, and ‘Where are we taking it? What do we want to do with the character? And then, once we figure that out, who’s the right person for that particular reinvention?”

Broccoli explained that when they first spoke to Daniel Craig about the role, the actor had to come to terms with the length of service he’d be expected to commit to, not to mention how much it would turn his life upside down for, then, a relatively unknown actor. “It’s not just showing up for a couple of months of filming,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “When we cast Bond, it’s a 10 to 12-year commitment. So any actor is probably thinking, ‘Do I really want that thing?’.”

The vexed question, however, for many Bond fans is what Eon will do with Bond next time out, given that No Time To Die brought Craig’s reign to an end with [sort of spoiler alert] 007 facing certain oblivion as Royal Navy cruise missiles rained down on Lyutsifer Safin’s bio weapon-infected island. Fan forums have called for the producers to make Bond much younger, even younger than the character was in Craig’s debut, Casino Royale, which suggested that it was the start of his ‘double-O’ status. 

As the conclusion of Craig’s five-film arc, No Time To Die represented the evolution of the character, from the “sexist, mysogynist dinosaur” Judi Dench’s M branded Bond in Pierce Brosnan’s Goldeneye, to a significantly more emotional Bond. “The films over his tenure were the first time we really connected the emotional arc,” Broccoli says. The character will inevitably evolve even further with the choice of the next actor to play 007 - to which the producers remain quite open-minded. Broccoli and Wilson have hinted, though, that the notion of a women playing Bond has been quietly nixed. 

With the likes of Idris Elba, Henry Cavill and Toms Hardy, Hiddleston and Holland appearing to rule themselves out, press speculation has turned to actors like Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page, Henry Golding, Micheal Ward and Thomas Doherty, the latter three relatively unknown, as Craig was. By the time casting actually takes place, there will no doubt be plenty more permutations. I just know it won’t be me.

With the 60th anniversary next week of Bond’s cinematic debut in Dr. No, on 5 October 1962, and Mad Vlad in the Kremlin threatening armageddon, consciousness of fiction’s most famous superhero remains high. Who knows what sort of world Bond 26 will arrive in, as Broccoli and Wilson have said that could be another two years before the film hits screens, and there’s a long way to go before then. The first job will be identifying its villain and the fiendish plot he or she will require 007 to foil. Given the state of the world right now, it would be fair to say that there’s a rich field of possibilities to take inspiration from.

A front row to history

Picture: Twitter/British Army

The flags have returned to full mast. Television presenters are wearing colour again. Politicians are back on our airwaves spinning their way through the cost of living crisis. Life after 12 extraordinary days is back to normal. 

“Don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to something else,” crowed the predictable tweets from the more reactionary quarters of social media last night as the Queen’s funeral, and a week and a half of blanket coverage of what has been, without wishing to sound hyperbolic, a properly historic event, came to an end.

On a superficial level, the days since news broke on 8 September of the Queen’s death have shown British pomp and circumstance at its most baffling. Anyone of a republican point of view, or simply indifferent to the role of monarchy in a modern democratic society will have found the enforced lockdown of anything extravagant in the wake of a frail 96-year-old’s death absurd: the abandoning of broadcast schedules, on-air presenters dressed uniformly in black, filling hours of rescheduled rolling programming with nothing but conjecture and babble.

Picture: The Royal Family

But to many, many more, the passing of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles has been nothing short of history unfolding before us. From the moment daytime TV was interrupted by grave-looking newsreaders dressed in black, standing in front of Buckingham Palace, the auspicious moments kept coming. They were captured on live television in a manner no monarchic transition in Britain’s long regal history has ever previously witnessed: we were there at Balmoral when The Firm’s senior team arrived in united grief; there when the Queen’s body was transported to Edinburgh and there when it landed at RAF Northolt, emerging from the loading ramp of a giant, slate-grey Globemaster transport aircraft. We were there as it was driven slowly through rain-soaked west London streets to Westminster. There when more than a quarter of a million people queued for hours on end to see the late monarch lying in state, itself a demonstration of endurance, unquestioning loyalty and quirky fanaticism. We were there when the new King signed registers, met the newly-installed prime minister, and shook countless strangers’ hands in the devolved provinces. There as two estranged brothers and their wives went walkabout in Windsor. And there, finally, as members of an estimated five billion-strong worldwide audience tuned in for a six-hour funeral.

An opinion poll published shortly before the Queen’s death suggested that more than 60% of the UK was broadly in favour of the monarchy. In the days since, that manifested itself at the expense of anything else getting a look-in on the news agenda. Liz Truss, in post for just two days before HMTQ popped her clogs, had barely got going with her new agenda before she was reduced, temporarily, to a bit part role in the nation’s fabric. If nothing else, the mourning period gave us respite from the relentless churn of politics that have consumed our media for…well, forever.

The billions watching around the world, not to mention the tens of thousands who lined the funeral cortege route from Westminster to Windsor, on top of the thousands who assembled before giant screens in municipal parks, gave credence to the belief that the Queen’s death meant a lot to many, even those in places where she’d only ever been heard of. 

She was “the world’s Queen”, a remarkable comment, given both the political systems in place int the free and not so free world, but also our own post-imperial, ‘Little Britain’ inferiority complex. Somehow she even transcended her own status - an unelected head of state in several nations, featuring on at least 30 currencies, and with one of the wealthiest portfolios of any individuals on the planet. And, yet, when she said “We will meet again” in that resonant address during the pandemic, she touched further and deeper than any politician did during the crisis. There was a reason why, over these days, we’ve seen and heard endless vox pops conducted in high streets and market squares saying more or less the same thing - that they’d miss - in no particular order - her smile, her duty, her constancy.

If that hadn’t affected you, then the lump-inducing notes from the lone piper in Windsor’s St. George’s Chapel yesterday as they faded away provided the eeriest of musical beds for the lowering of the Queen’s coffin into the chapel’s vault. Anyone who has ever attended the funeral of a loved one will know that awful, irreversible moment of goodbye. It was etched on the face of King Charles as the camera framed him. I challenge anyone not to have been moved by it, or anyone not to have empathy for his family.  

Wherever you stand on monarchy, there’s no escaping the fact that we’ve emerged from an incredible period of our nation’s history. The “ending of the second Elizabethan Era” has a grandeur to it, but it would be fascinating to know how historians will regard it decades or centuries from now. Television has amplified it: when the Queen ascended the throne in 1952, and was crowned in June 1953, hardly anyone had TV sets. At the end of her life, we’ve got them all in our pockets. Yesterday I spent the better part of ten hours in front of our TV, from the build-up to the funeral to its conclusion. Believe me, I’m no rampant monarchist, but I know a once-in-a-lifetime event when I see one. On various levels it was fascinating - the application of long planned-for protocols, arcane traditions, the single greatest collection of world leaders ever assembled, the mass of people turning out for one person. And this on top of moments such as Charles and his siblings resembling human waxworks for their 15-minute vigil at Westminster Hall, as members of the general public filed past, some in disbelief as to who they were seeing before them.

It was all part of a celebration of a life as much as commemoration of a long life lost. The hats, the outfits, the smiles, the corgis, the appearances with James Bond and Paddington Bear, the waving - there is a lot we’ll miss.

Picture: Twitter/The Royal Family

Conscious disguises - the life and times of David Bowie

David Bowie. The gift to this blog that keeps on giving. The occasion is Moonage Daydream, the much-anticipated feature-length documentary by director Brett Morgen, which opens today. As this channel has regularly recorded, the posthumous Bowie industry has never ceased to turn in the six and a half years since the icon’s death, with a bounty of re-releases, box sets, books, pop-up shops and exhibitions all pumping the legacy of a rock star like no other. While cynics might see it as exploitation, fan - and we are many - will see it as justified deification of one of the singularly most influential artists of the 20th century, one who crafted, controlled and curated his image so consciously while alive, and even as he knowingly approached death.

Moonage Daydream is, though, the first ‘official’ documentary to be sanctioned by the Bowie estate since his passing in January 2016. Appropriately, five years in the making, Morgen’s 135-minute epic does for The Dame what Peter Jackson’s even longer Get Back film did for The Beatles. Whereas Jackson’s production distilled 21 days’ worth of consecutive footage of the Fabs trying to make what would become their Let It Be album, Moonage Daydream painstakingly pieces together “thousands” of hours of film and video - some from Bowie’s personal archive - along with 48 newly remastered live music. It is a labour of love by Morgen, a Bowie fan all his life, which attempts to penetrate the creative ambition that made the singer who he was, single-handedly defining glam rock and, magpie-like, grabbing at any genre that took his fancy - from folk to progressive rock, Philly soul to drum and bass, trite pop to, in his final outing, the prescient album Blackstar, complex jazz.

Within this broiling sea of reinvention, Morgen reflects the theatrical guises Bowie adopted throughout his musical journey, as he evolved from suburban folkie David Jones to David Bowie, the vessel for the various phases he would pass through - the alien Ziggy Stardust, the glam prince, the soul boy, even the 1980s pop star (“my Phil Collins period”). “Becoming a pop act was no different than being Aladdin Sane or being Ziggy,” says Morgen. ”It was by design. He was going to enter the mainstream. It was just another challenge.” This point blew the director’s mind. The conventional wisdom is that Bowie made the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums out of weariness (or laziness). It wasn’t, argues Morgen. It was simply another conscious disguise to be that commercial.

“I think he would like this film,” keyboard player and frequent Bowie collaborator Mike Garson said of his late friend in The Times recently. “Three quarters of it he would really enjoy,” the remaining quarter being Morgen’s visually erratic style that will bombard the viewers with a dazzling kaleidoscope of imagery, zig-zagging its way through the Bowie timeline. The film was conceived while Bowie was alive, with Morgen pitching the idea to the star unsuccessfully, and before his apparent evaporation into what felt like partial retirement in 2004. Morgen turned his attention to the Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane) and Kurt Cobain (Montage Of Heck) to satisfy his storytelling, but Bowie wouldn’t go away. At the same time, he had the desire to create music films for the IMAX format.

On hearing that Bowie had died, on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday, Morgen contacted Bill Zysblat, who’d looked after the star’s business affairs. Zysblat revealed that his client had archived a treasure trove of content. Over the next five years Morgen worked his way through boxes of footage and still images - some five million assets in all, setting himself up with the near-impossible task of turning it all into something compelling. “Not because I wanted to,” he explained recently to the NME, explaining that he was, at that stage, completely unfunded. Working 18-hour days on his own, his dedication almost cost Morgen his life. “I had a massive heart attack on January 5, 2017,” he told the NME, revealing that he flatlined for three minutes, just five days shy of the first anniversary of his subject’s own death.

From today we will see for ourselves whether this near-death experience was worth the trouble. Moonage Daydream will reward us with, Morgen promises, “the missing unicorns”: never before-seen clips of Bowie performing live at Earls Court on the 1978 tour for the Heroes and Low albums. “Two nights. 35 millimetre. 24-track audio. Possibly the greatest performance on film of David’s career,” Morgen says. The film won’t just present the visual spectacle of Bowie performing live, but the aural brilliance of it too, with Morgen employing the Academy Award-winning team that worked on Bohemian Rhapsody to turn less than great quality tape recordings into something befitting the cinematic soundstage. 

Five and a half years after his death, with a plethora of posthumous biographies and retrospectives filling up shelves (especially mine...), the cold hard truth is that we still don’t know all that much about Bowie. We know the musical milestones, some of his family story, his Brixton childhood and adolescence in Beckenham. Even now, there’s precious little of Bowie actually talking if you search for it on YouTube. There are the few chat show appearances, the uncanny prediction of the Internet in his Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, but apart from Top Of The Pops clips, Live Aid and the films he made as an actor, nothing that truly reveals the artist himself. Even Alan Yentob’s legendary 1975 Omnibus film for the BBC, Cracked Actor, leaves the viewer vague as to who it was about, thanks to Bowie appearing gaunt and clearly on drugs (“I was so blocked, so stoned,” he once admitted while talking about the documentary. “It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it. I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely”).

Morgen’s challenge with Moonage Daydream is, clearly, how much new it will reveal. So much of Bowie’s career was a guise combining distinct image and music that even his hair styles formed part of a character. After spending the 1990s trying to bury his past, attempting the thankfully short-lived grunge band Tin Machine and even trying to put his creative peak in the 1970s behind him with the Sound + Vision Tour, Bowie finally embraced his popularity. His headline appearance at Glastonbury in 2000 was a joyous jukebox of hits. But if you watch the performance film, you also see a star shorn of his lofty artistic pretences. He is Dave, the blokey, jokey feller from south London. Indeed, in the four years following that set, we saw something of the Bowie you’d be happy to hang out with in the pub - a warm, self-effacing humour exuding from the stage in the brilliant A Reality Tour DVD, or being wickedly droll with Ricky Gervais in Extras. 

Perhaps, though, we don’t want Bowie to be anything more than the slightly ethereal figure he became in the late 1960s and in his ’70s pomp. Even in his final music video, for the Blackstar single Lazarus (“Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can't be seen”, embracing his impending death, but managing to remain abstract, distancing himself from the rest of us mere mortals. And that, quite frankly, is alright with me. 

How ARE you?! Selling Sunset, Dutch style

Picture: Netflix

Bored, one Sunday afternoon in early 2004, I drove out of Amsterdam in the direction of Hilversum, a name you’ll know if you’ve ever owned a transistor radio as it was one of the pre-marked positions embossed on tuning dials (the town being the Netherlands’ self-styled ‘media city’ as home to most of the country’s broadcasters due to its hilly position above a mostly below-sea level landscape.

Dutch afternoons in February tend to close in early, so not fancying navigating uncharted waters in the wintry half light, I decided not to make the tour too long and navigated out of Hilversum in a looping direction back to Amsterdam. An arrow-straight tree-lined road took me through a picturesque, wooded area known as t’Gooi, passing bucolic communities which, judging by their properties, were home to the well to-do (media folk and Amsterdam financiers, no doubt) along with working farms. 

Somewhere before the road connected with the A2 spinal motorway that would take me back to the Dutch cultural capital, I made a decision that would prove to be fateful: I turned off the provincieweg and detoured into a cute village containing historic looking chalets, elegantly architectured townhouses and a windmill, with a river running right through it. 

© Simon Poulter 2022

Driving gingerly through minuscule streets I eventually squeezed across a bridge that seemed barely wide enough for a bicycle, let alone my car, and onto the opposing bank, passing through a neighbourhood of modern post-war housing. Eventually I found myself back on the main road and heading home to my one-bedroom shoe box in Amsterdam’s Oud Zuid (Old South). By the following spring, I’d decided that this apartment - which had only meant to be temporary refuge after I relocated from California - had become claustrophobic. 

I asked the relocation agent who’d helped find it what the housing market was like in Amsterdam’s outer suburbs, having in mind something with a bit of space to house my America-fattened library of CDs and DVDs, and my modest collection of guitars and other musical accoutrements that had been in storage since arriving in the country. A shortlist of six houses was drawn up, with visits planned to all of them in the space of a single Tuesday. The sixth and final property was in the village I’d taken a detour through just a few months before. This was the house that I made my home that July.

Last week, after 18 years of ownership, I said goodbye to it. Circumstances have prevailed in the intervening years, eventually returning to London after 17 years abroad and, now, with a wife and a home of our own to maintain. My little bolthole in the Dutch countryside had become superfluous to requirements. That’s life.

Now, don’t get me wrong: selling up was bittersweet. I’d never owned an actual house before, just a flat in Surbiton (and various rentals and flatshares), so there was something satisfying about coming home each night to my own front door, my own living room, kitchen, upstairs bedroom and a converted attic that was my home office and imaginary music studio. In the spring, summer and even early autumn, the house had an Italian-style garden at the back in which to chill out, especially after coming home from work. And then there were the neighbours: I can’t speak highly enough of the families who lived around me, who welcomed this lone Englishman into their midst in the summer of 2004 (and put up with his English-speaking ignorance and occasional, futile attempts to converse in Dutch). Even towards the end of the selling process, they were of enormous help, taking care of things I was unable to do from London. If there was one downside, it was that - as rural villages go - it could be a little cut off. Amsterdam was only 20km away (the skycrapers of the city’s south-eastern business district could be seen in the distance across billiard table-flat fields), but unless you had a car, you may as well have been living on the moon. With a car, commuting and socialising was easier than it is here in London, with its nose-to-nose packed morning trains and choked city streets. 

© Simon Poulter 2022

Still, though, handing over the keys to the house’s new owners brought a mixture of emotions. I was delighted, first, to have sold the house in a steadily flattening market, but secondly to a young couple just starting out on the property ladder. They, too, were moving out of the city. But even on the morning of the handover, I was reminded acutely of how life in the area was just so unrushed, despite being close to one of Europe’s liveliest cities - buying champagne for my neighbours in the picturesque village of Abcoude or stopping for a coffee in the timeless marketplace of Breukelen, just down the road (and the town from which New York’s Brooklyn gets its name).

I grew up in a village, albeit a London suburb (where I live again today) which the locals call ‘The Village’. It isn’t one, of course - just another piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is conurbated London - but you see what they mean. In our street there is a similar sense of the neighbourliness I experienced in my Dutch village, wherein neighbours both know your business, but also would do anything for you when called upon. It’s almost from another time.

The process to sell the house was as accelerated as it was to buy it in the first place. With the Dutch summer break fast approaching, not to mention the cost-of-living crisis threatening to deflate the country’s property market, I needed to move quickly. Here’s where my force-of-nature estate agent Gwen came to the fore. We’d been in touch for several years, dating back to a time when - as these cycles go - Dutch property was undergoing another of its capricious periods. I kept my patience. When the time came to get on with selling, Gwen connected me with all the decorators, repairmen, gardeners and cleaners I would need to ensure it was in tip-top condition, operating at a remote distance from the UK to get the house ready for sale. Simply put, it just happened. 

For a profession as maligned as estate agents, Gwen was diligent to the core. Mine may not have been the biggest house sale she’ll ever preside over, particularly in an area containing million euro mansions, but even with my modest little drum, I felt like I was being given top priority. Even more so, given that much of the process was being handled in a language different to mine (though the Dutch gift for linguistics meant that my laziness was tolerated throughout).

Contrast my experience with the disturbingly addictive Selling Sunset reality shows on Netflix. They have become a fixture in our house. I would like to say that it is my wife and step-daughter who watch them, with me occasionally looking up from my iPad and harumphing, but that would be a bare-faced lie. 

For the uninitiated, Selling Sunset, and its new sibling Selling Sunset OC, are fly-on-the-wall shows about the Oppenheim Group, a high-end estate agency operating in the rarified echelons of Los Angeles’ priciest neighbourhoods and, latterly, the equally expensive coastal cities of Orange County, to LA’s south. Looking at these trash TV series from one viewpoint, I know LA very well and we recently had the final component of our honeymoon in the OC’s Huntington Beach (dining out in places like Laguna Beach and Balboa Island, which feature in the show), so seeing familiar sights is a draw. But those who’ve seen the shows will know that’s not what draws in the viewers: it’s the absolute bitchfest that ensues each episode as they focus as much on the interpersonal chaos between the ‘cast’ of estate agents (and, evidently, wannabe actors), with their obvious cosmetic enhancements, as they gouge each others eyes out (metaphorically, but I wouldn’t put it past them actually gouging a rival’s eyes) in pursuit of their cut of a mult-million dollar house sale. And seeing as one house in Selling Sunset OC went for over $106,000,000 you can understand the blood thirsty ambition. My eyes are still watering from that.

So, I was saying...

Picture: Chelsea FC

I wasn’t intending to blog again about Chelsea for a while, but this morning’s shock announcement that the club had “parted company” with Thomas Tuchel took almost everyone by surprise. 

Even with this club’s history, especially in the Abramovich era, of capricious managerial sackings (such as Carlo Ancelotti - arguably one of the greatest club coaches of the modern era - for simply leading Chelsea to second place in the Premier League at the end of his sophomore season, having done the league and cup double in his first...), the abrupt way with which the Todd Boehly-led regime dispensed with Tuchel was utterly shocking.

Viewed through a narrow prism, it might have been coming - at some point in the near future. Even if the new Premier League season record looks patchy - three wins, two defeats and a draw - it was last night’s defeat away to Dynamo Zagreb that brought the curtain down on the German’s 20-month tenure. The 1-0 loss might have been accommodated, but not the way Chelsea lost, with Boehly and his co-owner Behdad Eghbali looking on, and immediately determining that they’d seen enough.

Reports have since emerged that all had not been well in the Chelsea camp for some time. No surprise given the sometimes toothless performances of late, but most had faith in Tuchel to turn things around, especially after he’d picked up a browbeaten team from Frank Lampard in January 2021 and promptly went on to win the Champions League, the European Super Cup and the Club World Cup in the space of a few months. When Russia invaded Ukraine, and Roman Abramovich became sanctioned, putting the club itself at existential risk, Tuchel became Chelsea’s public face. This at the same time as he was going through a divorce. As spring gave way to summer, and the club’s ownership was eventually resolved at the 11th hour, Boehly took a hands-on role in rebuilding, eventually spending £273 million on acquiring Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Raheem Stirling, Kalidou Koulibaly, Wes Fofana, Marc Cucurella and others to plug gaps. 

Even the most ambitious proprietor would understand that, following a shorter pre-season and only a few games of the new season itself, it would take time for the new players to bed in and the squad to gel. Perhaps, though, that’s an overly generous assessment. In my last post on Chelsea I quoted Tuchel’s rantings about the team lacking the right mentality: “It’s a lack of hunger, intensity, a lack of determination to win duels, to actually do things on the highest level.” Goals were too easily shipped in moments of lax concentration, while at the other end, attacks looked positively anaemic. There are, too, reports of Tuchel’s relationship with the squad taking an unexpected turn for the worse. From, clearly, being a good man manager - you don’t achieve what he did on his arrival if you’re not - to seeing even Mason Mount off the pace makes you question how the hitherto underlying spirit dropped off. Hakim Zyech has looked as disinterested as a lethargic teenager visiting an elderly relative, while Christian Pulisic - who has never fully lived up to expectations - has stumbled about with nothing to show for it. And, yet, Tuchel continued to play them.

Conor Gallagher, who Crystal Palace were desperate to keep after his aclaimed loan period, was bawled out by Tuchel at every opportunity during his debut home start at the Bridge; Billy Gilmour, another youth prospect and serial loanee, was eventually sold to Brighton for a cut-price £9 million. That was, obviously, a club decision, but Tuchel was more involved in this summer’s business than any Chelsea manager for the previous 18 seasons. There are suggestions, too, that Tuchel simply hadn’t yet developed the same working relationship with the new owners that he’d enjoyed with Marina Granovskaia and Petr Čech, previously Abramovich’s representatives on Earth. I don’t know about that, but for a manager to be terminated so quickly suggests a ruthlessness that no one was expecting from Boehly, an owner who has been more visible in three months than Abramovich was in 18 years.

There was, though, something pleasantly round about Tuchel’s sacking, after his 100th game in charge. Yesterday marked 100 days since the new owners took over. The word is, however, that the Zagreb result wouldn’t have made any difference, and change was already in the offing. Perhaps Tuchel was indeed the architect of his own downfall. Communication with his squad had become minimal (as had his confidence in their abilities), and he had reportedly become less engaging with the club hierarchy, too. Tuchel was also racking up the bookings for his touchline behaviour, including that infamous red card and hefty fine following the stormy Tottenham encounter at Stamford Bridge. It was starting to become obvious that his public demeanour wasn’t quite right. Even his normally frenzied windmilling from the touchline, like a tracksuited Basil Fawlty, had given away a greater restlessness than his normal frenetic appearance. It’s entirely reasonable to suggest that this was only a window on what he was like behind the closed gates of Cobham. With a win ratio of 44%, and Chelsea heading towards mid-table of the Premier League - even only after six games and 10 points out of a maximum 18 - something wasn’t right.

“The new owners believe it is the right time to make this transition,” the club said in a statement, conflating the 100 days of Boehly/Clearlake ownership with Tuchel’s final match in charge. To this they aded the customary platitude of “placing on record” the club’s “gratitude” to Tuchel and his staff. The bottom line is, however, that regardless of who is in charge, Chelsea are manageress yet again. 

The end of the Abramovich era was meant to herald a period of stability, of allowing the manager to build in much the same way as Jurgen Klopp had been allowed to at Liverpool, not to be felled by a knee-jerk reaction at the first sign of failure. But, as we are constantly reminded, this is a results business, and the results simply haven’t been good enough. And even though players should always bear the burden of poor performances, the coach is paid to motivate them. Tuchel probably knew that had been missing after the Zagreb game when he declared himself to be “angry at myself and the team”, adding that “everything was missing”. Sadly, his job was to ensure that it wasn’t.

So what happens now? With Brighton’s Graham Potter hotly tipped to succeed Tuchel - in what would be a major gamble on someone unused to managing a collection of high-octane egos competing in Europe - the Chelsea roundabout spins again. The new owners have made their point in shedding Tuchel so soon in their reign, but at the same time, they’ve set themselves up for failure in the future, if the managerial door revolves every time results take a dive. From a fan’s point of view, we only want the club to succeed, and if that means drastic action, then so be it. Just as long as it doesn’t mean that Rafa Benitez gets another shot, we’ll support the shirt, come what may.

Window of opportunity: time for Chelsea to put a turbulent August behind them

Picture: Chelsea FC

“It’s soft, soft, soft defending. What stops that? Pure mentality. You stop it with pure mentality, defending mentality so there is no superiority for the opponent. Just toughen up as a team.” So said Thomas Tuchel in the aftermath of Chelsea’s defeat on Tuesday night at Southampton, their second loss of this already five games-old Premier League season, which has left the club languishing mid-table. And, to be honest, he was right.

On Match Of The Day, Tuchel was equally forthright: “We lose concentration, we lose our plan and lose consistency, it is too easy to beat us. We need to have answers, we need to step up and play a level higher if needed. We struggled to do this.” Crucially, he added: “It is too easy to put us off balance, to beat us, to confuse us. It is too easy. It happened against Leeds. We need to understand why and find solutions.”

Well, solutions may have arrived. Last night’s closure of the summer transfer window ended a £255 million spree, the second highest spend ever by a European football club. Into the ranks have come Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly, Marc Cucurella and Wesley Fofana, along with teenagers Carney Chukwuemeka and Cesare Casadei being added to academy director Neil Bath's next-generation vision.

When the Todd Boehly/Clearlake consortium took over Chelsea it promised a sizeable fund to plug gaps, especially in defensive capabilities following the departures of Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen. It would, of course, be ridiculously naive to expect the new blood to already be producing the goods, but - the Southampton performance notwithstanding - Koulibaly and Cucurella have looked lively (but clearly still gelling with their teammates) and Sterling's brace against Leicester and Chelsea’s only goal against Southampton hinted at the goal scoring prowess of which the 27-year-old is reknown. 

However, one swallow doesn't make a summer. Until yesterday’s signing of Aubameyang, the lack of a qualified No.9 finisher and indifferent performances from Chelsea's massed ranks of attacking midfielders meant that goals were in short supply from others, including the toiling Kai Havertz - played as a sort of 9 - or the patently frustrated Christian Pulisic. The 33-year-old Aubameyang will still have to demonstrate his worth in a position that has been checkered for Chelsea over the years (and is unlikely to play straight away for his new club after he was attacked with a hammer by a burglar at his Barcelona home earlier this week).

Critics will always round on the sums of money paid by a supposed championship contender to bolster their ranks, and in Chelsea’s case, it has always been so. Ever since Roman Abramovich commenced his extravagant outlay to turn the perennial under-achievers into London’s own Galacticos, the wisdom of football’s tribality has had it that the club has simply bought the five Premier League titles, five FA Cups, the Champions League (twice) and several more trophies, at a cost of 15 different managers in the 19-year Abramovich era. But at what cost? As a season ticket holder of many years standing, I’ve benefitted from all the glory, but can’t help feeling that Chelsea have also fuelled the inflationary player market. As we’ve seen again this summer, when Chelsea come knocking, a player’s value seems to go up by at least another £10 million. How else does the relatively untried 21-year-old Fofana move to Chelsea from Leicester for an eye-watering £70 million-plus add-ons?

Todd Boehly and Wes Fofana
Picture: Chelsea FC

Time will tell as to whether this summer’s intake will make a difference. The brief, at the end of last season, was that Chelsea need to close the 20-point gap on Liverpool and Manchester City. Five games in, that looks extremely unlikely. In mitigation, this has been a somewhat fraught summer for the club. 2021-22 ended with the existential threat of the club disappearing altogether, following the UK government sanctions on Abramovich forcing him to sell up. The Boehly-Clearlake takeover took an uneasily long time to close, which meant a frantic few weeks to reorganise everything from the club website to Stamford Bridge stadium staff, as well as start their summer transfer business. A short summer, with the new season starting even earlier due to UEFA’s ludicrous World Cup in Qatar, has added to the pressures on Tuchel to hit the ground running, with both new players and a squad featuring several players looking for a move away.

There is certainly substance to Tuchel’s comments about mentality. But while there have been myriad conditions mitigating the club this summer, none of the players at the club already or newly joined are under-rewarded. That, of course, is assuming that a modern Premier League player’s psychology is purely underpinned by their wage packets and what colour Lamborghini they want to buy next. Clearly, though, there have been some fragile egos at play. For example, it will be interesting to see how Hakim Zyech performs, now that he hasn’t returned to Ajax, or that Pulisic hasn’t found somewhere else to ply his alleged wingcraft. Marcus Alonso has, thankfully, finally been off-loaded to Barcelona as a makeweight in the Aubameyang deal, which will hopefully be one less disinterested influence in the dressing room.

Picturre: Chelsea FC

Hopefully, then, the “distractions” (Tuchel’s word) of the transfer window are now behind Chelsea and they can knuckle down to the business of closing that gap with City and Liverpool. Much expectation will fall on the shoulders of Aubameyang, but given that he’s following in the footsteps of Romelu Lukaku, Fernando Torres, Gonzalo Higuain, Alvaro Morata, Radamel Falcao and even Andrei Schevchenko - with the exception of Didier Drogba, the centre forward role at Chelsea may well be cursed. In truth, though, while that position might attract all the attention, it’s elswhere that Tuchel must apply himself. 

When he took over from Frank Lampard, Tuchel rebuilt from the back, addressing defensive frailty. The job now is to find the right formation, figuring out how best to use a good pool of defenders, including newcomers Koulibaly, Cucurella, the established old heads of Thiago Silva and Cesar Azpiliqueta, and wingbacks Reece James and Ben Chillwell. Midfield still presents a challenge. On paper, N’Golo Kante, Jorginho and Mateo Kovacic should be ipregnable holding players, but injuries have blighted the position. The arrival of Juve’s Denis Zakaria on loan might make the role more dynamic. Moving upfield, Chelsea’s attack has looked anaemic in the opening games of the season. Sterling aside, others, like Havertz, Zyech, Pulisic and even the saintly Mason Mount have simply not been delivering.

Tuchel is right in saying that Chelsea’s problems have been mental rather than physical, but in itself, the mental challenge now is for the head coach himself to impose his will on team psychology. They need to play less predictably and with greater resilience. And that starts tomorrow with the visit to Stamford Bridge from West Ham.