A game of two halves

It wasn’t, let’s face it, a particularly successful debut weekend for Chelsea's new home kit. Defeat on Saturday for Thomas Tuchel's side in the FA Cup Final and then a thumping 4-0 win, yesterday, by Barcelona over Chelsea in the women’s Champions League Final. It would have made for uncomfortable reading this morning in SW6 and in Surrey. Unsurprisingly, however, most of the media chin-scratching is over the challenge Tuchel now faces to keep his team in contention for Europe next season, rather than recognition of just how far Emma Hayes has brought Chelsea, and women’s professional football in England.

The women’s game has transformed out of all recognition in recent years, with most of the big clubs ploughing money into their women’s squads, making competitions like the Women’s Super League in England far more exciting as a result. Rather than treating them as ancillary operations, owners like Roman Abramovich have matched ambition with resources. Chelsea coach Hayes has been the beneficiary of a recruitment programme which, proportionately, has kept pace with - and even exceeded - that of the men’s squad, complementing the dedicated training facilities at the club's all-squad Cobham training complex.

Picture: Chelsea FC

It was no coincidence, either, that Abramovich himself was in Gothenburg last night to cheer - and console - Hayes’ players. And, yet, I wonder how much newspaper attention will be afforded Hayes in taking an English women's team to the pinnacle fixture in European professional football? The sports pages may have covered the final, but the women’s game is still painfully lacking respect from many sports editors, with coverage often buried. Even worse, from male football fans, of which a cursory gaze through the comments of any attempt by the Mail Online to cover games reveals a depressing litany of misogyny (I’m not even talking about casual sexism, either) and homophobia. 

Picture: Twitter/Alex Scott

I’m not trying to be woke in raising this. I just find it hard to understand, genuinely, how in the 21st century it should even be a ‘thing’ that women play football professionally. But here we are, in a world where former Arsenal and England defender Alex Scott, who has already built up substantial experience as a TV presenter and football pundit, is chosen to replace Dan Walker (who has never played football professionally) as anchor of BBC1’s Football Focus, and all of a sudden online forums are full of “box-ticking” comments about the BBC appointing a black women to present the Saturday lunchtime institution. 

At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, there are clearly a lot of people with a problem at the idea of women doing something that men can also do. It manifests itself in even darker ways, too: former England international and Chelsea winger Karen Carney contemplated taking her own life after being abused on Twitter following comments she made during Amazon Prime coverage in December about Leeds beating West Brom 5-0. Even now, Carney is a lightning rod for online abuse, often for her Midlands accent, something that rarely afflicts male commentators from the same region (with, perhaps, the exception of Alan Smith).

Chelsea’s defeat in Gothenburg last night will be of little consequence to those categorically opposed to the idea of professional women’s football, but to those of us who do take an interest (mine, admittedly, through Chelsea’s ever-increasing success), there was much to celebrate, even if the four goals Hayes’ side shipped in a devastating first 35 minutes of the fixture will sting for some time. Objectively, Barcelona exposed a gulf in quality, shockingly so, considering just how talented Chelsea are, with their usually on-point ‘Kerr-by’ forward partnership of the symbiotic Samantha Kerr and Fran Kirby, along with appearances from other dependable such as central defender Millie Bright and goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger. 

This was still the same squad that recently won the WSL, the women’s League Cup and next weekend will contest the FA Cup. Chelsea’s appearance last night also marked the first time an English team had appeared in the pinnacle European finale since Arsenal won it in 2007 (Hayes was assistant to Vic Akers that night, in a season where Arsenal won a historic quadruple). They were also playing a Barcelona that had won all 26 of their domestic league matches, scoring 128 goals and conceding only five in the process. And that, for contrast, is on a budget of just Eur 4 million, a fraction of the salaries and transfer fees the men’s game commands.

Picture: Twitter/ChelseaFCW

Hayes, though, is a breath of fresh air, in football as a whole. “I am not going to give you crappy platitudes,” she said, live on BT Sport after her side had beaten Munich to reach the Champions League Final. “I have worked my whole life for this day and I am so fucking proud of them players. They have delivered.” Yep, the F-bomb on a Sunday lunchtime (Ofcom sanction, no doubt, in the post). But it was unlike any of the pro-forma cliches you normally get from professional football managers, the Keegan meltdown notwithstanding. 

“This is thousands of hours, thousands of setbacks," Hayes continued. “I got to this level through my hard work and determination, and I am fortunate enough to be working for a football club that I adore, that give me licence to do this.” She then reflected on how her love of football began on the Islington streets of her childhood: “I entered that pitch every day as a nine-year-old, about to ‘play’ in the Champions League final. Oh my God, my dreams came true today.” While, ultimately, those dreams may have taken a dent last night, Hayes’ ambition to drive women’s football ever onwards won’t be dented. She wants to win over the naysayers and give nine-year-old girls everywhere the idea that they, too, could play in a European final one day. 

It’s this self belief that has made her one of the best coaches in the game, regardless of gender, even raising the idea of how she’d make a better manager than many of those running men’s teams. Earlier this year Hayes was linked with the vacant job at AFC Wimbledon, one she instantly rejected, partly because she was extremely happy at Chelsea (jokingly, because Wimbledon wouldn’t have been able to afford her, anyway), and partly on principle.

"The football world needs to recognise that while the game is played by a different gender, it’s the same sport,” she railed. The qualities involved in team management were exactly the same as for a men’s team. “We are talking about human beings,” she stressed. “We spend too much time talking about gender and ethnicity instead of the quality of candidates.” 

Hayes then got to the nub of the issue: “Women's football is something to celebrate, and the quality and the achievements of all the females I represent. It’s an insult to them that we talk about women’s football being a ‘step down’, with the dedication and the commitment and the quality they have. That's what I’m disappointed with, not being linked to a football job.”

Picture: Peckham Town FC

Things have come a long way, however. A couple of weeks ago BBC London reporter Chris Slegg fronted a compelling film featuring Mary Phillip, England’s first black international captain and a six-time FA Cup winner, who is now the manager of men’s side Peckham Town. She’s now used to the “she ain’t got a clue what she’s doing” barbs - even from rival managers.  “It is still perceived as a men’s game and I am in men’s football. But when you learn to play you are coached the exact same way a man is. The drills and tactics are the same.”

“I was born in the 70s, fell in love with the game in the 80s, played at elite level in the 90s, became a professional in the early 2000s and a manager in the 2010s,” Phillip told the BBC. However, her journey and the journey of millions of female players has been long. 

Women’s football first became popular during World War One, but faced cultural male hostility. In 1921 it was banned by the Football Association. In 1967 Tottenham met (and beat…) Chelsea in the men’s FA Cup Final, a game that had a profound effect on the-then 19-year-old Patricia Gregory, who wrote to a local newspaper to query why women didn’t play football, and then set up a team of her own. Within a couple of years, a league of 47 teams had been set up, and the Women's Football Association was born. The same year, finally, the FA overturned their 1921 ban.

More than half a century on, the women’s game gets TV coverage and attention, but the sense is that it’s still not regarded with any of the same blanket national obsession as the men’s game. There’s no doubt that things are moving in the right direction - Sky Sports and the BBC jointly signed a £24 million deal with the Women’s Super League that will make it the world’s most-watched women’s sports league. Coming on top of £20 million in sponsorship, the TV deal has been described as “a game changer”. UEFA also recently announced a Eur 24 million package for women’s Champions League teams, pledging that clubs in the group stage will receive a minimum payment of Eur 400,000. 

Further visibility and further investment - even if paltry by comparison to the eye-watering sums swilling about the men’s game - but momentum that brings Emma Hayes’ dream just that little bit closer to reality.

Dead men walking

Imagine, for a moment, being sacked by the media before your employer has formally relieved you of your position? Imagine knowing for weeks that the person most likely to take your job hasn’t officially left theirs, even though someone has been appointed to replace him? Imagine maintaining, amid all the speculation, that you plan to see out your contract? Imagine turning up for work on a Monday knowing the it was only a matter of when, not if, that your successor would be announced? Imagine, then, being a dead man walking.

"People have said I am a dead man walking but I am not - I am still moving. It is difficult to kill me" - Claudio Ranieri

It was Claudio Ranieri who rose, stoicly, above the rumouring when still Chelsea manager to respond to media claims that he was a “dead man walking”, following Roman Abramovich’s acquisition of Chelsea. The Italian - a dignified figure then and still a much loved figure to this day - was being written out of a job by the sports press who hypothesised that the so-called “Tinkerman” (on account of his sometimes eccentric susbtitutions) would not be the manager Abramovich would want to implement his vision of turning Chelsea into the AC Milan of West London. Enter José Mourinho.

As long drawn out public executions go, Antonio Conte has been on Death Row for the last 12 months. Even as he was celebrating winning the Premier League - perhaps unexpectedly - in his first season in charge at Chelsea, the Italian was sowing the seeds of the departure announced this morning by agitating for more investment in players, or investment in better players. This became the narrative of an otherwise disappointing second season for Conte at Chelsea. Given Roman Abramovich's history of trigger-happy knee-jerk dismissals, Conte was playing with fire. That it's taken such a protracted time for him to go is, actually, baffling. Chelsea managers have gone far sooner and for less.

On Monday this week Conte took charge of Chelsea's first official pre-season training session at the club's Cobham base. It was the first time he'd been seen in public with Chelsea since the FA Cup Final at Wembley in May, when he paraded with his squad and the trophy. His future remained ambiguous: he maintained he was going nowhere, that he had a contract and he would fulfil it. The club said nothing, but the rumours continued that it was actively seeking a replacement, with Napoli's Maurizio Sarri persisting as the lead candidate. Today, Conte's status, at least, has been finally clarified: "Chelsea Football Club and Antonio Conte have parted company," was the headline on the club's website, following the somewhat basic "During Antonio’s time at the club, we won our sixth league title and eighth FA Cup. In the title winning season, the club set a then-record 30 wins in a 38-game Premier League season, as well as a club-record 13 consecutive league victories. We wish Antonio every success in his future career." 61 words, and none of them including the customary "we thank XXXX for his contribution to the club's success over the last XXXX years" or "by mutual agreement". It's a statement that no doubt, had been crafted by a lawyer. Just the right side of acknowledgement, just the right side of liability.

The period since the FA Cup Final has been, even by Chelsea's modern standard of dysfunction, chaotic. According to various reports, Conte's departure was protracted while lawyers haggled over the terms of his payoff, rumoured to be worth up to £9 million, as well as payoffs for his entire coaching staff, which includes his brother Daniele. Whether Conte had accepted his fate, or not, remains to be seen, and the sight of him on Monday taking training came across as either an act of accommodation or resilience on a scale not seen since Monty Python's Black Knight declared "it's just a flesh wound",  as blood spouted from a socket vacated by his severed arm.

Sources in Italy claim that Conte has been "disgusted" by his treatment, but as likeable for fans as he was, he should not be surprised. On top of the precedent set by eight previous managerial sackings, often with considerably shorter lead times, Conte needs to reflect on the way he went about things: effectively firing a sellable asset like Diego Costa by text message wouldn't have gone down well; then there was the constant niggling about players, plus an apparent deterioration in his relationships with key figures on the playing staff like Eden Hazard, Willian, David Luiz and Thibaut Courtois; and then a season - a title-defending season - in which consistency and indifference became the norm, rather than the bright, exciting excellence of the previous term. If the griping about players wasn't enough, a post-Christmas run of three consecutive 0-0 games and seemingly routine defeats to Manchesters United and City raised questions. The 4-1 reverse to Watford only raised more. A league record of 21 wins, seven draws and ten defeats, with a fifth place finish, may not be a disaster, but in contemporary Chelsea terms, not enough. The 3-0 away defeat to Newcastle on the final day of the season probably sealed Conte's fate - even with the Cup Final win to come - as it simply summed up a season of seeming indifference. That Chelsea would fall outside Champions League places - still the measure of Abramovich's expectation - added one more nail to the Conte coffin as Chelsea manager.

Given this record, it seemed to be an unavoidable conclusion that Conte would go. What has delayed the process has been the even more protracted legal wrangling to land Maurizio Sarri as his replacement. Despite Napoli appointing Carlo Ancelotti as manager some weeks ago, Napoli have been haggling with Chelsea over minutiae in an agreement to release Sarri from his contract, and prevent Chelsea trying to poach Neopolitan players. Presumably, the timing of this morning's terse, 61-word statement about Conte means that Sarry's appointment, plus the signing of Italian midfielder Jorginho, all part of a £54 million deal with Napoli, will go ahead.

Just as well: the club's website yesterday trilled that there's just four weeks to go before the start of the season. Never has there been such an alarming lack of preparedness for a new season. The club might, apparently, seem calm about it, but its fans are restless. As Spain found a few weeks ago, sacking a manager just before a major competition can have disastrous results. I hope Chelsea - lacking a Director of Football since Michael Emenalo left for Monaco, with an owner seemingly barred from the UK and calling a halt on the development of Stamford Bridge - are prepared for the consequences.

If there is one good thing about finally solving the manager issue, it's that the club can start making summer signings. The suggestion is that since discussions began with Napoli over Sarri's release, the manager-in-waiting has been feeding instructions or at least requests on who he'd like Marina Granovskaia, the club's de facto chief executive, to sign. More hangs on this than just a sign of activity: Eden Hazard's stock has risen in Real Madrid's eyes since Ronaldo hopped off to Juve, and with the Belgian rattling his sabre over Chelsea's lack of signings so far in the window, Sarri's first task will not be bed in new players but to keep those like Hazard from fleeing. Conte's man management left a lot to be desired, and stories have even surfaced this week if him carrying an intimidating air about him around the club. Sarri will have to work hard and work fast to galvanise the squad, parlay his vision and get them working to it in time for the Community Shield face-off with Manchester City on August 5, and a week later, the opening game of the Premier League season, a tricky away tie to Huddersfield. It all feels just a little too much, a little too late.

Meh...it's finally the end of the season

There’s a small but unlikely chance that, over the next 48 hours, corporate IT departments might see an uptick of calls from employees whose F5 buttons have become exhausted on their company-provided computers. Then again, they might not. My lack of conviction on this theory is down to one simple fact: if Chelsea Football Club does part company with Antonio Conte, no one will be the least bit surprised, making it unlikely that there will be much browser refreshing going on at all.

Surely, Conte is on his way out, despite winning the Premier League title in his first season at the club and, now, the FA Cup in his second? Well, yes, but... Chelsea's football board will meet sometime over the next two days to discuss the Italian's future (presumably Roman Abramovich will join by conference call, given his suspect visa issues...). However, things aren't straight forward: even if Conte has seemingly been talking himself out of a job for most of the season - with his constant niggling over squad strength along with some dismal team performances - he is, today, still in post with another full season to run on his current contract. Secondly, although Chelsea have changed the compensation policy for sacked managers (which was getting ridiculous, given the attrition rate), Conte would take away a reported £9 million should he be fired. Assuming that his coterie of assistant coaches would also receive payoffs, Chelsea are believed to be reluctant to sanction another payoff, especially when it's clear - by the scale, or lack of, outlay on new players - the club has cut back on the lavishness that defined the early Abramovich years.

Chelsea managers appear only to last as long as either their perceived effectiveness, or their apparent compliance. Conte has probably exhausted both. Even after Saturday's FA Cup Final triumph over Manchester United, the he has still been defiant towards his employer: "When you decide to take a coach like me, you must know who you are taking, who you are charging for this job," Conte said, once again seemingly starting a fight with no one but himself. "I cannot change my personality. I cannot change my idea of football. Today was the only way to lift a trophy. If you want to change, then we can change our idea, but you must change many players," another dig at the club's apparent lack of player investment, a frustration for Conte that appeared to begin as early as pre-season, and went on to be the undercurrent of his second season in charge.

Twitter/Chelsea FC

By everyone’s admission, this has been a disappointing season for Chelsea, for which the FA Cup - still one of the greatest trophies in football - provides some compensation. But only so much. The Premier League title was always going to be tough to reclaim - it just is - but the extraordinary acceleration by a Manchester City, now fully galvanised under Pep Guardiola, meant that an equally extraordinary effort would be required by Chelsea to keep pace. Throw in a sparkier Liverpool this term and a José Mourinho in his second season at Manchester United (usually the mid-point of his tenure at a club and therefore his most profitable), plus competition on four fronts including a return to the Champions League, and the challenge for Conte and his team couldn’t have been bigger. Saturday’s result at Wembley not withstanding, Chelsea simply didn’t rise to the challenge.

Granted, this season's fifth place Premier League finish is clearly better than the 2015-16 disaster, which could have been a lot worse than the 10th place Chelsea managed to salvage in the end. But, still, there has been too much history repeating itself from that title defence this season, in particular, in the way Conte's frustrations with his bosses have been picked up on by his players. When his shoulders have dropped, so have his players', though nowhere as bad as that miserable period between August and December 2015 when Mourinho flew Chelsea into a canyon of negativity and "palpable discord" developed between coach and team. Conte is, by general comparison to Mourinho, a considerably more chipper individual, but his constant scratching at the open wound between him and his board could prove to be a fatal mistake. Not winning things because you don't have the players when the club has spent some £180 million on players is not a wise thing to complain about when you work for Abramovich. It's just strange that the Russian hasn't pulled the trigger already, after the dismal run of games in January and February, or even after the final Premier League game of the season, a 3-0 humiliation away to Newcastle.

It's been noticeable that Chelsea have shied away from the money-no-object marquee signings that transformed the club from perennial underachievers pre-Roman to trophy hoarders since the Russian took over. That said, last summer's acquisitions of Álvaro Morata, Tiemoué Bakayoko, Danny Drinkwater and Antonio Rüdiger carried some kind of industrial logic: Morata to lead the line as Diego Costa's replacement, Bakayoko to partner N'Golo Kante in central midfield (as they do for France) or Drinkwater to partner Kante (as they did for Leicester in their title-winning campaign). However, with the exception of Rudiger (who was outstanding on Saturday at Wembley), the most polite assessment you could give is that these players are still adapting to the Premier League, the club, or both. After an initial show of goalscoring prowess, Morata ended the season with just 11 goals; Bakayoko was, at times, an embarrassment (especially against Watford, getting sent off to the relief of everyone); Drinkwater made just 12 appearances, seven as a substitute. More arrived in the winter window, with Olivier Giroud joining from Arsenal and Ross Barkley from Everton. While Giroud has quickly become a fans' favourite, Barkley has become a forgotten man. Even the sight of him warming up at Wembley gave the air of a peripheral player, rather than the great English hope many had billed him as. Questions, quite rightly, have been asked as to not only who the club is buying, but by what criterion players are being bought. And, with technical director Michael Emenalo no longer at the club, who is making those decisions.

Eden Hazard has hinted that a condition of him staying at Chelsea will be the quality of players they bring in over the summer. Even if he has blown hot and cold this season, Hazard has been the club's most outstanding player (demonstrated again on Saturday at Wembley). Some fans are resigned to the 27-year-old moving to Madrid, perhaps in the belief that we've had the best out of him, but he is still a player who makes the difference. If he goes, he needs replacing, like-for-like. Likewise Thibaut Courtois, who has been somewhat ambiguous about whether he'll be around beyond the summer. Again, on Saturday, he demonstrated what a top-drawer goalkeeper he is.

At the end of the 2017-18 season, and despite winning the FA Cup for the sixth time since 1997, there is a deeply unsettled vibe around Chelsea. We should be happy. We've won silverware, we're in Europe again next season (albeit the Europa League), and we could be Arsenal. We can't win the Premier League every year, but this season just didn't feel like Chelsea tried. Yes, there were impressive wins in August, September and into October, but there were also too many draws and defeats that suggested the mental strength just wasn't there. True, Chelsea had a decent run in the Champions League (for which the opportunity to see Lionel Messi in the flesh was one I'll savour for a long time). The FA Cup, too, has provided some satisfaction, but there have been too many laboured performances this season in which it was clear that Conte was either being deliberately obstinate to make a point, or simply had run out of ideas when things weren't going well. On this last item, there is some debate: at Wembley, the sight of Willian and Pedro in a permanent state of warming-up right in front of us was frustrating, and you could see the Brazilian, in particular, growing ever more anxious as the clock ticked down. These are not great signs of a warm relationship between a key player and his manager. On the other hand, you could argue that Conte stuck to a plan - defend at all costs - and knew what he was doing. The trophy he held aloft on Saturday evening might be testament to the fact that he did.

So here's the Chelsea board's dilemma: sack a man who has, regardless of how or when, produced silverware, almost on demand, or stick with him for the remainder of his contract, even if it is clear (and has been for some time) that the relationship with his players is less than perfect. And what if they do sack him, and bring in a Luis Enrique or Maurizio Sarri or another exotic-sounding careerist from La Liga or Serie A? Will that necessarily do any good? Would Enrique or Sarri deliver a title in his first season, such as Conte, Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and interim managers Roberto Di Matteo, Guus Hiddink and even the despised Rafa Benitez have done? And, to raise the thorny issue at the heart of Conte's frustrations, what about player investments - is the club prepared to spend big again this summer?

Twitter/Chelsea FC

Talking to other Chelsea fans on Saturday there is a state of resignation that Antonio Conte has gone as far as he can, that the FA Cup is a suitable reward for a job done, but that it is time for the club to move on again. Two seasons is not much, but Chelsea have seldom, in the modern era, been about building domains. When he bought the club, Abramovich envisaged turning Chelsea into AC Milan or one of the Spanish giants, playing exciting football in Europe every year with a squad of galácticos. That ambition has been, at least, partially realised over the last 14 years. However, entrance to Europe requires excellence in England, first, and before the club makes any decision on Conte's future it must first examine what happened this season in failing to make the Premier League Top 4. Manchester City were unstoppable, just as Chelsea had been the season before, but what kept Manchester United, Tottenham and Liverpool ahead of The Blues in the final reckoning, to keep them out of Champions League places?

Perhaps Chelsea thrive on change. Perhaps the club's strategy is that long-term managerial appointments are a recipe for complacency. We might never know. But if the mood of the terrace is to be heard, there is a sense of weariness towards Conte. Whether it has been the timing or lack of substitutions to inject life into otherwise stubborn performances, Conte has regularly demonstrated a 'I know best' obstinacy that, while true that he probably does, has not translated into something to get behind from the stands. And if we sense it, players like Hazard sense it, which means surely it's a problem that can only be solved one way...

View from the VAR side

"It's hard to know where to start," said West Bromwich Albion manager Alan Pardew last night, as he was asked about the impact the Video Assistant Referee had on his FA Cup Fourth Round win over Liverpool. And he wasn't about to be positive, either. "I don't think that is what we want to see going forward, whether you are a Liverpool or West Brom fan."

VAR is only a matter of weeks old in English football, and - as with anything new and slightly clunky - is taking time to accept. We've moaned long enough about the need for video technology and when it finally comes in we moan some more. In last night's cup tie, referee Craig Pawson referred to VAR and the eyes of virtual referee Andre Marriner (in a box somewhere in London) a total of eight times. Three incidents reviewed via the system proved to be key the game's outcome - including a disallowed West Brom strike, Liverpool winning a penalty, and a contested Baggies goal being allowed to stand.

In its match report, the London Evening Standard talked about VAR being used "...during an action-packed first half". The problem is, VAR slows down that action completely. Craig Dawson's goal took more than a minute to be judged offside via VAR. "Firstly, there is no communication from the referee to us," Pardew complained, adding that the bigger issue was the four minutes it took to judge the Liverpool penalty claim after Mo Salah went down in the Albion box in the 23rd minute. "You are going from high-tempo workrate to nothing," said Pardew. "We had a hastring [injury] just after that." (i.e. "Just sayin'").

It's something I noticed at Stamford Bridge two weeks ago when Chelsea played Arsenal in the Carabao Cup. VAR reviews of, first, César Azpilicueta and Calum Chambers' coming together, then a challenge on Cesc Fàbregas, and again when Victor Moses appeared to foul Alex Iwobi in the penalty area, seemed to take forever for referee Martin Atkinson to resolve. If the managers didn't know what was going on, the players on the pitch certainly didn't and nor did we up in the stand, bored by the tedious 0-0 stalemate unfolding. From a television point of view, it was the sort of pause broadcasters hate - dead air, effectively - as Atkinson repeatedly held his finger to his ear like Chris Morris's spoof newsreader in The Day Today.

For us paying fans, we could easily fill the downtime by posting facetious tweets, but for the players at risk of hamstrings cooling down, it must have felt like eternity. It is, of course, only sensible to assume that VAR simply needs more time to get used to. We've needed video technology for too long now, and now it's here we should embrace it. Jurgen Klopp, the defeated Liverpool manager last night, was certainly more stoic than Pardew: "Normally after a game I have to explain to you a defeat which was not deserved because we din't get a penalty or they scored another goal. Is it cool in January to have delays when it's cold, especially for the players? Maybe not, but it will become smoother and more fluent in the future."

Definitely not impressed was broadcaster Danny Baker, who launched into one of his periodic football rants (and of a veracity not seen since he laid into a combination of England's shameful 2016 European Championship game against Iceland, and Glenn Hoddle's commentary of it). Of the more repeatable tweets, "VAR is sucking all the life out of what was a pulsating cup tie. Literally draining the atmosphere. So, we may have a correct game by computer but dull match in flesh and blood. Absolutely awful. yet this terrible thing will be rolled out" and "What numbs a crowd is the idea that now THEY aren't the people at the event, they are just watching something that is being judged and relayed from some remote office. Supporters are now just extras at their own event. VAR MUST BE ABANDONED."

I have a suspicion that this will run. And run...

So VAR, so what?

Viewers of last night's BT Sport coverage of the FA Cup Third Round tie between Brighton and Crystal Palace may have noticed occasional mention of VAR or Video Assistant Referee. Well, I say "may" and "occasional", but if truth be told, the game was so dull that commentator Ian Darke spoke of little else (including the compelling insight that Bakary Sako's 25-yard equaliser for Palace was so straight and true that VAR wasn't needed to provide adjudication. Thanks for that.).

The curiosity around VAR last night was, perhaps, understandable, given that it was the first competitive game in England to have the technology available. As it turned out, it was only used the once, to help Andre Marriner adjudicate on Glenn Murray's 87th-minute winner for Brighton, but even then video pictures couldn't conclusively confirm whether the ball had brushed the forward's arm before crossing the line. It hadn't, but the fact that VAR and TV cameras still couldn't reach a decision shows that perennial arguments in football will still continue, even with the potential adoption of this system.

VAR is, for now, a limited technology solution for resolving disputes, being restricted to four types of incidents - goals, penalties, straight red cards and cases of mistaken identity. The game's legislative body, the International Football Association Board is expected to decide next March whether VAR will become a permanent part of the game. But despite is apparent limitations (with the caveat that the 'human' referee is still the absolute arbiter of any game), VAR is a step in the right direction.

Far too many games these days are dominated by refereeing controversies, and these are exacerbated by the fact that football is overscrutinised. Ever since Sky introduced up to 13 cameras positions at major games, with most now broadcast in high definition (including 4K resolution), there's very little that anyone watching around the world can miss. Which means that by the time a professional referee has made a judgement, it will have been dissected countless times by TV pundits and Twitter experts alike, giving very little room for simple human error. This, in turn, is leading to referees seeking stress counselling. Now, I know this won't garner that much sympathy from the rank and file football fan, but if there's something the game needs, it's engaged, competent referees whose professional capabilities match those of the multi-millionaire players they are employed to police. Technology can only help, and in this respect football can even be accused of being well behind the times. Many other sports have adopted technology to improve decision making, transparency and to resolve time-consuming disputes, so it’s about time the world's most popular sport follows suit. It won’t resolve some of the more subjective arguments, of course, but if it means reducing those tedious issues that put referees in the spotlight rather than the 22 players supposedly providing the active entertainment, that can only be a good thing.

A Bridge too far?

Ever since André Villas-Boas was, apparently, set the impossible task of transforming from within a Chelsea dominated by its then José Mourinho spine of Čech, Terry, Lampard and Drogba, there's been a never-ceasing murmur about who would blink first in the battle of wills between the club and, in particular, its "Captain, Leader, Legend".

The conventional wisdom has been that John Terry - while beloved unconditionally by Chelsea fans - has been on an exit path ever since he turned 30, six years ago. That he hasn't left - and even had a resurgence, some managers later, under Mourinho - has only served his status as 'Mr. Chelsea'. But the reality has been, despite the mutual Mourinho-Terry dependency, that the defender's effectiveness has started to show its age.

Tomorrow night Chelsea's record breaking, medal-hoovering skipper will no doubt start in the FA Cup quarter-final at home to Manchester United. It's a tie rooted in so many histories, the most prominent being Mourinho's as, now, the United manager, but also the long memories we Chelsea fans all have of the humiliation by United in the 1994 FA Cup Final (never mention David Elleray's name around these parts...) and that night in Moscow when a slippery sod rendered Terry in tears and United the European Champions.

The sad truth is that if Chelsea lose, it could be the last competitive game we see Terry play at Stamford Bridge. And even if Chelsea go through to the semi-final and beyond, Terry's place in any starting line-up will be in doubt. To his absolute credit, Terry has accepted that this season his club captaincy has been more a job of seniority and moral support, dressing room continuity for Antonio Conte. There haven't been any complaints in the press about playing time, while his posts on Instagram have been of a dutiful player training relentlessly. "In the nicest way I hope I don’t get back in because it means we are carrying on winning matches," Terry told the Evening Standard in November. Last week Conte declared that Terry was important to him this season "because he's the captain and he's working very well on the pitch and helping me a lot in the changing room, transferring the right message".

The Italian is well aware of Terry's Chelsea legacy, but most Chelsea fans will, equally, be aware that the old soldier can't go on forever - even if, much like Monty Python's Black Knight of Holy Grail fame, he believes he can. This season's Premier League form with a largely Terry-free line-up has provided Chelsea fans with a convenient reason to not miss Terry. We might love the old slugger, of course, but with David Luiz's growing maturity, Cesar Azpiliqueta's quiet confidence, Gary Cahill finally looking not totally lost without JT at his side, and Kurt Zouma slowly working his way back from injury, no one has felt that Terry could offer anything more than being a figurehead with a penchant for taking a boot to the face when it is needed.

Still, though, the 36-year-old Terry believes he has a couple more seasons in him in the top flight before he hangs up his boots, much like his close friend Frank Lampard who has only just retired at 38. West Bromwich Albion and Bournemouth are believed to be interested in taking him on, Stoke are also rumoured to be keen, and having previously said, out of loyalty, he wouldn't play for a rival Premier League club, these are likely to be his options, should he not accept a coaching or ambassadorial role at Chelsea.

It would be a tough acceptance for Chelsea fans, but no more than seeing any beloved player in another team's shirt. There maybe a few more blue rings on the Terry treestump than when Chelsea sold on the much loved Juan Mata to United, even Nigel Spackman to Liverpool, many years ago when money was tight, but Terry deserves what he can get, even if at a rival, as much as Chelsea clearly need to complete the process begun this season of weaning itself of a club player since he was 14. It can be done, it probably needs to be done if, for once, we allow head to overrule heart.

First the pie, now the mash

As someone of - shall we say? - a somewhat less-than 'bronzed Adonis' body shape, the public wringing-out of Sutton United reserve goalkeeper/goalkeeping coach/groundsman Wayne Shaw has been an unedifying spectacle.

But, then, we Brits love a story about a loveable foil. Shaw himself may have courted publicity long before Tuesday night's "piegate" incident at Gander Green Lane: when images first emerged of the 23-stone, 45-year-old with a...um...unique physical profile for a footballer, even a part-timer at a non-league club he was already cast for "top footy bantz", with memes immediately tweeted which revolved around that old terrace staple of "who ate all the pies?".

Well, now we know. But not without Shaw apparently putting himself in league with the Devil - i.e. Sun Bets (shirt sponsors of Sutton's FA Cup 5th round tie with Arsenal) for the stunt in which he conspicuously munched on a pasty while the clock ticked down on the match. Given that the FA Cup is sold on the romantic lore of its "magic", and the prospect of underdog teams doing battle with those from the elite at obscure suburban grounds, sight of the "roly-poly-goalie" engaging with pastry and meats-various should really have become just a part of the competition's glorious mixture of the professional and the amateur.

But, no. The suspicion that Shaw's piefest may have actually contravened FA betting rules has brought about a collective swallowing of something hard and jagged. Shaw himself has apparently resigned from the club "in tears", while the Gambling Commission and the FA are said to be investigating - quite rightly suspicious of the fact Sun Bets had offered odds of 8-1 that Shaw would be filmed consuming some form of pie during the game (although there is already a counter that he was eating a pasty, not a pie, so the bet was null-and-void, anyway).

With honesty, Shaw admitted that he had been aware of the odds on offer but maintained that he didn't place a bet himself though. Still, despite it all probably and naively being a 'bit of fun', Shaw himself has ended up being hung out to dry, disgracefully, even by The Sun newspaper itself, the media associate of Sun Bets. Humbug, methinks.

Fun though this may all be - and there is a strong sense of po-faced joylessness over the official reaction (the Gambling Commission's Richard Watson said, with some justification, "integrity in sport is not a joke") - the saddest part is that Shaw ends up just another loveable loser, an Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards with goalkeeping gloves. And it has detracted from a genuinely impressive performance by Sutton against Arsenal, 105 places above the south London side.

"[The issue] has been very disappointing, there’s no doubt about that,", Sutton's dignified manager Paul Doswell told Sky News. "It’s something that we’ve dealt with quickly as a club. Wayne himself has offered his resignation to the club this afternoon and that has been accepted. It’s a very sad end to what was a very good story."

Inevitably, though, Shaw may yet run out the winner. Despite leaving the job he loved, that had seen him sleep at the ground just to ensure it was ready for the big tie, the supermarket chain Morrisons has apparently offered him a job as a pie taster. "We’re always looking for the best talent to taste our pies and make sure they hit the back of the net," said the supermarket's Chief Pie Buyer, Tessa Callaghan, without any obvious recognition of the crow-barred PR opportunism of it all.

Well, I suppose we Brits love to make capital out of calamity. Our favourite war film is The Great Escape (which, you'll recall, ended with most escapees being recaptured and shot) and its theme tune was adopted to gee up England fans at internationals. And don't forget Gareth Southgate, Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle landed lucrative Pizza Hut commercials for messing up their penalties at Euro '96 and the 1990 World Cup, respectively. Piegate may end well for Wayne Shaw, but at risk of joining the po-faced and joyless who've been scornful of the whole episode, I can't agree more with Doswell that it has taken the shine off the real reason we love watching David/Goliath cup ties. And that has nothing to do with pastry.

Now 96 families know they're not walking alone

In the 27 years and 11 days since the Hillsborough tragedy, we have frequently heard or read the refrain "no one should die because they went to a football match". But on the day that a jury has delivered justice to the families of the 96 who died in Sheffield, by declaring their deaths unlawful, we should also put football into some context.

In England on April 15, 1989, football was somewhat in the social doghouse. To be a fan was to have pariah status in some circles. English clubs and their supporters were in the midst of a five-year ban from European competition after hooliganism had reached its nadir at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels on May 29, 1985, when 39 Italian fans died and 600 were injured as a result of fighting between Liverpool and Juventus supporters. Two weeks prior to that ugly encounter, 56 people died and at least 265 were injured when fire swept through Bradford City's antiquated Valley Parade stadium.

But, with the Premier League and its Sky money not heralding a gentrification of English football's elite for another three years to come, Hillsborough ensured that the sport continued to be supported without the fanfare and wall-to-wall attention it gets today. Amongst metropolitan circles to declare interest or even an opinion on the game would result in looks at social occasions akin to announcing a penchant for bestiality with zoo animals.

Hillsborough darkened the sport's already dimmest days and, that the tragedy should have involved Liverpool fans again brought a further cruel twist to the reputation of the city and the club. On the day of the disaster more than 24,000 supporters travelled from Merseyside for the FA Cup semi-final between the Reds and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough, Sheffield Wednesday's ground. They had been assigned to the North and West stands, but in the build-up, a large number of Liverpool fans were already crowding before the turnstiles of the Leppings Lane end of the ground. To relieve the pressure, an exit gate - C - was opened a few minutes before the scheduled kick-off time, but all this did was filter 2,000 spectators into fenced-in pens that were already bulging, resulting in a severe crush...and the deaths of 96 people. The youngest was just 10, the oldest, 67. Many had died horribly from compression asphyxia, an agonizing death (essentially how a boa constrictor kills its prey).

In the aftermath, blame was placed squarely on the behaviour of the fans themselves. As with Heysel, and indeed all the other shameful moments of English football support, it was assumed that this was a terrible event with the sport's neanderthal element at its root. This was seized upon by the police and the establishment, who appeared in collusion to besmirch the Liverpool supporters with lies to protect their own standing. Sir Bernard Ingham, then Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, accused the fans of being "tanked up yobs". Today, he refused to apologise for the slur. The Sun newspaper compounded things by publishing lurid claims about the fans, rendering the paper persona non grata to this day on Merseyside.

Despite this, the families of the 96 men, women and children have fought a tireless battle in the intervening years to win back the reputations of their loved ones and, moreover, for the police who were supposedly in control of Hillsborough to be brought to account for their apparent negligence. Not all police officers at Hillsborough that day were culpable: most joined the effort to get victims to safety, with advertising hoardings famously used as makeshift stretchers. But the evidence and statements that have appeared throughout the inquest, one of the longest in British legal history, have made for grim testament of the conduct of the senior commanders on duty at Hillsborough and even of the culture within the South Yorkshire police authority in a decade that also saw it accused of heavy-handed tactics during the 1984 miners' strike.

Today, after hearing from more than 500 witnesses, reading 4,000 pages of documents. watching countless hours of video evidence and almost three months of deliberation, a jury has found the police commander at Hillsborough on the day, Chief Superintendant David Duckenfield "responsible for manslaughter by gross negligence". During the inquest, Duckenfield’s barrister, John Beggs QC, had pushed the prevailing police view of Liverpool fans being drunk and uncompliant with police instructions as the crush worsened at the Leppings Lane End. Survivors countered this, giving evidence that there hadn't any misbehaviour and that a lack of coherent police planning had led to the chaos that ensued. Overall, the jury concluded a catalogue of errors - a lack of police planning, control and communication, the inadequacies of the stadium itself, delays in the emergency response, poor signage and information on match tickets, and even a lack of response by Sheffield Wednesday officials in delaying kick-off of the cup tie. Of 14 questions the jury was asked to consider, all but one received a 'yes' - the one  'no' being in response to a question about whether the supporters' behaviour "caused or contributed to the dangerous situation at the Leppings Lane turnstiles".

There will, no doubt, be renewed vigour to bring those responsible to account for their negligence. Perhaps the police on duty on April 15, 1989 - all no doubt now enjoying comfortable retirement, generous pensions and preferred parking at the local golf club - will be pursued with the same zeal that miscreant celebrities have been by Operation Yewtree. For the record, the current chief constable of South Yorkshire Police, David Crompton, said the force "unequivocally" accepted the findings, and admitted that it had "failed the victims and failed their families".

Personally, I see no benefit in a witchhunt. The families, hopefully can now seek closure and vindication, rather than the prolonged pain of further legal proceedings. The one frustration is that they've had to endure 27 years of agony that could have been avoided a long time ago by a simple admission of failure. If there is a legacy of Hillsborough - and wisdom after the event - our sports stadia and the organisation around football matches improved beyond all recognition. Lord Justice Taylor's report saw to that, heralding in more expensive but safer all-seat venues, with changes to matchday policing at grounds. In the process, it also brought about a change in the clientele profile.

But for me the most important outcome of today's verdict is the full exoneration of Liverpool fans. Football has had a lot to answer for, and even today, it would be naive in the extreme to think that hooliganism has gone away. I, like the fans of most teams remain party to the tribalism that, to some extent, drives the game. As I am with Manchester United, Spurs and Arsenal, I'm programmed to dislike Liverpool out of a decades-long on-the-pitch rivalry. But no amount of dislike could wish for the events of 27 years ago. None.

No amount of retroactive investigation and, potentially, arrests will bring back the 96, either. All we can hope is that the reputations of those fans and, indeed, the city of Liverpool have been restored by the verdict, and the victims' families can, 27 years on, finally enjoy peace and dignity.

Reality bites for Chelsea - so now its time to fix the problem for good

© Simon Poulter 2016

At some point today, Barry Bright, an ex-estate agent and the former chief executive of both Sittingbourne FC and Gillingham FC, as well as a sitting member of the Kent Police Authority, sat down at his desk at the Football Association and, like Elliott Ness trying bring down Al Capone, looked at every angle that could have Diego Costa's automatic red card ban extended for his generally industrial behaviour against Everton in Saturday's FA Cup quarter-final. 

Because, with the FA concluding that Costa didn't bite Gareth Barry - duh! - there was still a rabid desire by the body's Independent Regulatory Commission to make an example of the Brazilian-born Spaniard. Predictably, the media has already started their braying: "He had intent," they suggest. By that token, looking at the usual expression on the face of an enraged Diego Costa, the span of intent could range from a ritual disemboweling to a nuclear attack. 

So what about: "He made a rude gesture to Everton fans"? Well, he was photographed making a horizontal V-sign, much as most rap stars and, now, all football players do when someone sticks a camera in front of them. It was hardly Harvey Smith.

And then: "He was about to bite Barry, but then decided not to" -- since disproven by Barry himself; Or: "He looked at the referee a bit funny": well who could blame the combustible Costa from not getting a tiny bit peeved with the out-of-his-depth Michael Oliver for the bruising attention his shins had been getting all afternoon from Everton's defenders.

In the end, the inevitable: a charge of improper conduct, for his alleged behaviour "after being shown a second yellow card in the game," according to the FA's official statement. In addition, Costa has been given until Wednesday "to provide his observations" over that "alleged gesture".

So, while Mr Bright and his chums do their best to keep Costa out of sight for what remains of this dismal season for Chelsea, there needs to be a similarly forensic and zealous investigation carried out by the club itself themselves as to why they will end 2015-2016 with nothing to show for it. That's unless, pathetically, they really, truly regard avoiding relegation as a trophy to be proud of.

Because with no more Champions League (perhaps for a long while) and no hope of a Wembley visit this year, Chelsea's season has run totally barren. True, Guus Hiddink has restored confidence and their league form since his arrival has been impressive, but this is still only by comparison to the abject moribundity that they'd allowed themselves to fall into under José Mourinho. Hiddink's salvaging of their league status is big, but put into the wider perspective, it's been one of survival.

And, so, Chelsea can now coast to May 15 when they play Leicester City - perhaps by then Chelsea's successors to the Premier League title - on the final day of the season. What circularity: a season that began on August 8 last year at Stamford Bridge with Mourinho losing the plot over the doctor, ending with Roman Abramovich having to watch Claudio Ranieri - the "dead man walking" he sacked in 2004 - walk through a guard of honour made up of Chelsea's players.

Perhaps it might wake the Russian into accepting how out of shape his club really is. How this club may have acquired an incredible haul of trophies since he took over, but for each of those trophies there is a discarded manager and the perception amongst the rest of the footballing world that Chelsea is a club lacking soul, humanity, class, respect and heritage. Those are all accusations you will hear a hundred times a day on Twitter from the trolls, but even I have to admit they're a tiny bit right.

When I was a child I had no real understanding of why I supported Chelsea. I just did. Liverpool and even Ipswich Town were in the ascendency of the old First Division. Chelsea had a perceived glamour, because they'd been moderately successful in the 60s and early 70s, and bizarrely had picked up a celebrity following that included, yes, Raquel Welch. But after winning the European Cup Winner's Cup in 1971, the next time their trophy cabinet would be opened was to receive the Full Members Cup in 1986, which is about as prestigious as listing a swimming certificate next to your degree.

So, when the away fans taunt us with their "shit club, no history" and "where were you when you were crap" jibes, I pretty much know exactly where I was. Which is why the arrival of Abramovich has been something we've all embraced. Because we have had success. Oodles of it. We've even played some exhilarating football, not just under Mourinho, but also under Ancelotti, Di Matteo, and - dare I say it - Benitez. Avram Grant even took us to a Champions League final. Yes, him.

This season, however, has proven just how tenuous success can be. Champions one minute, relegation candidates the next, while relegation candidates one December become champions-elect the next. Chelsea, have reminded us how, in general,  English teams are mediocre in Europe. Arsenal will soon follow once Barcelona have done the inevitable in their Champions League second leg (and there's a club with a moribundity about it that makes the vibe at Chelsea look quite peppy).

Chelsea will always be my club, just as they always have been. My first visit to Stamford Bridge at the age of 10. There in 1983 when they almost were relegated to the Third Division. There in November 1991 when they were beaten 3-0 at home by Norwich in front of just 15,000, with Dave Beasant culpable for two of those goals. We ended that season, the last before the Premier League began, in 14th place.

Abramovich was supposed to have saved Chelsea from the turmoil of financial collapse, legal disputes and Ken Bates. His spectacular injection of funds was supposed to have bought us the best players and Europe's finest training facilities. Our academy system was supposed to have generated next generations of homegrown. Abramovich's own vision was for Chelsea to become the new Milan, challenging the likes of Bayern and Barcelona for the European cup each season. In fact, he wanted Chelsea to be the new Milan so much that he bought Andrei Schevchenko and eventually persuaded Carlo Ancelotti to become the manager. Although he sacked him the season after the Italian had delivered a league and cup double.

It's when you examine this relentlessly unending dysfunction that you have to admit, reluctantly as a Chelsea fan, that the success and the silverware - while nice to celebrate with open-top bus parades - have been achieved without any long-lasting foundation. 12 managers in 13 years is the sort of track record that we scoff at Newcastle for. We rightly pillory Mike Ashley for the poisonous atmosphere he has instilled on Tyneside, but we ignore the continuing ineptitude behind the scenes at our own club, one in which our Under-18 and Under-21 sides continue to win trophies, but see no progression to the first team. One in which 36 players end up on loan throughout Europe, with only very few of them showing any chances of getting a game for the club they signed for. One in which the answer to one crocked striker is to bring in an even more crocked striker, not play him, and then bring in a more crocked striker and not play him either. And just where are Papy Djilobodji, Marco Amelia, Matt Miazga and Danilo Pantic, transfer deadline signings? Nope, me neither.

Tony McArdle/Everton FC

In today's Daily Mail the excellent Martin Samuel accuses Chelsea of lacking a philosophy. He is totally right. What is the club philosophy? More importantly, what is the club's strategy? And did the two brilliantly executed goals by Romelu Lukaku on Saturday do anything to remind those who make decisions at the club that their player buying and selling strategy is a mess? As Danny Baker so eruditely tweeted: "Chelsea fans watching Lukaku. Like seeing the girl you dumped at 17 go on to be Jennifer Aniston." Ditto Kevin de Bruyne.

What was the long-term purpose of Abramovich turning a semi-fashionable but constantly under-achieving London club into one that came to regard itself as having a birthright to be in the European elite if that status eventually fizzled out through the club's own doing? Mourinho can't be blamed for the whole of Chelsea's malaise this season (though clearly a lot of it). And it would be wrong to go after scapegoats when it is obvious that the club's inconsistency and lack of stability is clubwide.

That said, much frustration or even anger should be generated by Michael Emenalo, the technical director. Not much is really known about Emenalo, or why he was appointed to such a pivotal position within the club - responsible for player development as well as talent acquisition, along with Abramovich acolyte Marina Granovskaia who handles transfer negotiations. I'm sure the latter has done a pretty good job in getting good deals from a financial point of view, but has this duo delivered anything much when it comes to players?

Antonio Conte (assuming it is he that becomes the 13th manager of Abramovich's reign) will no doubt demand new players. Indeed he's probably already handed in his shopping list. Fine. A new coach brings in fresh blood. But what about all the dead wood? Will he be able to reduce the ridiculously wasteful player loans? Will he make more of an effort to see youth promoted from the cup-winning 'development' sides?

Cynics might scoff at terms like "rebuilding" and "transition" - and with some merit, too - but these are what Chelsea now needs. Accept that John Terry is no longer viable. Accept that Eden Hazard is no longer willing. Accept that Costa would rather be anywhere else. Accept that if you're going to buy players, you'd better have a vision for them, and play them. Unearth the talented 18, 19, 20 and 21-year-olds the club has about the place and discard the panic buys and acquisitions that were doing anyone else a favour but the club. Build up a new core, one that in principle can emulate the spine that Čech, Terry, Lampard and Drogba provided for so many of those successful Abramovich years.

If that responsibility does fall to Conte, it will be interesting to see just how far the 46-year-old gets. Though we never know anything of Abramovich's true ambitions, he had recognised in re-hiring Mourinho (mainly because he couldn't get Pep Guardiola and Mourinho couldn't get Old Trafford) that they would aim to establish a "dynasty" at Chelsea. This, despite the knowledge that 'long-term' for Mourinho never means more than three years. Within 24 hours of signing a lucrative contract extension last August, the Portuguese was jumping up and down at his club doctor. And the rest of the season, and indeed the dynasty building, would simply have to be put down to experience.

To look at this mess positively then, we must adopt the phrase "today is the first day of the rest of your life", an expression that is both simplistic and, yet, alive with positivity. Chelsea will stoicly chalk up the last seven or eight months as character building. But they will have to do more.

Bringing in a manager like Conte is not, in reality, any different than any of the 12 "permanent" managers they've brought in before. He'll be no more of a miracle worker than even The Special One. His reputation is good, but not especially impressive by comparison to any other elite manager.

The question is whether he'll be able to buck the trends that have thwarted others. He will need assurances that Chelsea is his to rebuild. Experience has taught us that is unlikely. For until Abramovich shakes himself free from the hangers-on who "advise" him, who convince him that the likes of Emenalo are qualified to make big strategic decisions, Chelsea could hire me for all the good that it will do.

Steady on now, don't go nuts

Picture NFL

Ever since Sir Freddie Laker started offering cheap flights to America in 1977, we Brits have soaked up opportunities to be, temporarily, American. The arrival of package holidays to New York, Miami and Orlando at a stroke afforded the chance to live out our dreams in a country we'd only seen on television via Starsky & Hutch, Kojak and, er, The Little House On The Prairie.

Thus we rented motorhomes, we did the fabled motel-and-diner roadtrips, we bought cowboy boots and baseball hats, we eat burgers that were patently different to the greasy fare slapped into a white bun at Wimpy, we hired big cars and we got carjacked within half a mile of the airport. Literally, we lived the dream.

Why we took to all this is quite simple: America was not Britain (and last I checked, still isn't). For starters, it had blue skies and sunshine, which in the late 1970s was a welcome change from the permanently monochrome ceiling of our island. And, then, America offered all manner of foodstuffs with which we could balloon to the size of a small house during our fortnight of queuing for rides at Disneyworld or, for those willing to brave a 12-hour flight to the left coast, Disneyland.

So, in the midst of this empassioned, hands-across-the-ocean celebration of Britain's "special relationship" (and at a time when Maggie and Ronnie were making "Coo-eee!" noises at each other via the disturbingly-named 'hotline') the UK's Channel 4 started screening American Football.

In truth, this bore as much sense as NBC or CBS in America showing live cricket, but in the spirit of Britain apparently holding the hidden desire to be a part of a America (hosting its cruise missiles and F-111 bombers, and replacing tracksuits with hoodies and sweatpants as general daywear), it was a canny ploy by C4. Especially as it enabled them to sell advertising time to American beer brands and manufacturers of "chips" (though we'd still prefer to call them crisps, as we all know that chips come wrapped in newspaper and drowned in an ocean of vinegar, rather than foil-packed goodness).

Gridiron may have its distant roots in rugby (and, to some degree "soccer"), but watching 30 men with ears that look like they've been constructed from Play-Doh by a four-year-old, rolling around in mud for 80 minutes, was a very different beast to what was being offered to Yank-up British home entertainment. We tried desperately to get our heads around teams of people padded up like the cast of Dynasty on steroids, wearing, for goodness' sake, helmets - HELMETS! - and essentially playing a licensed version of British Bulldog, for 30-second spells at a time over four hours.

However, sweetened by the taste of America that Sir Freddie and his successors had given us, and with Channel 4 beaming this bewildering explosion of noise, spine-shattering rutting, and totally OTT commentators making statements longer than the plays they were talking about, we took a typically half-arsed approach to watching it.

We may not have understood the rules, or why games lasted longer than a German opera, or, well, anything at all about it, but we happily bought into the hoopla of it all. We raided Sainsbury's of its Budweiser four-packs (not dissimilar to a six-pack, except that it wasn't one) and emptied small bags of Quavers into repurposed fruit bowls. Then we crammed friends and anyone else prepared to stay up on a school night to watch the game on our ridiculous 20-inch TVs in a loose attempt to recreate the American living room experience of a 60-inch set, family-sized bags of Cheetos and a large plastic tub full of beer cans bathing in ice.

Though it may seem to have lasted longer, British enthusiasm for staying up on a Sunday evening to watch live American football soon wained. Brave efforts to watch a Super Bowl, in particular, usually lasted no more than the first hour, before people zonked out ahead of the anticipated half-time show, only to arise from the stupour with the festival all over, amid much grumbling about 9am meetings later that morning. It really just wasn't 'us'.

You've all heard that hoary old trope "England and America are two countries separated by a common language" that George Bernard Shaw came out with in the 1940s? Well, it's not just language. British actors might be able to do passable American accents (example: most films and TV shows), but American actors can't do British, unless they're Gillian Anderson, whose ability to flick between British and American accents is uncanny. And rare. The truth is, we are two different peoples who happen to share large parts of a common language (for a more extended version of this point, look up Eddie Izzard on YouTube and his explanation of "herb" versus "'erb").

Which is why I was not at all surprised to wake up this morning to find my Facebook and Twitter timelines full of posts about Super Bowl parties, Lady Gaga singing The Star-Spangled Banner and looking like Dave Vanian of The Damned, the Super Bowl half-time show and its idiotically overhyped ads (not to mention what looks like an excruciatingly awful combination of Beyoncé, Bruno Mars and a possibly photobombing Chris Martin) - all exclusively from American friends.

There were pictures of food, pictures of beer, pictures of TV sets with pictures of the Levis Stadium on them, pictures of face-painted children sportingly supporting both the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers (an awful practice now seen at Premier League games with two-club scarves hawked outside grounds), and so on. People had gathered, like Thanksgiving, with their nearest and dearest around them. People I would never have down as sports fans at all were celebrating this most American of holidays - Super Bowl Sunday.

No doubt there were a few Americanophiles in Britain who fixed matchsticks between their eyelids to endure what social media seems to have painted as a dull 24-10 win by the Broncos over the Panthers. But even by my standards of obsessive-compulsive sport viewing (yes, I have willfully marched in to the Old Cock'n'Bull in Santa Monica at 4.45am to watch Chelsea-v-Tottenham while downing a nutrionally questionable combination of Guinness and a full English), there seems to have been nothing offered by last night's extravaganza in California to warrant disrupting my sleep pattern for the week. Or that of my compatriots.

Facebook/NFL

The Super Bowl - like most American sports, now I think of it - is an exclusively American event. My transatlantic cousins may not have the first clue about the World Cup and its finale (when staged in Pasadena in 2004 locals actually didn't know what was taking place inside the Rose Bowl stadium), but they have a capability of elevating enjoyment and excitement of their own sports to a totally different level of hootin' and hollerin'.

In England, we might have our FA Cup Final traditions: the TV goes on at noon for interviews with comedians we'd forgotten were still alive and didn't know supported one of the finalists; and, at a stretch, the Eurovision Song Contest enables our womenfolk to screech their way through all the awful campness while us chaps pretend not to be watching from behind a newspaper. And while these might be social gatherings, with chilled beverages and snacks, they are rarely in the same league as the American nation's Super Bowl festivities.

For the Cup Final, it being a Saturday afternoon (assuming the latest sponsor hasn't moved to 11am on a Wednesday to suit audiences in China), we will sit there nursing a mug of tea and a KitKat; we will pathetically stand for Myleene Klass warbling through God Save The Queen; we will get emotional about Abide With Me; and then we'll get stuck into abusing the referee for 90 minutes. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we might be joined by a family member with nothing else to do, and if we're extremely lucky, they might not know a thing about football, but they're happy to watch this instead of catching up on EastEnders episodes.

Even communal pub viewing of a game of the FA Cup's magnitude is a fairly restrained affair, but largely because it is primarily patronised by British men who, as we all know, do not talk to each other unless absolutely necessary, and even then it will be to either trade obvious comments about a tackle (Bloke 1: "Should have been a card." Bloke 2: "Yeah."), or to enquire "Same again?".

The bottom line is that, despite media coverage of last night's Super Bowl across the British news media, I am supremely sceptical (or is that "skeptical"?) that many - if any - in the UK care. We have no birthright programming to appreciate it, its significance or its noise. We struggle to understand the nuclear physics depth of its statistics. And when, on a sunstroke-weakened moment we've bought one of those replica "football jerseys" at the airport, we just look utter berks when we finally break them out to watch the big game (Note: as does most American sports "apparel" on anyone from Her Majesty's shores).

We Brits have wanted to be American since the Pilgrims legged it up the Mayflower's gangplank in Plymouth and set sail for, um, Plymouth. But the truth is, we can't be. We look twats in baseball hats, we prefer our beer in pints and there is nothing - not even cheese balls - in our snack inventory to come anywhere close to the mighty Cheeto. Which as good enough a reason as any not to stay up watching a Super Bowl, ever.