Accidents can happen

Every Christmas, the shelves of the big book emporia bow with a barrage of dreary footballing memoirs - stocking fillers for dads, mostly, and invariably ghost-written by Fleet Street hacks. Rarely, if ever, are they of much real interest. Occasionally, a Roy Keane or Peter Crouch might come along with something mildly controversial or amusing, but for the most part, they chart a similar trajectory: local park ➤ boys club ➤ youth team ➤ first team ➤ different clubs ➤ retirement/management/punditry. 

So it’s quite an event when a football book comes along that is genuinely worthy of note. The last, I recall, was Black And Blue, the intentionally uncomfortable read by Paul Canoville, Chelsea’s first black player. It recounts his troubled youth but also, more dramatically, his even more troubled debut for the club: away to Crystal Palace, in April 1982, he was subjected to a torrent of racial abuse - from his own fans. A month later, he made his home debut against Luton Town at Stamford Bridge, a game I was at. His arrival on the pitch was met by monkey chants and bananas thrown from the home stands. It sickens me to this day.

The following year Chelsea signed a diminutive Scottish winger from Clyde, whose mercurial talents would eventually limit Canoville’s appearances. But, at the same time, the newcomer befriended Canoville, even taking on the racist abusers, despite receiving death threats himself for his effort. “I couldn’t not intervene,” Pat Nevin said in 2017. “At the time the black players were being told to shut up about it when a lot of them wanted to talk about it. Me speaking about it may have sounded brave - unusual - maybe I was the only one at the time, but it was my background.”

Nevin is certainly unusual, which is what makes his memoir The Accidental Footballer so eagerly-awaited. The Glaswegian has long been a refreshing counter to footballing culture. In the Chelsea dressing room he was called “Weirdo” - a tag he now laughs at - purely because he read the NME and The Guardian, and listened to Joy Division and the Cocteau Twins, rather than Shalamar and Kool & Gang, or whatever his bubble-permed teammates had on their Walkmen at the time. Most entries in the footballing oeuvre follow a refrain of ‘It’s is all I ever wanted to do’. Nevin had other ideas. As a child he wanted to be a teacher like his brothers, or even a professional writer. While his book’s title suggests an unplanned career path, his reluctance to play professionally came more from his love of the game: “I didn’t want anything spoiling my love of playing.” Speaking on a Zoom webinar to publicise the book, Nevin says that in his career he’s worked with plenty of footballers who’ve fallen madly out of love with the sport. These same issues might have warded him off, but didn’t. Football pulled him in, taking him first, as a professional, to Clyde, then Chelsea, Everton, Tranmere, Kilmarnock and Motherwell.

At the end of the 1987-88 season Chelsea were relegated, and Nevin was sold to the Merseyside club, but he remains today a popular figure at Stamford Bridge. This is partly down to the five years he spent there, including three seasons as part of a formidable trio with Kerry Dixon and David Speedie, producing 200 goals between them. The trio contributed to the club’s promotion out of the old Second Division, but couldn’t prevent it yo-yoing back down again, leading to Nevin’s departure. He didn’t, though, cut his ties completely, and continues to work for Chelsea TV, the club’s website and matchday programmes. Thankfully, things have moved on since the disgraceful days of Canoville and Nevin’s playing days together, and the Bridge is mostly a more socially reconstructed place, with the club doing much in football’s fight against racism.

As the book and, indeed, the Zoom webinar underlines, Nevin is one of football’s rarer coves. Eloquent and clearly intelligent, his BBC radio commentaries demonstrate a view of the game that is thankfully bereft of the monosyllabic cliches of his peers (an apocryphal tale has it that he once accepted a bet - possibly from Danny Baker - to work David Bowie references into his commentary of a Scottish league game some years ago, allegedly with statements such as “He’s a terrific Station To Station player”. Nevin has been asked by this blogger to confirm the story, but would be delightful if true). 

Music, however, remains his passion. He still gets a buzz, he says, from discovering new material, especially music you’ll not have heard of. On the wall behind him as he talks on Zoom, Bowie’s Heroes is placed prominently, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Each chapter of the book is a song title - The Mighty Wah’s The Story Of The Blues, Elvis Costello’s I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea, London Calling and numerous Bowie titles, and so on - as it covers the first three phases of his playing career, in Glasgow, London and Merseyside. Each is a convenient fit to the narrative, but it does also emphasise Nevin’s encyclopaedic musical knowledge. 

Pat Nevin: the Johnny Marr years

The webinar meanders between questions about football and questions about music, with anecdotes about writing for the NME (he even shared a flat with that publication’s Adrian Thrills early in the day) and attending John Peel’s birthday parties (despite having played for arch rivals of Peelie’s beloved Liverpool). In his playing days he bore little resemblance to anyone else in the game, looking more like one of the indie rockers he obsessed over. A picture of Nevin in camel overcoat and black beret bears more than a passing similarity to Johnny Marr. He even appeared in a Fuzzbox video. 

So, you could say that in a world of sheep-like social conformity, as football is, Nevin was - and remains to this day - a refreshing alternative. “I loved being called ‘Weirdo’,” he recently told The Times’ Henry Winter. “I remember taking Simple Minds’ album [1982’s New Gold Dream] into the dressing-room, saying, ‘You should listen to this,’ and it was, ‘Get that shit off’. Seven years later they’re all listening to Simple Minds.” Today he will occasionally DJ in clubs, playing Joy Division and the butterfly it produced, New Order, amongst his decidedly well-curated set lists.

After music, one of Nevin's other big differentiators from regular footballing folk is that he’s a deep thinker. Not that all footballers are brain dead, of course, but at the core of The Accidental Footballer is an unease with the sporting world around him. Preferring a night out at the Royal Ballet, rather than Stringfellows, would have marked a player out in the 1980s and, frankly does still. We shouldn’t, here, discount the fact that professional, elite football still doesn’t have an openly gay player, not that Nevin is. But football has never managed difference well. Chelsea’s Graeme Le Saux, who cites Nevin as a role model, was frequently the subject of homophobic innuendo, simply because he, too, read The Guardian, could string a sentence together, and didn’t pursue the same lifestyle as others in the sport. Just the other day my girlfriend remarked that you never see any professional players of an Indian or Pakistani background. How things have come since Paul Canoville made his debut, though after the apparent booing during the taking-the-knee gesture before Chelsea’s game at Aston Villa last Sunday, we may not have come as far as we’d like to think.

Paul Canoville in action

The Accidental Footballer shows a football professional whose view of the game, limited to just the three phases of his career, is one of contrast. Journalistically, it recalls the highs (and lows) of playing and balances them with the cultural upheavals of the period. At 58, Nevin is proud of his roots and the principles he acquired from growing up in an East Glasgow tenement. His dad boxed, and taught him how to do likewise. When he lost a playground fight with five other boys, he joined his brothers in exacting revenge, one by one. For such a relatively small feller, he never shirked. It’s what has empowered Nevin to take up causes, such as the racism Canoville faced, even confronting members of the National Front. The same with tackling the homophobia he and Le Saux faced, simply for being…well, nothing more than different.

“We’ve not fixed racism,” he told the Royal Blue Mersey Everton fan site in an interview about The Accidental Footballer. “We’ve come a decent distance but we’ve not fixed it within society. We’ve certainly not fixed homophobia. But when a footballer comes out, that will normalise it further. There’ll be a hell of a lot of people like me, standing shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the cause. It will be great to see when it happens.”

One of the more uncompromising sections of the book focuses on the historic sexual abuse scandal that emerged in 1996 surrounding Celtic Boys Club. Nevin trained with the club himself as a youngster, but was released for being too small. Revelations by former Scottish international-turned talkSport presenter Alan Brazil, that he’d been abused by a club coach, reverberated around the game, opening up the path to wider allegations of abuse at other clubs, Chelsea included. “I couldn’t not write about what happened at Celtic Boys,” Nevin told Royal Blue Mersey. Ignorance, he says, was the result of a lack of eduction. “That level of ignorance does not exist anymore, which is great, but it’s really sad that it took that to actually happen.” He says that none of the kids involved were to blame: “Certainly not the ones who suffered from it, but neither were the other kids who weren’t abused.” Paedophiles, he says, are good at hiding. “They’re manipulative. So I had to write about it, although there were plenty of other things in the book I enjoyed writing about more than that.”

Indeed there are. Music, largely. His friendship with Peel - even sitting in for him on Radio 1 - his regular DJing sets at The Victoria pub in Dalston, the gigs he worked around his playing schedule (even travelling to Paris midweek to see the Cocteaus), or even being excused the second half of a Chelsea game to get to see New Order. But even in his music life, Nevin’s stance on things could attract trouble - he once had a knife pulled on him at a Clash concert by a thug who took issue with his campaign against racism. He still stands against it, and wholeheartedly embraces the institutional approach football now takes against it. “The great thing now is that I don’t have to stand up there shouting and bawling in front of everyone else,” Nevin told Sky Sports recently. “There are better people doing it now. Raheem Sterling can do it. Marcus Rashford can do it. But I do feel vindicated that I was there saying it all the time.” Nevin remains active with the Paul Canoville Foundation, and he is clearly pleased that things have moved on since his teammate’s horrific 1983 debut. “You won’t see a banner for me at [Stamford Bridge] but you will see one for Canners and that is great. I don’t need a banner. Canners, for what he did, needed a banner. It is so important.”

By focusing on his playing years, which ended in 2000 after returning to his native Scotland to turn out for Kilmarnock and later Motherwell, The Accidental Footballer draws attention to Nevin’s time in the game when things, like the player himself, were different. The Premier League was only eight years old when he retired, and he’d largely missed out on the astonishing wealth that professionals today command. Not that he seems bothered. He’s a proud working class Glaswegian, whose principles are solidly based on a fairer society. 

To return to my premise, he remains one of my favourite people in football and, for those five years he graced Chelsea’s numbers, for his history at my club. But, mostly, he’s one of my favourite individuals - erudite, intelligent, principled but not hectoring, and with - without doubt - the finest Zoom background you will ever see a footballer, past or present, putting on show.

The Accidental Tourist is out now, published by Moonray.

Bridge of sighs

Get ready for the COVID anniversaries, as they will be coming thick and fast over the next few weeks. My first of note lands this evening when Chelsea-v-Everton kicks off at Stamford Bridge. It was this very fixture, on this very date last year, that marked the last time I was sitting in my seat in the East Stand Upper Tier, at the very same venue, watching football "live" (i.e. not on an iPad or with fake crowd noise unhelpfully piped in by Sky Sports). 

The home side won handsomely, 4-0, in what turned out to be a miserable return to the Bridge for Everton manager Carlo Ancelotti (regulars to this blog will have endured, amid my rants-previous about Chelsea's biennial managerial schisms, how Ancelotti was dispatched by the club on the final day of the 2010-11 season at Everton's Goodison Park for leading the Blues to just second in the league...). But tonight, by some quirk of Premier League scheduling, it’s the same fixture on the same date at the same venue, albeit one devoid of supporters, prompting some reflection on the football year gone by. Because that win over Everton last year felt like the season had ended prematurely on a high. But as we walked out of Stamford Bridge, the weirdness that we’d all experienced that afternoon was just the start of things. Most startling was how, almost at a stroke, football dropped down the list of priorities and, to some extent, stayed there, though not immediately for everyone: three days after that Everton match, their rivals from across Stanley Park, Liverpool, hosted Atlético Madrid at Anfield in the Champions League. 

Four weeks later, the city of Liverpool experienced a sudden surge of coronavirus deaths, with 68 recorded across the Royal, Aintree and Broadgreen Hospitals between 7 and 9 April. The suspicion fell on a spike in COVID-19 infections following the Madrid game, which had been attended by 3,000 Spanish fans who'd flown in for it. Madrid was already succumbing to the virus by then, and had strict lockdown rules in place. A week later, 250,000 people descended on the Cheltenham Festival. “People were crammed six deep at the bars,” journalist Alan Tyers, who’d been covering the event for the Daily Telegraph, told The Guardian. “If you were going to design a virus dispersion hub, you could do worse than the indoor bits of a packed racecourse”, he said, as he recalled concourse bars packed with racegoers innocently enjoying some drunken revelry. Tyers’ comments appeared in a comprehensive, forensic examination of last year’s Cheltenham meeting which, combined with the Liverpool-Atlético game, were two notorious ‘superspreader’ events that took place just as the virus was taking a hold in the UK. By the final Cheltenham race on 13 March, The Guardian noted, there had been 2,263 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Britain. That same day, the Premier League suspended all games. 

The government remained unchanged until the 16th, when Imperial College modelling predicted that the country’s death toll from COVID-19 could reach 500,000 if there wasn’t a major intervention. By the following Monday, Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown. That same day 56-year-old decorator Geoff Bodman was put on a ventilator at a Cardiff hospital. The Guardian reported that it was ten days after he’d returned home from the Cheltenham Festival. Eight weeks in intensive care ensued, during which he had a stroke. “They should never have allowed [the festival] to go ahead,” Bodman told the paper. “But it would have cost millions to cancel.” Perhaps if they’d known then what we know now, with the UK death toll approaching 123,000 and over four million cases recorded, the organisers of these events might have thought differently. But, benefit of hindsight, and all that.

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

I, for one, shudder at the thought of what I might have been exposed to at Stamford Bridge on this day a year ago, not least because I was soon identified as “clinically extremely vulnerable” to the virus, and technically, should have spent most of the last year shielding. I eventually caught it in November and experienced only a very mild dose, but it could have been worse. Much, much worse. That Sunday, in our section of the East Stand, we didn’t know quite what the protocol was. Old friends, who’d been there week-in, week-out for years, greeted each other awkwardly with elbow bumps rather than conventional handshakes. A large swathe of Row 19 in front of us was empty, the unmistakeable sign of regulars giving the game a swerve. Not that it made much difference to the result.

When the 28th season of the Premier League resumed in June, it was to a very muted return. Matches had to be played behind closed doors with only essential staff allowed inside grounds. Home and away teams are still kept apart before kick-off, with visiting sides invariably forced to use makeshift changing facilities in club car parks, rather than the traditional ‘Away’ dressing room. Match balls and corner flags have to ritually disinfected, and non-playing staff and substitutes were required to sit socially distanced and masked in the stands. Players mingling, hugging and generally mixing is still a moot point. Broadcasters have tried to compensate for the lack of crowds by adding crowd sound effects but it just isn't the same (the one consolation of watching with the sound effects off is that you hear every swearword from the touchline, forcing commentators to regularly have to apologise for pre-watershed expletives).

Football soldiered on under make-do circumstances. Games that went ahead in the first few weeks of the hastily resumed season were notably flat for home viewing, despite the bonanza of live coverage, with all Premier League games televised and 6pm weekday kick-offs (though the Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening kick-offs have eaten into time usually reserved for family entertainment). But despite this bounty of televised football, it would be hard to say that we’ve always had our money’s worth. Graeme Souness recently wrote in The Times that the absence of fans in stadia has had a statistical impact on matches. He noted that home advantage was no longer a factor, with one particular week, recording all five Wednesday night fixtures ending in away wins. We’re now on course for an away win record in the league. 

“People tend to forget that players are performers and entertainers and will all feel the impact to a degree, some by a lot and some by a little, without crowds to play in front of,” Souness wrote. “The vast majority of them enjoy the thrill of having a live audience there, so they are suffering without it.” As a player he recalled feeding off the atmosphere inside the stadium both home and away, especially the latter: “The more hostile it was, the more I thrived on it.” Aggression, Souness said, has been dampened, measured by the minimal number of player scuffles he’s seen during lockdown conditions. He also noted that the absence of baying crowds has also impacted referees’ brandishing of red cards and awarding penalties, though there is no evidence to back up such a claim.

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

As forthright in print as he is in the Sky Sports studio, Souness concluded that Premier League football had, throughout the crisis, proved to be less of its traditional value, adding that it can sell itself for “astronomical figures” around the world “because it is deemed the most exciting, honest and entertaining,” but that has been missing. He cited VAR as a factor, and sort of has a point. Greater televisual scrutiny has, indeed, made VAR seem like a bureaucratic burden, with some decisions made using it no better than a referee giving or not giving a decision without it. I can only imagine what those interminable pauses in games would be like inside a stadium. 

Perhaps we will only find out on the last day of the league season, 23 May, when matches will be playable - in theory - in front of crowds for the first and final time, following the expected lifting of lockdown a week before. By then, Manchester City will have walked away with the league title, and it will be probably only the race for third and fourth place that will be of any consequence. For this Chelsea fan, tonight’s encounter with Everton will count greatly in that hunt for a Champions League place. If both teams approach it right, it’ll be - to use one of football’s many clichés - a ‘cup final’. And that’s just the sort of game that I would dearly love to be in my seat at Stamford Bridge to watch.  

It's a pity history didn't repeat itself

It was less than a hour after the final whistle at Goodison Park, in a match that Chelsea lost by a single goal away to Everton, that one of the greatest managers football has ever produced was brutally sacked. Some close to Carlo Ancelotti say he’d been expecting it, but that doesn’t diminish the ruthlessness with which then-Chelsea chief executive Ron Gourlay informed the Italian he was out, in the away team dressing room.

This was the Italian coach who’d won the league and cup double in his first season at Chelsea, who’d brought with him to West London an incredible pedigree from Italy, with scudetti and myriad other silverware during his spells at AC Milan and Juventus. Ancelotti had, it is said, even been seen as the model manager in Roman Abramovich’s eyes, given that he’d regarded the rossoneri as the template for Chelsea, stylish, successful in Europe. And yet, despite winning the Premier League and the FA Cup in his first season at Chelsea, Ancelotti was summarily fired on the final day of the domestic season - for simply guiding the club to second place. By the same token, then, you have expected history to have repeated itself yesterday at Goodison Park. A frankly pathetic Chelsea squandered a second successive league game in hand to remain in sixth place with only the momentum of their Europa League run keeping them in with a chance of playing in the Champions League next season.

I can't, then, be the only one obsessively checking Twitter yesterday evening, or hitting refresh on the BBC Sport home page today, expecting the headline "CHELSEA SACKS SARRI" (and the obligatory tabloid splash, "WHO'S SARRI NOW?". "Clueless Sarri," as The Sun branded him today surely must be reaching the end of the line. Surely, now, it's a case of 'when', not 'if'? I've tried to be sympathetic to Sarri, that implementing his philosophy must take longer than the eight months he's been at the club. And, to offer some benevolence, until the previous Sunday's frustrating draw with Wolves, we’d been beginning to think that Sarri had turned a corner, prompted by that Carabao Cup final when, even what seemed like a predictable team selection (Hazard as a false 9, etc) turned out to be inspiring, defensively frustrating a free scoring Manchester City and pushing them to a 0-0 scoreline after 120 minutes. Even the ridiculous “misunderstanding” with Kepa Arrizabalaga won Sarri extra respect. Momentum in the Europa League, too, has carried positives, as crowd-pleasing and rare appearances (and goals) from 18-year-old Callum Hudson-Odoi, plus better all-round team performances, have given fans the hope that the Champions League next season is a real possibility.

But despite that apparent European momentum, the sharp focus remains on Chelsea in the Premier League, and here Sarri seems to be going down the Antonio Conte route of talking himself out of a job. "I don't know [what happened]," he told Sky Sports after the Everton defeat yesterday. "The players don't know what happened and at the moment I can't explain the change. We played, in my opinion, the best first half of the season and we could have scored four or five times and then suddenly we stopped playing. It is very strange. We stopped to defend and to counter-attack, everything. [We became] another team, I don't know."

Well, if he doesn't know, then who does? Over the last few weeks, as disappointment has given way to underachievement, Sarri has fallen back on his player's mindset, and thus he did the same yesterday: "I think the problem was mental," he told Sky, "so if you have a mental problem suddenly on the pitch the system and the tactics are not enough." This is just not good enough. I rarely support the notion that it begins and ends with the manager, and in most cases where a manager gets sacked, the players should absorb plenty of the blame. But there's something seriously lacking in the motivation department for Chelsea to play as resiliently as they did in the first half against Everton yesterday, and then, defensively, look like puppets with their strings cut in the second half. Not even the replacement of the poor Higuain with Giroud, and the introduction of Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Hudson-Odoi to bolster the attack could compensate for how poor Chelsea were at the back. There may be individual failings, but the manager trains the team and prepares them for matchday, and should select the most effective and motivated combination of players. Sarri's team were anything but in the second half. Which brings the blame game back on Sarri himself.

Given the history of premature, in-season departures of predecessors at Chelsea who failed to come up to expectations, Sarri has probably been under a stay of execution. Perhaps, though, it’s not that much of a mystery as to why he remains: Marina Granovskaia, the defacto Chelsea chief executive, placed a heavy bet on bringing Sarri and Sarri-ball to Chelsea. Abramovich presumably gave his blessing, but the Chelsea owner has been largely invisible over the last few months as he wrangles with the British government over his visa. It's hard, though, to imagine that the Chelsea hierarchy - in whatever amorphous form it currently takes - hasn't or isn't considering a replacement for Sarri. With a two-week international break, it even has the opportunity to bundle the Italian out and get in someone else without too much disruption to either the club's domestic or European programme. The question, of course, is who: Zinedine Zidane is now off the market, Massimiliano Allegri is unlikely to want the job, and Frank Lampard is only in his first season at Derby County. There's the possibility of John Terry, of course, perhaps with former Chelsea assistant coach Steve Holland being prised away from the England set-up. Or the club dives once again into its directory of Italian managers looking for an out.

Whatever happens, it is becoming clear that whatever Sarri has been trying to achieve at Chelsea is not working. Sky Sports have been reporting "sources" as saying that Sarri's future is now, finally, under evaluation by the club's hierarchy. That should have some bearing on Granovskaia herself for placing such a huge bet on the 60-year-old, but if there's one other thing the hierarchy should be evaluating, its why Chelsea should be looking at yet another season in which it jettisons its head coach not much longer after he arrived.

You snooze, you lose?

I know I'm tempting fate posting on the Romelu Lukaku situation this Saturday morning, given that by the end of the weekend the striker could be a signed, sealed and delivered Manchester United player. That's as opposed to the Chelsea player everyone - including Antonio Conte - has spent the better part of the last 12 months assuming he would eventually become again.

The 24-year-old's protracted desire to escape Everton, to whom Chelsea sold him in 2014, has been as tiresome as it has generated eye-watering headlines of his valuation. That Everton allegedly slapped a presumably prohibitive £100 million price on him is as damning a statement of the inflationary state of football as anything else. I suppose you can't really blame Everton, even if he's really worth only a fraction of that amount.

Both United and Chelsea have apparently offered £75 million. This is still an insane amount, but Conte is reported to have instructed his club's dealmakers (principally Marina Granovskaia) to get Lukaku at any cost. However, that doesn't appear to extend to the fee that Lukaku's agent, Mino Raola, would want from any sale (Raola notoriously pocketed a tidy sum for bringing Paul Pogba to Old Trafford, and also represents another United player, Henrikh Mkhitaryan). Advantage United.

Antonio Conte has now, according to The Times, made his peace over Lukaku signing for United, although he's understandably seething that a player he's been openly courting for the better part of a year is being drawn towards José Mourinho's United at the last minute. And it will raise questions about Chelsea's transfer nous. There's no doubt that the club has demonstrated sound acumen when husbanding its resources: the sales of Juan Cuadrado, Asmir Begovic, Christian Atsu, Bertrand Traore and Nathan Ake have brought in £62 million, money which will go towards the impending acquisitions of Tiemoue Bakayoko and Antonio Rudiger, and possibly Alex Sandro. But still.

Long before those three names were on anyone's lips, Lukaku had been a case of 'when' rather than 'if'. At root has been his desire to play in the Champions League and even to prove to Chelsea that José Mourinho was wrong for selling him to begin with. Everton initially didn't want to let him go, and slapped a nonsensical price tag on him as the proverbial sprig of garlic to ward of predatory interest. On top of that, it has been suggested that Chelsea's relationship with Everton has not been great since it spent much of 2015 trying to buy John Stones. Increasing bids from Chelsea were rejected on the basis that Stones was not for sale. Until Manchester City came along with £47 million, of course. Funny that.

Clubs now appear giddy with an inflated pot of television money, and are apparently happy with increasing their spending on individual players by magnitudes of leaps and bounds. There is a precedent for this: when BSkyB bought the first package of Premier League broadcasting rights in 1992, ahead of the league's debut season, it paid £304 million, establishing the model for paying way over the odds to keep all competitors at bay. 26 years on, the last three-year Premier League TV deal checked in at £8.3 billion. Even with Financial Fair Play ensuring that clubs balance the books, things have gone nuts. If Chelsea do, against the odds, manage to bag Lukaku, it should be remembered that the last two strikers they bought - Diego Costa in 2015 and Michy Batshuayi last summer - cost £32 million and £33 million respectively. And in the case of Costa, you could say they've got their money's worth. Would the same be said of Lukaku? I'm not so sure...

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.