Be careful of what you wish for

There’s a tale - apocryphal or not - about Eden Hazard’s relationship with Antonio Conte when they were both at Chelsea. Such was the eardrum-bothering volume with which the Italian coach would bellow instructions from the touchline, the mercurial winger would arbitrarily switch wings if Conte’s seal-like barking got too much. I must admit, from way up in my East Stand Upper eyrie at Stamford Bridge, Conte’s vociferous chuntering - with Tannoy-strength projection - could be equally as irritating.

There’s no question that the new Spurs coach is effective, decisive even, and may just be the thing that chairman Daniel Levy needs to shock his embittered, lethargic and indifferent players into performing. Nice guy as Nuno Espírito Santo is, he came across as too casual in his authority at Tottenham, running into the perfect storm of Harry Kane angling for a move to Manchester City, impacting his previously symbiotic relationship with the otherwise dependable Son Heung-min, while allowing the ego-on-legs that is Dele Alli to retreat even further into his own agenda, which seemed to be as much about having a good time as knuckling down with the job he gets paid handsomely for.

Should I care about any of this? Well, obviously not. Football’s laws of tribalism ensure that not only do I not care about any team other my own, but also that the ongoing existential drama of what it is to be seemingly permanently “Spursy” is only to be laughed at. Which I do. I also don’t care about the idea of Conte taking charge in N17. He won Chelsea the Premier League in his first season in charge, and then the FA Cup in a somewhat insipid final at Wembley, before parting company with the club (and then taking it to court). The same was the case when José Mourinho joined Tottenham (and, indeed, Manchester United) - we had the best out of him, won titles and enjoyed the psychodramas that come with his involvement in a club, but moved on with gratitude. 

Conte is, by turns, likeable and charismatic, but also by reputation, difficult to handle. And, let’s face it, Chelsea get through managers with a higher frequency than I buy underwear, so it’s hard to get too attached to any of them, even a club legend like Frank Lampard. Thomas Tuchel will, I’m sure, at some point, fall out with the club hierarchy, and the revolving door will spin again. So we enjoy things while we can. Conte, on the other hand, has a different challenge at Spurs, namely to deliver success to a club that has spent longer than I care to remember believing it should be hoovering silverware, but consistently falling short. Unlike Liverpool or Manchester United, who have the Shankly and Ferguson legacies to draw on, Spurs have never had an imperious phase, even if their fans believe - from what and where, I have no idea - that they do. 

The agreement to appoint Conte as new head coach, on an 18-month contract worth up to £15 million a year, will need to deliver. Unlike Nuno, Conte has a somewhat more substantial track record, having won five league titles as a club manager (and over seven campaigns). Even if his last appointment, at Inter Milan, ended with the sack, he still managed to take the nerazzurri to their first Serie A title in more than a decade. He therefore arrives in north London with his work cut out, and even though the opening overtures from the club hierarchy have been positive, it won’t be lost on many that Spurs’ original approach for Conte in the summer, to replace Mourinho, ended after Conte allegedly expressed concerns about the club’s strategy and funding for recruitment. Tottenham suggested that they didn’t see eye-to-eye with Conte on squad strengthening, and a perception that he wasn’t interested in working with youth players (a hangover from his Chelsea days). Clearly, then, these red lines have been removed. 

Conte has since made a statement that the summer was “too soon” to take over at Spurs, but that doesn’t bely the fact that, wherever he goes, he has high expectations of clubs spending to match their ambitions. Daniel Levy is not known for his largesse (especially as he’s going to be paying for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for many years to come).

“The terms must have changed,” Chris Sutton said last night on BBC Radio 5 Live. “[Conte] isn't going to go to Spurs unless he feels he can win something or come close because he is not that type of manager. He is not coming to the end of his career. He wants to come in and transform the club.” In that, Sutton said, Conte will be doing Spurs a favour, rather than the other way around, helping out an unemployed top-tier coach. It won’t, though, be an easy ride. 

From Day 1, Conte faces plenty of challenges. Principal of those will be getting Harry Kane scoring goals again, which also means restoring the 28-year-old’s love for the club badge. No mean feat, that, when his head was so publicly turned by the prospect of City. The second challenge will be to restore a sense of team unity. It was notable that no player gave any statement of sympathy for Nuno, not even a patronising “wishing the gaffer well”. Rumours spilled out from Tottenham that team spirit had been allowed to fray by a head coach who was not a great interpersonal communicator, whose vision wasn’t well translated to the 11 on the pitch, and for those players not considered to be in Nuno’s immediate thoughts, a sense of being frozen out or ignored. 

Football management is about squad engagement as well as managing disappointment - just look at what happened to Frank Lampard when he started to work with a core of younger players at the expense of older heads. I hate the notion of player power: the manager should be respected otherwise discipline breaks down, but it’s worth noting that so far, Thomas Tuchel has been able to keep a large squad happy with tactical rotations to cope with the various competitions Chelsea are currently in without any obvious disquiet in the ranks.

There is, though, also a tactical challenge that Conte will face. Spurs fans have a tradition of expecting their team to play a certain way, and while this isn’t as bad as it sounds (i.e. coaching from the terraces), it does play into the club culture, one that has become ever so slightly entitled. If there’s one aspect of this I’d say, as objectively as I can as a supporter of a despised rival (and, therefore, what do I care?), is that Spurs need to get back into a more attacking frame of mind. That doesn’t just lean on Kane’s shoulders (though he could help), but on the entire formation. So far this season they’ve been far too tentative - and the results have shown. That might come through the physical intensity Conte will put the team through. At Chelsea he was notorious for the punishing training routines at Cobham, and during his single full pre-season put the squad through the kind of ‘beasting’ ordeal that SAS recruits might baulk at. Conte is also a disciplinarian (just look at his fractious relationship with Diego Costa), and that will come into sharp focus with Alli, who’d been all but abandoned by both Mourinho and Nuno, and even Mauricio Pochettino, suggesting that it wasn’t them, but Alli himself who has been the problem.

Another challenge Conte will encounter is longevity. No one is naive enough to think that any job in football is for life, and the fact that the Italian has only been signed until the summer of 2023 suggests that his appointment is more of a project than the start of a legacy. From a Spurs perspective, there is also Conte’s reputation for managing for the short term, not always through choice. “He left Inter [at the end of last season] because they couldn't invest money and they sold his best players,” points out football writer Gabriele Marcotti. “He left Chelsea because he couldn't get owner Roman Abramovich to spend more money on players he wanted.” Marcotti says Conte has form in this area, recalling a tale about him leaving Juventus saying that “they wanted me to eat out in a 100 euros restaurant with 10 euros in my pocket”. Marcotti believes that Spurs, with its notoriously profligate attitude to buying players, might leave Conte short-changed.

For his part, Conte has spun the inevitable PR line about why things didn’t work out between him and Spurs just four months ago. “Last summer our union did not happen because the end of my relationship with Inter was still too recent and emotionally too involved with the end of the season,” he said in a statement. “So I felt that it wasn't yet the right time to return to coaching.” But added: “The contagious enthusiasm and determination of Daniel Levy in wanting to entrust me with this task had already hit the mark. Now that the opportunity has returned, I have chosen to take it with great conviction.” Just as well, then, that Nuno sleep-walked into his P45.

The managerial merry-go-round is a constantly baffling thing. The minute a manager is fired, a list of runners and riders tipped to replace him is quickly assembled, even if you can’t help feeling that they’re all red shirt-wearing crew members of the Starship Enterprise being summoned to the transporter room (you might need to look that reference up). Managers like to talk of “relishing the challenge” and “opportunities too good to miss” when they sign up for the most poisoned of football’s chalices. Conte is far from cannon fodder, but it’s hard to imagine that Spurs will be any happier an environment to work in than anywhere else he’s been and subsequently walked away from. You kind of wish him luck, but then that wouldn’t be a rival football club fan’s sentiment, now would it?

With 20/20 hindsight...

I'm not going to rewrite my own history. Frank Lampard's removal in January still hurts (see posts passim). But what Thomas Tuchel produced on Saturday in Porto, out of the same group of players who’d started the season under Lampard, was a tactical masterclass. The result, a 17th major trophy - and for the second time, Europe’s most prestigious - under Roman Abramovich’s ownership suggests that the philosophy of silverware over managerial longevity works. 

To those of a principled nature, this apparently mercenary need for cups might sit uncomfortably with a more purist, romantic view of football. But Saturday’s win over the even more lavishly resourced Manchester City, whose owner even paid for the club’s fans to be flown to and from Portugal, revealed something of the notion that it’s not always about money. That might sound rich from the fan of a club where money has, actually, bought quite a lot. But money didn’t buy that victory - directly - it was Tuchel’s tactics, plus Pep Guardiola’s decision not to play start with Fernandinho and Rodri, and add a little bit of free stardust from the Chelsea Academy. 

One genuinely satisfying outcome of the Champions League Final was the sight of Mason Mount and Reece James making such outstanding contributions to the win - the former with his midfield-splitting pass to Kai Havertz for the goal, the latter for his robust maturity in preventing City’s fearsome attack from clawing back. You could also cite Andreas Christensen and Christian Pulisic, both of whom have experience of Chelsea’s youth system. Havertz’s goal was most satisfying, simply because the £71 million signing had taken a while to settle in the side since his arrival last summer, with a huge price tag on his shoulders. A nasty bout of COVID-19 didn’t help, either. Perplexingly, he’s still not the out-and-out forward Chelsea so desperately need. 

Timo Werner, bless him, once again demonstrated how a full season and the injection of a fellow German to manage him still hasn’t done anything to improve his finishing. A return of 12 goals in 51 games (and just two in 23) over all competitions is by any measure woeful for a striker, especially one who arrived from Leipzig last summer, having bagged 28 strikes out of 34 Bundesliga games alone. So with the sadly outcast Tammy Abraham - another youth product - and Olivier Giroud destined for pastures new, if Chelsea are to close the gap with City in the Premier League, Werner either needs to dramatically improve his lethality, or Mr. Abramovich has to get his cheque book out again.

The youth element of Chelsea’s make-up has been the core of the club narrative over the last two seasons. When Frank Lampard took over, he had little option but to play the youngsters, thanks to the UEFA transfer ban in place. His existing familiarity with players like Mount, as well as the history of assistants Joe Edwards and Jody Morris working with the Academy, meant their progression added chapters to the fairy tale. And thus it continued when Tuchel took over, though he fell back on experience and maturity to begin with, probably as a safety net, before increasingly seeing what Mount and James could do. The same applied to Ben Chilwell, who’d joined from Leicester last summer, but seemed to take a while to win the new coach over, with the unreliable (in my opinion) Marcos Alonso getting the nod over him. 

It would, however, be too easy to make Saturday night’s victory a romantic one about youngsters alone: just look at the shift the near-32-year-old captain César Azpilicueta put in, or the 36-year-old Thiago Silva, before his groin gave out, or even Antonio Rüdiger. And just how magnificent was the diminutive N’Golo Kanté, who turned 30 in March, placing him in the category of players Chelsea likes to offer limited-length contracts from now on (but would be utterly insane not to tie him down, based on the form he’s shown this season). Kanté was everywhere against City, and while it’s become something of a cliche to refer to him as two players in one, he was, once more, more than just a holding player, but frequently the origin of Chelsea’s forward runs, attacks that exposed Guardiola’s midfield folly.

Here, then, is where I run the risk of revisionism. Chelsea were in some trouble in January when Lampard - forever a club legend - was fired. It’s possible that they could have dug themselves out of it, but heads had noticeably dropped. I still can’t reconcile my thoughts: could Frank have benefitted from a more experienced director of football to manage him? Or was it just too soon, ultimately, to be managing the club? John Terry beware, if so. 

Thomas Tuchel is not naive. He will know full well of the managerial toll that has come with the successes of the Abramovich era. Saturday’s result was the third occasion Chelsea have won a title at the end of a season where the manager has changed midway through. Maybe the Russian owner knows what he's doing, after all. His instincts for pulling the trigger at the right time seem uncannily sharp, but it’s hard not to wonder why those instincts weren’t apparent when some appointments were made in the first place. Avram Grant, André Villas-Boas, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Maurizio Sarri, even José Mourinho (twice)  and Lampard himself were all, to some extent, experiments that failed, requiring Guus Hiddink or the detested (but successful) Rafa Benítez to be parachuted in. 

Tuchel took over an increasingly listless team, instilled some defensive fortitude into them and plugged the leaks. It’s likely that he will now be offered to extend his somewhat tentative 18-month contract. If nothing else earns it, the ‘cup with the big ears’ should do so (not that Chelsea winning it helped Roberto Di Matteo - appointed in March 2012, fired the following November). Tuchel’s tactical victory on Saturday over Guardiola has, at least, quelled the disquiet over Chelsea’s end to the domestic season, with their only-just fourth place in the Premier League, having lost games at crucial moments, and Leicester’s convincing victory in the FA Cup Final which denied Tuchel his only other chance of securing silver.

But taken into another context, along the way, Tuchel has now outsmarted Guardiola three times in six weeks, which poses the enticing prospect of Chelsea mounting a credible challenge to City next term. In the Premier League, Tuchel arrested any further decline and pushed Chelsea back into European contention, just. He took them into an FA Cup Final. And - most impressively - he masterminded superb knockout-round victories over Atlético Madrid, Saturday night’s hosts, Porto, Real Madrid and then City. It’s not been lost on commentators that the near-deity Pep Guardiola’s desire to win Europe’s biggest prize continues, while Thomas Tuchel has achieved it in only five months. He’s not the Special One, but on Saturday’s evidence, he is pretty special. Wish I’d known that when I wagged the finger of doom in January and said that Chelsea should be careful what they wished for. I mean, what do I know?

Grotesque doesn’t even cover it

The other evening I happened across an episode of Dad’s Army, 'Is There Honey For Tea?', in which the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard rally around Private Godfrey and his sisters Dolly and Cissy when their idyllic Cherry Tree Cottage comes under threat of demolition. The house is a perfect rose-decorated slice of bucolic English perfection which, Sergeant Wilson wistfully remarks is “just what we are fighting for”. Britain was a different place in 1975, when the episode first went out, beset by grey skies, strikes and British Leyland cars, an altogether different era to the somewhat confected view of tradition which, even as the set-up for comedy, that episode of Dad’s Army set out to convey. But it brought home a point. Tradition does count.

The timing of the episode going out was prescient. Tradition is under attack again from the announcement that England’s so-called ‘Big Six’ league clubs - Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City - are to join a new and exclusive European Super League along with Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, AC Milan, Internazionale and Juventus (notably, none of the likes of Bayern Munich, Ajax or PSG are involved). It’s been some time coming: the clubs are believed to have been in talks for some time about creating their own rival to the Champions League, but formal confirmation of the consortium has brought the morality of it all into acute focus.

Football supporters, commentators, the domestic leagues and politicians have all, quite rightly, condemned the plan. There have been murmurings of points deductions, international player bans and other sanctions for those clubs who take part. Overall, the move has been roasted, demonstrating the grotesque arrogance of football clubs in failing to understand the ethos of what supporting football is all about, and why fans are prepared to dip into their hard-earned to follow clubs at every level for sometimes perverse and random reasons. 

I make no secret of my patronage of Chelsea, one of the clubs who’ve signed up for this folly. And it’s not out of arriviste glory-hunting, either: I started visiting Stamford Bridge as a child, when the club was near bankrupt, flirting with the old Third Division, and crowds of just 7,000 were turning up to see warhorses like Micky Droy and Ron Harris kick lumps out of opponents. Liverpool were then the dominant English side - even Ipswich were in the ascendancy - and the sort of riches that surround Chelsea today weren’t even dancing on the wildest stages of our imagination. That’s not why went to the Bridge. It was our club, just as whichever berth you call your home club is yours. It is, of course, an added bonus if you have superstars to watch. Even better if your club gets to play the European elite - nothing gets the hackles up quite like watching a load of cynical Spaniards falling over a lot in front of you on a Wednesday evening. But to some extent, this is mere confection, fairy dust sprinkled on the more prosaic form that is the Beautiful Game.

"We have all spoken forever about the importance of the ‘pyramid’ - the dream, the aspiration of clubs developing, they fall, they get promoted,” former  Football Association and Manchester City chairman David Bernstein told Sky News this morning. “Clubs like Manchester City who, 20 years ago, were in the first division and playing Gillingham in a play-off final at Wembley, become what they are now. Leicester City now have punched above their weight. "So I think you are moving all that dream, that aspiration, and I think that's sad and very dangerous."

Football fans have expressed similar sentiment, especially supporters associations of the clubs embroiled in the breakaway. The Chelsea Supporters' Trust branded it “the ultimate betrayal" and a decision made “with no consideration for the loyal supporters, our history, our future or the future of football in this." One Liverpool group accused the club’s US-based owner, Fenway Sports Group, of appropriating a property that is "ours not theirs”, while another said it was withdrawing support to a club “which puts financial greed above integrity of the game.” The Manchester United Supporters Group posted a picture of the Grim Reaper kicking a football on its website, along with a statement opining that the new league “has no sporting merit and would seem to be motivated by greed,” adding that it had been created without any input from the grass roots of the club’s support. "These owners, irrespective of where they come from, seem to think football belongs to them; it doesn't it belongs to us - the supporters - irrespective of which team we support."

I’m not saying that Doncaster Rovers are any closer to playing Real Madrid in the Champions League, but why can’t they aspire to the Premier League and therefore a shot at a top four place? Unlikely that they would, but who is to decree that they can’t, simply because a self-appointed elite has elected to create a closed shop into which only they can play. And for those fans of clubs in this super league - do we really want to play the same 11 teams all the time, including six we meet at least twice a season in our home league? There’s no dodging the fact that competition for the Premier League title and for the Champions League itself is dominated by the same clubs season in, season out, but there’s still enough margin for variety that we can, for example, see West Ham challenging for a Top Four league finish this season, and thus a shot at the European elite next season at the expense of one of the so-called big six.

Tradition, of course, doesn’t even enter the equation. It’s all about cold hard cash. Larceny, actually. The big clubs and their owners have shown their true colours and a patent absence of any understanding of what they’re custodians of. By reducing European club competition to, essentially, an exhibition tournament, they are effectively turning the 12 teams into football’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters. I’m sure we’ll see all the tricks in the book, but it will soon get pretty boring watching them play the Washington Generals every time. European nights haven’t been made by predictability, but by the complete reverse. We still talk now of José Mourinho leading Porto to the Champions League title in 2004, or even further back, Brian Clough doing the same with Nottingham Forest, twice. 

What I bridle with the most is that these clubs believe, to begin with, themselves to be a self-appointed elite. Even thinking about my own club, Chelsea are where they are today thanks to Roman Abramovich's largesse. Do Arsenal or Tottenham have any right to see themselves as elite on their form this season? No, and frankly that statement extends back even further. Elsewhere, neither Liverpool or Manchester United have been exactly polished this term, ditto Barcelona and Real Madrid. The only thing that distinguishes these clubs is the wealth behind them.

What the proprietors have declared, in forming the super league, is their disdain for everyone else, and that frankly is the ugliest aspect of all this. I’m not going to pretend that football is a purely altruistic sport, where hard work and endeavour is the only measure of progress. Because clearly when you’re able to spend £70 million on a single player, whereas other clubs in your same domain struggle to spend that on a squad refresh, you’ve got a performance advantage (even if the litany of expensive flops proves that all that glitters isn’t always gold). Essentially, the breakaway clubs have given a massive ‘up yours’ to the rest of football. They have even doubled down on this by taking pre-emptive “protective steps” to legally prevent football authorities from taking sanctions out against the clubs, with measures talked of including players being banned from playing for their countries, one of the ultimate objectives they strive for.

Let me return to this thing about tradition. It’s a thorny subject. A procession of interviewees today have referred constantly to the role all football clubs, even the big ‘corporate’ behemoths, historically play in their communities, and that the big six are showing this contempt. They will all dispute that, going to great lengths to demonstrate their community programmes, from grass roots support to dispatching their first team to children’s wards at Christmas. But you can’t ignore that even the most historic clubs now looking to join the super league are living a world away from the traditions they come from. 

“He’s more machine than man,” Obi-Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker about his former protege, Anakin in the 'first' Star Wars film. You could say that about the clubs involved in this venture.  “They pretend ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, the people’s club, the fans’ club,” railed Gary Neville yesterday about Liverpool. And he had this for the club he played for: “Manchester United, 100 years, born out of workers. And they are breaking away into a league without competition, that they can’t be relegated from? It is an absolute disgrace. We have to wrestle back power in this country from the clubs at the top of this league, and that includes my club.” His former manager Sir Alex Ferguson - who remains a director at the club - told Reuters: “Talk of a Super League is a move away from 70 years of European club football.”

You could take a step back, breathe, and conclude that football is in constant flux. That progress should be embraced. Even Private Godfrey concluded that if his cottage had to be destroyed for the war effort, so be it. We can easily descend into romanticism, but I think that risks missing the point. We support the clubs we follow - regardless of their status - because of something else, something intangible. Even we Chelsea fans, contrary to the jibes, are not glory hunters. We’ve endured bad times and frustrations. We even appreciate the good fortune we find ourselves in, to follow extravagantly financed teams staffed by exciting talent. But that doesn’t entitle the custodians of our clubs’ histories to ride roughshod over them and our patronage. 

You could even take the harder view that football has been a divided kingdom for a long time, of an elite and all the rest. In the grand scheme of things, does anything fundamentally change with this super league? Yes, pretty much the same clubs who vie each season for the knockout stages of the Champions League are involved in it, but there’s a fundamental here: there’s no reason why other clubs can’t also be in the mix, working their way up the pyramid. And that’s what we scream and shout for. Not some glorified showcase, a friendly tournament in all but name, and one designed purely to line the pockets of the proprietors, and do nothing for the humble supporter, many of whom will be now questioning where they put their disposable income when it comes to football.

Paging Dr. Hiddink

Picture: Chelsea TV

For many people, myself included, today is the first day back at work after a welcome break. It was an opportunity to sleep in, to recharge and, even in the strange circumstances we find ourselves, enjoy a Christmas with the ones we love (or, at least, those we’re allowed to spend time with). For Frank Lampard, I suspect, this Monday morning is simply the continuation of a nightmare that has not, apparently, been ended by his wife Christine elbowing him in the ribs to wake up and stop him turning restlessly.

Yesterday’s performance by Chelsea was one of the most toothless, abject displays I’ve seen by The Blues in all the years I’ve been watching them. Which is many. And I’m still only talking about the first half against Manchester City, who had monstered the home side with three goals within the first 34 minutes. If there was one consolation, it’s that Lampard’s side held at only three for the remaining sixty-odd minutes, Callum Hudson-Odoi’s 92nd-minute strike never more than a token. 

The almost immediate conclusion, as the final whistle blew, was that the pressure on Lampard had just been cranked up considerably, with Chelsea ending the Christmas period in eighth place and a woeful record of three defeats in five games that netted only a single win. At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, this is not what Roman Abramovich shelled out £250 million in the summer for. That’s the stark truth, regardless of the more rational analysis that results are never instant, no matter how much you spend. If you look at the indifference afforded Jürgen Klopp, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and even City’s Pep Guardiola in their first months of management at their respective clubs, progress takes patience and time. Unfortunately, those are commodities the Russian oligarch has repeatedly shown limited supplies of. 

Time, in particular, is relative. A month or so ago, Solskjaer’s future at Manchester United was in grave doubt. Today they sit just behind Liverpool on goal difference alone, on the back of a ten-match unbeaten run. For Lampard, a month is a long time. “I know that it doesn’t come that easy,” he said after yesterday’s savaging by City. “I know where we’re at, whether it puts pressure on me or not. A month ago, everyone’s asking me when I’ll sign a new contract and now people will be saying different things because in quick succession over a tight, busy period, we’ve lost four games of football.” 

It’s true: when Chelsea were on the up they were suddenly being talked about as title contenders. But with every opportunity over the festive period they’ve had to add points and climb the narrowly spaced top six, they’ve blown it. Stoically Lampard has maintained the manager-under-pressure mantra of “My job is to keep working”, but if reports this morning are to be believed, the Chelsea hierarchy has already started shortlisting potential replacements. That in itself is to be predicted, given the capricious history of the club’s owner, but it doesn’t diminish the dull headache produced by the prospect of yet another managerial schism at the club and, in particular, one involving one of the club’s most celebrated former players.

“I played here for a long time,” Lampard said yesterday. “I understand that the minute you lose a few games in a short period of time, then everyone looks and ask questions and the expectations are different this year, because everyone says, ‘Well, you spent this amount of money?’. The reality is [that] a lot of the younger players that have come in are new, are young, have been injured, have not played together. It’s the first time I’ve been able to play Ziyech, Pulisic and Timo Werner in the same team. If we’re expecting the relationship between them three to be the same as [City’s] Sterling, De Bruyne and Silva, then there’s a lot of expectations that are not real.” As ever, an intelligent and cogent argument from Lampard, and to anyone else, it stands up. But Roman Abramovich isn’t anyone else. As this blog has documented on many occasions in the history of Chelsea’s revolving front door, managers have come and gone with alarming regularity. The most notable departure for me is always that of Carlo Ancellotti, hired as the exalted Milan maestro, who delivered a league and cup double in his first term at Chelsea, and was gone by the end of his second for having the temerity of only achieving a Premier League runners-up spot.

“This club has to take some pain to get where we want to get to, because any build or rebuild - and the ban that we had, and the players we have brought in - takes pain,” added Lampard. True, but the transfer ban of the 2019-20 season is starting to become old news. And the players he brought in during the summer - most notably Werner and the high-expectation Kai Havertz (even taking his bout of COVID into account) - should by now be at least showing signs of pulling their weight. And that comes down to leadership.

That was in short supply yesterday. Actually, it was non-existent. Until City slackened off after the break, job done, Chelsea were anaemic in all departments. The entire backline was caught all at sea by City for all three goals by Ilkay Gundogan, Phil Foden and Kevin de Bruyne. Club captain César Azpilicueta, normally so dependent out on the right, was constantly caught out; his inside centre-back Kurt Zouma looked disinterested; veteran Thiago Silva - nominally, the player brought in for his leadership - appeared uncommunicative; and even left-back Ben Chilwell, one of Chelsea’s brighter acquisitions, looked off his game. The defence wasn’t helped, either, by a midfield providing absolutely no protection whatsoever, or offering much stimulus when they did have the chance of going forward. And as for the frontline, utterly toothless. Werner summed up his current run of form by kicking the flag instead of the ball on a corner late in the day.

It’s times like this that Chelsea fans and commentators alike get nostalgic, and reach for the past. It wasn’t so long ago that the current Blues boss was part of a spine that had Petr Čech at its base, John Terry in command at the back, Lampard in the middle, and Didier Drogba at the top. Lampard, now, needs to tap into that. While Drogba could go missing in games when he wasn’t interested (similarly, Diego Costa more recently), when in the mood he was as tenacious a street fighter as Terry was the ‘Captain. Leader. Legend.’ blunt instrument at the back. It won games. It won titles. It may not have won friends, but that’s not what you’re in football for.

The solution? Well, it would be easy to pontificate from the sofa that Lampard needs to make more use of Olivier Giroud and less of Mason Mount, who has, it should be said, deservedly been a first-choice pick, but even he looked bereft of ideas yesterday. Werner needs time to regain confidence, N’Golo Kante needs to find the tenacity that made him such a mesmerising watch in central midfield when he arrived from Leicester City. And elsewhere, heads need knocking together so that concentration improves, and players start showing a bit of interest in what they’re doing. As on yesterday’s performance, that was in scant supply. And it’s precisely that sort of indifference that traditionally prompts Abramovich to look up Guus Hiddink to see if he’s got any plans for the next few months. 

Red Rain

Picture: Getty Images

This is going to sound bitter and twisted, but saturated media coverage this morning of Liverpool's first league title in 30 years - and their first of the Premier League era - comes across as a birthright fulfilled. There's no doubt that Liverpool have deserved this season's title: the 23-point margin (currently) between them and chasers Manchester City, with seven games still to go, is testament to the clever football Jürgen Klopp has been applying at the Merseyside club. But, much like England addressing its own 54 years of hurt (and counting), no one is entitled. Blanket press today of Liverpool being crowned champions without, last night, kicking a ball feels a little overblown, especially when you read The Times' chief football writer Henry Winter's report on Chelsea's win over City last night, which handed Liverpool the title. It took Winter at least the first quarter of his piece before it even mentioned Chelsea, let alone that they'd won what was an entertaining and, unlike many in this restarted season, engaging game.

We Chelsea fans will be accused of pettiness when it comes to any suggestion of dismissiveness. In the 1970s and 80s, when Chelsea were, frankly, nobodies, Liverpool's hegemonic presence in domestic and European football gave them a regal air. Even in my native pocket of south-west London - surely prime Chelsea country - there were Liverpool fans aplenty (along with Ipswich fans at my junior school due to that club's brief period of supremacy). When the 90s arrived, along with Sky's first mega deal with the-then new Premier League (in which I played a teeny-tiny part, working on the presentation to the BSkyB board that secured agreement to propose a £304 million, five-year contract), the balance of power shifted. Football was in a fragile state, especially post-Heysel and post-Hillsborough, the double stadium tragedies that Liverpool and its fans had been sadly caught up in. With the Premier League and football's new money, Manchester United became the new power with Surrey its minted, middle class fanbase, as had been the case during Liverpool's previous years of authority. With this historical context, there is still no real reason why Chelsea fans should bear any animosity towards Liverpool, any more than any other team you could mention. There is certainly no geographic proximity, unlike Tottenham or Arsenal. But there is, though, form. Lots of form. 

Let's start with a certain Jesper Grønkjær, the Danish winger who, on 11 May 2003, changed the lives of Chelsea fans forever with the "billion pound goal" - cutting in from the right and beating at least three defenders to blast past Liverpool keeper Jerzy Dudek. It was a goal that rather stunned us in the Stamford Bridge East Stand. It would be a while before its impact sunk in. Grønkjær's goal secured a 2-1 win and a fourth-place finish for Chelsea, at Liverpool's expense. Chelsea qualified for Europe. Legend has it that this convinced Roman Abramovich to buy the club, and not Liverpool, prompting a period of unprecedented success, not to mention unprecedented resources, a core element of the story. Liverpool, the working class representatives of English football tradition, Chelsea, the now arriviste club from a part of London associated with poshness.

We move on, then, to the era of greatest niggle, with José Mourinho - and his particular brand of toxicity - in the blue corner, and Rafa Benitez in the red corner. To some, it became a tiresome clash of egos, to others, pure box office. Chelsea, under Mourinho, were mounting a blitzkrieg-speed assault on English football, in a way never managed in their golden phases of the mid-'50s and late-'60s. In the Portuguese coach, we had a Special One who could never be accused of lacking confidence. His capricious rival, Benitez, like predecessor Gérard Houllier, couldn't help feeling he was battling ghosts from the club's past. First blood was drawn in February 2005 when Chelsea beat Liverpool 2-3 in the League Cup Final at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. To say it was tempestuous is understatement: Riise put Liverpool ahead after a minute, but it wouldn't be until the 78th minute that the advantage would be reduced by a Steven Gerard own goal. Tee, and indeed, hee. Three goals followed in extra time: Didier Drogba and Mateja Kežman putting Chelsea in the lead, Antonio Núñez giving Liverpool faint hope by a goal in the 113th.

Battle lines were crossed next later that season in the Champions League semi-final. By then, Chelsea had won the Premier League by a record-breaking 95 points, and all in Mourinho's first season in English football. It was also Chelsea's first league title in 50 years. Before drawing Liverpool, Mourinho had also dispatched Barcelona and Bayern Munich. The semi-final was, thus, deliciously set up, though this wasn't matched by the first leg, at Stamford Bridge, which ended 0-0. The second leg at Anfield, however, was a different affair. Mourinho stoked things before kickoff by saying that the pressure was on Liverpool ("We’ll go back to London as heroes, independent of the result"). Febrile from the start, within four minutes Petr Čech brought down Milan Baroš only for referee Lubos Michael to wave play-on. Luis Garcia caught on to the loose ball and scored...or so it appeared. In a time before goal-line technology, William Gallas looked to have cleared the ball, but Michael awarded the goal regardless, perhaps convinced by the emphatic celebrations of the Liverpool players. Even to this day, it's not clear that it was a goal. Mourinho still goes on about it. Garcia has since trolled Chelsea by dressing as a ghost for fancy dress parties. Liverpool went on to a final with Milan in Istanbul, arguably producing the greatest comeback in European football history. Liverpool and Chelsea went on to develop an even greater rivalry, meeting a further 20 times in domestic and European competitions within the next four years. In fact, at one point, the number of times the two clubs met in both league and cup competitions became yawningly tiresome for both sets of fans.

Another fissure became Mourinho's relationship with Liverpool's Steven Gerrard. As Scouse as chip butties and Brookside, the midfielder handed in a transfer request in the summer of 2005, barely weeks after that night in Istanbul. Chelsea tried to sign him (Mourinho would attempt again at Inter Milan and Real Madrid) after the Reds' skipper had decided to "roll a hand grenade into the Liverpool boardroom" when contract talks broke down. Gerrard was eventually won round by Liverpool, but the episode made its mark on Mourinho, who would later describe the midfielder as "one of my favourite enemies". The Mourinho-Gerrard axis remained part of the clubs' rivalry: on Mourinho's return to Chelsea in 2013, the away fixture at Anfield led to Manchester City winning the league title (an ironic twist on last night's fixture). In a Mourinho tactical masterclass, Chelsea monstered Liverpool, despite them being on an imperious, 16-game unbeaten run. Title denied. The cherry on the cake - celebrated seven years hence - happened on the stroke of half-time: Gerrard mistimed a routine pass which fell for Chelsea's Demba Ba. To make matters worse, the midfielder fell over while trying to recover the ball, freeing Ba to score. Blues supporters have never let Gerrard forget the slip. "I’m not going to get drawn into wishing the Chelsea fans well," he would later say, adding "it was nice of them to turn up, for once today". Ouch. 

"I’ll be honest. I couldn’t stand you as a club," another dyed-in-the-wool Liverpool figure, Jamie Carragher, would tell Frank Lampard, now the Chelsea manager, and ever-present in this enduring period. "It surpassed Everton and Manchester United as our rivalry for a period." With Chelsea and Liverpool being drawn, yet again, in the 2008 Champions League semi-final, the Londoners ended up winning 4-3 on aggregate, with Lampard scoring the conclusive goal with a penalty in extra time. His mother, Pat, had died of pneumonia just six days before, leading to an emotionally charged goal celebration. The clubs would meet again in the following season's Champions League, this time in the quarter-final, and again with Chelsea winning the tie, 7-5 on aggregate. No one could say these encounters were anything less than value-for-money.

Another twist of the knife came in 2011 when Fernando Torres joined Chelsea from Liverpool in an end-of-window January transfer. The conventional wisdom is that any major name switching clubs in January will not, usually, be all that much (if you're of value you'd surely stay for the duration of the season). And thus it proved. Some revisionists have claimed that the Spaniard's time at Chelsea wasn't that bad - he did, at least, play a role in the 2012 Champions League title, after all - but for the most part, Torres was torrid. In that initial half-season he scored once in 18 outings, hardly a return for a striker of his repute. Despite twice being Anfield's record highest scorer, the magic never moved with him to Chelsea - 45 goals in 172 appearances, as opposed to 81 goals in 142 appearances for Liverpool. Some might say, cheekily, that offloading Torres was Liverpool's ultimate revenge. Some might counter that by saying that, by joining Chelsea, he achieved his ambition to win titles, something he'd felt had eluded him in the north-west. Champions League, Europa League and FA Cup winners medals gives some credence to that theory.

There is far more richness to the Liverpool-Chelsea story than one blog post can convey, even one as lengthy as this. Chelsea's role in Liverpool's first league title since 1990 is, really, one of happenstance. "I don't think this game decided the title," Lampard said after last night's win over Manchester City. "That was decided a long time ago by Liverpool's consistency and wins. We need to congratulate Liverpool. Fair play to them, give them full credit. They deserve to win it." A moment of understated diplomacy in the history of Chelsea and Liverpool, a rivalry I've always equated with Subbuteo - the quintessential reds-versus-blues match-up. 

For a while to come, there will be Chelsea fans begrudging Liverpool's victory, challenging the cult of Klopp and the belief of many on Merseyside that a title was overdue. I won't deny my own "meh" response this morning as breakfast TV seemed to cover nothing else. But having queued along the King's Road in 2005, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2017, to watch an open-topped bus bearing a victorious squad, it is a delicious feeling to be champions, and I can understand fully the desire for it to be restored. I didn't expect it in 2005, and the novelty hadn't worn off in 2017, either. Liverpool may have only just added a 19th league title, worthily, even in this strange season, and it would be utterly churlish to claim Chelsea's help, but as smouldering red flares are still being doused in the streets around Anfield, it should be reminded that the hard work is still to come. The title defence next season will come against determined opposition. One particular rival amongst them.

The night football came home...and no one was in

"The ambient noise is hideous. The overall spectacle melancholic. Maybe I will get used to it. But I have not enjoyed the game, and not just because it is same old Arsenal." So tweeted Robert Peston, ITV's verbosity-prone political editor. Normally Pesto is to be found asking excruciatingly long questions to whichever stooge has been put up to front the daily No.10 press conference. But here, in the succinct confines of Twitter, he nailed it: my worst fears confirmed - football returned to stadia bereft of fans, noise or atmosphere.

As I watched with low expectation the lifeless spectacle that was the evening's first serving, Aston Villa against Sheffield United, I couldn't help feeling it was all just an experiment: some sort of exhibition by a chemicals company to test out a new type of ball, a new form of artificial grass or that it was an Under-17 practice match behind closed doors. It certainly didn't feel like a team trying to fight its way out of relegation (Villa) or one trying to clamber into fifth place (United). The sterility of a Villa Park shorn of all but essential personnel, and the awkward moment of managers Dean Smith and Chris Wilder not knowing whether to shake hands or elbow-bump at the start (sensibly, they opted for the latter), gave the fixture a surrealism. I've seen televised games before played in front of an empty stadium, but they've usually been European matches operating under crowd bans. This enforced absence was different, and not even the Sky Sports option of a crowd sound effect audio channel could make a difference.

Players taking a ten-second knee before kick-off, followed by a minute's silence for victims of COVID-19, provided two moments of theatre. But for the 90 minutes of play that followed, the only drama was referee Michael Oliver's smart watch proving to be not so smart, and failing to signal a goal when the Villa keeper Orjan Nyland fumbled Oliver Norwood's free kick over the line. Cruel for Sheffield United, but even more cruel for the football-starved viewer hoping for something more than an anodyne encounter to herald the return of competitive football after a three month absence in which we focused on other priorities. Not dying, mainly. If the failure of Oliver's watch was a major talking point in the otherwise so-so 0-0 draw then so, too, was the lack of intervention from VAR on what - regardless of the game itself - was supposed to be a prestige moment in this weird season. "We were waiting for somebody at Stockley Park to show a bit of courage and say they will make that decision," Wilder said afterwards, "but if they've not seen it and seven cameras haven't seen it I suppose they will say that it was not their decision to make." Fair point. For once, you could hardly say the crowd saw what the referee didn't.

If the Villa game was meant to be the warm-up act, the main event - Manchester City-Arsenal - hardly delivered the goods, either. Like the preceding fixture, there was plenty of effort but suspect quality. I know it's going to sound mean-spirited for me, a Chelsea fan, to pass comment on Arsenal, and do so objectively, but it's fair to say that the Gunners barely turned up to their opening engagement of Project Restart. David Luiz's brain didn't turn up at all. The Brazilian, always a subject of mixed opinion while in Chelsea blue, is yet to win over anyone in N1. After last night's performance, it's unlikely he will now. Coming on for the injured Mari after 24 minutes, it didn't take him long to let Kevin de Bruyne gift Raheem Sterling for City's opening goal. Worse was to come when he ridiculously brought down Mahrez to give away a penalty. The subsequent red card received from referee Anthony Taylor might well be the last red thing Luiz sees as an Arsenal player: his contract runs out later this month.

Luiz has inevitably provided the lightning rod for Arsenal fans' wrath, but at the end of the day, this was a clinical Pep Guardiola result for City over an team Mikel Arteta clearly has an uphill challenge to improve. That, though, is to look at the game through the myopia of normal football engagement. Widen the focals, and we had a match, like the 6pm kick-off, that resembled a pre-season friendly with less-than friendly intent. Across the park, fitness looked predictably suspect, and this actually underpins the arguments of indifference to the Premier League resuming. Playing before soulless, empty stadia is one thing, but if the season's remaining, contractually-obliged fixtures are in any way similar to these first toes dipped in the cold sea of revival, then even the most starved fans are going to go wanting.

Players often talk of crowds as being the "12th teammate", and the absence of supporters is clearly a factor. Sure, football can be played as a mechanical exercise, but last night's attempts at blowing puffs of breath into a dying season demonstrated just what a pointless exercise it really is. I've said before that the season's stumps should have just been pulled up, and we restart in September or whenever it's safe to do so, and my view hasn't been changed by last night's morsels of live 'elite' football. It might be back, warts and all, but elite quality - on this first evidence alone - is a long way away. Many will no doubt be relieved: we're all craving normality - holidays, going to the pub, not having to wear face masks to post a letter, and no one will disagree that 'normal' will come at a price, for the time being. I'm not, however, convinced that football so vacant of atmosphere is the normal we want.

Glad it's all over?

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

So that's it. Barring the Women's World Cup and the UEFA Nations League (no, me neither...), the European Under-21 Championship and the Africa Cup Of Nations, that's football over for another season. Two months off, for those of us who worship at the altar of The Beautiful Game™. For the players not involved in such meagre summer nibbles, it's a few weeks on the beach before pre-season and the whole circus gets going again.

However, before Season 2018-19 turns to dust, some reflection. The general assessment of the Premier League is that the right team - Manchester City - won it. Wherever you stand on clubs funded by bottomless riches, Pep Guardiola's side presented a brand of football that came as close to perfection as you could hope to see. I take some pride in that Chelsea were one of the few teams to beat City in the league (2-0 at Stamford Bridge in December), and that they took the Mancunians to a penalty shootout in the League Cup final. We'll gloss over the 6-0 spanking City gave us in February at the Etihad.

City's awesomeness notwithstanding, this has not been a vintage domestic season. Liverpool, bless them, did a decent job keeping up with their north-western rivals, but the chasing pack - in final order,  Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal and Manchester United - appeared at times to be competing with all the dedication of two bald men fighting over a comb. Just imagine if all six teams had really made a go of it? Perhaps there was mitigation: Spurs yet to establish a winning rhythm with their impressive new stadium (or, alternatively, it all went Spursy again); Arsenal still adjusting to life after Arsène Wenger; Manchester United readjusting to life after their frustrating flirtation with José Mourinho, and then finding that turning to a favoured son may not be the answer, either.

Which brings me to Chelsea. Towards the end of the previous season, as it was clear things were turning sour between the club and Antonio Conte, and that yet another managerial departure was inevitable, few knew what lay in store with Napoli's Maurizio Sarri touted as the next Italian in the hotseat at the Bridge. Those plugged into the Italian football jungle drums were hearing exciting things about the unprepossessing Neopolitan, who'd gone from commercial banker to football manager in the lower leagues of Tuscan football, to all of a sudden bringing a brand of football to Napoli that, while not successfully tipping Juventus off the top of Serie A, ran the Turinese giants close. So, building on a tradition of managerial gambles (Villas-Boas, Scolari and even the premature appointments of Vialli and di Matteo come to mind) Chelsea, with their owner somewhat preoccupied with visa wrangles in the UK, punted for the 60-year-old Sarri. If I skip forward a year, on paper you can't argue with third place behind City and Liverpool in the league, a Wembley final and, now, winners of the Europa League. By any token of success, Chelsea have done well this season. It's just that there's not a lot of celebration going on.

Something about Sarri just hasn't connected with the fanbase. Even Conte, when he was starting to sulk, was still routinely serenaded by the faithful singing "Antonio! Antonio! Antonio!". Notably, no such thing with "Maurizio!", a name with an identical syllabic scan. I've never been a fan of fan power: just because we have an elevated view from our seat doesn't give us any authority over a coach who works with his players every single day. What arrogance do we have to suggest that a professional manager knows less than us? On Callum Hudson-Odoi, Sarri was, in principle, quite correct in his assessment that, pre-injury, the teenager had a lot to learn about his game, especially in the defensive phase. Similarly, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, whose muscularly elegant attacking play is the kind that every football fan wants to see, especially from homegrown player, but whose physical rigour over the course of 90 minutes has been guilty of fading too soon. Surely, though, these are things you work on? Surely, there is more upside than down that these players can offer you? By the time they did start to play regularly, it was clear that Sarri was playing them reluctantly and in response to fan power. Sadly, their seasons ended too soon to injury. I hope Sarri didn't feel vindicated.

And then there were the infuriating, zero-sum substitutions: Berkley on for Kovaacic, Kovacic on for Berkley; Jorginho played regardless, the world's best holding midfielder, N'Golo Kante, pushed out to the right of the diamond; Gonzalo Higuain played up front on a Sunday in spite of Olivier Giroud's Thursday night prowess; worse, still, Eden Hazard pushed into the False 9 position in spite of both Higuain and Giroud being available recognised centre forwards. Again, Sarri knew best, or at least professed to knowing best. At risk of sounding a tad mercenary, however, that's not what we fork out hundreds of pounds a season to watch. We want to see the best being the best at what they do. Perhaps if we'd seen fewer of the results like the 6-0 defeat by City or 4-0 away drubbing by Bournemouth, not to mention the niggly two-goal defeats at Liverpool and Everton respectively, attitudes may have been better. Actually, when you look at Chelsea's Premier League performance in totality this season, the results aren't all that bad: Won 21, Drawn 9, Lost 8, Goals for 63, Goals against 39, and 72 points in total. But then compare that with the gulf between Chelsea and Liverpool and City above them - goal differences of +67 for Liverpool and a final points total of 97, and +78 and 98 points for City.

All of which means next season is going to be a tough fight for Chelsea to get back on level terms with their more successful rivals this term. Which begs two questions: how will they fare without Sarri, to be confirmed any day now as the new boss at Juventus (following an "amicable" agreement with the Chelsea hierarchy to move on)? And how will they fare without Eden Hazard, surely to finally get his move to Real Madrid this month, one that most Chelsea fans, I would contest, are respectfully at peace with after seven seasons at the club.

To the first question, I'm sure Chelsea will do fine after Sarri, just as they've been fine following each of the last fifteen managers who've gone after relatively short tenures during the Roman Abramovich era. Of course, there is the almost certain likelihood that whomever takes over will have to contend with the FIFA transfer ban, but then if that means that the club relies on its own resources for a bit, and bloods in some of the myriad youth players scattered throughout the lands as loanees, then maybe the club will get to see what fan loyalty really is about. Sometimes crowd pleasing starts at home. The big question, however, is who gets to manage them, and here's where stomachs begin to cramp up. The appointment of Frank Lampard to run a squad containing homegrown youth would be very attractive to the romantic at heart. But just as no Chelsea fan - and I mean, no Chelsea fan - would ever want to see Gianfranco Zola take the top job, in case he screws up and sullies his legend status at the club, there's a similar squeamishness about Lamps taking on a historically risky job just a single season into his managerial career. No one will deny that Frank is one of the brightest players ever to have graced the game, and will have been applying himself as Derby County manager with customary maturity, but do we want to see one of the greatest players in the blue shirt chewed up and spat out by Chelsea so soon in his managerial career?

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

And, then, Hazard. Resistance to hype might prevent the diminutive Belgian from being favourably compared to Lionel Messi and that ageing showboater Cristiano Ronaldo, but Hazard sometimes does defy the eyes. Sure, there have been plenty of games when he has been demonstrably below par, as if he gets to pick and choose when he turns it up to 11 and when he just ticks over, but just as it has been a privilege to have seen the aforementioned Zola play football, the same applies to Hazard. If he does move on - and who would begrudge him if he did at the age of 28 - we will have seen the sort of mercurial talent that, normally, only gets to play for European club royalty. So the next Chelsea manager will have the inconsiderable challenge of filling an unfillable void. 20-year-old American, Christian Pulisic, might well be that stopgap, though little, really, is known of him, apart from what can be gleaned from his unveiling at Chelsea, in which few believed that he was, actually, 20. Remarkable maturity off the pitch, so let's see what he offers on it.

Every new season brings hope, adventure and expectation, and even with Chelsea's challenges due to the two-window transfer ban (which, despite ongoing appeals, seems unlikely to be revoked) and yet another change of manager, the prospect of young players coming into the squad, and a few dead weeds disappearing, means that when that first August weekend of the new season comes around, there will be a wholesale sense of change at Stamford Bridge that hasn't been there for many an opening weekend. The coming days will, I suspect, be key to that. But perhaps, though, a little holiday from football might do us all some good.

Like two bald men fighting over a comb: Man United versus Chelsea

The jokes have started early. Rumours coming out of the US that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is making or has made a bid to buy Manchester United have been met with gags such as “Amazon buys Man U, and immediately delivers the title to their neighbours”. What a sad state of affairs, then, that arguably the biggest football club in the world, with a history as storied as any footballing royalty in Europe, like Juventus, Real Madrid or Barcelona, should be such a source of ridicule. But, then, Chelsea - their opponents today at Old Trafford - aren’t exactly all that far away, themselves, either. Not that I’m suggesting for one minute that The Blues should be considered in the same company, history-wise, as their Mancunian rivals, but it is curious, going into today’s encounter, just how many parallels exist between the two clubs, and not just the shared experience of José Mourinho as manager.

Watching the Manchester derby the other night, I genuinely felt sorry for Ole Gunnar Solskjær - super-sub in his playing days at United and effectively brought in off the managerial bench in December to become, first, caretaker manager at Old Trafford and, since the end of March, permanent head coach. For a rival fan, Solskjær in his day could infuriate with his ability to be brought on by Sir Alex Ferguson late in a game and score the kind of vital goal that secured United’s imperious reputation in the 1990s and 2000s. But since Ferguson retired, that reputation has proven unmaintainable. On Wednesday night, however, the genuinely likeable, articulate and intelligent Solskjær looked crestfallen as Manchester City first broke the deadlock with Bernardo Silva’s 54th-minute strike, and then sub Leroy Sane’s low shot a few minutes later to humiliate David De Gea. It was a game that bluntly symbolised the power shift in Manchester: United, still retaining an army of vastly expensive players (Luke Shaw earning five times more in a week than a teacher of ten years' standing earns in a year...), some of whom there only by entitlement, up against a similarly enriched City line-up coached by Pep Guardiola, justifiably the most admired manager of his generation. City may have bought their way to the summit with Sheikh Mansour’s Emirati riches, but that’s the way it goes. You can no longer stand on ceremony in modern football, as United are finding to their cost.

Compare them, then, with Chelsea. Until Roman Abramovich came along in June 2003, buying Chelsea on the back of their final game of the 2002-2003 season, in which Jesper Grønkjær dramatically volleyed in to beat Liverpool 2-1, thus securing Champions League football for the following term, the club’s legacy was, to be fair, patchy. A single league title, in 1955, a couple of FA Cups and the European Cup Winners Cup twice since 1970 was all they had to offer, with a veneer of glamour generated by a celebrity following in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When away fans sing “where we you when you were shit”, I know exactly where at Stamford Bridge I was standing. Without, though, trawling over the Abramovich era in depth, Chelsea in 2019 are in a weird place: an owner rendered indifferent due to his visa problems (and contemplating offers for the club); a stadium overhaul on permanent hold; a string of successful (and some less so) but short-lived managers since 2005, with the jury out on the current one; the prospect of a UEFA-enacted transfer ban and a squad in desperate need of overhauling, including some highly-paid European stars approaching the point when the club’s policy on over-30s means that they will be frustrated in being offered a contract of longer than 12 months. Throw in the inevitable loss of a star player (Eden Hazard), and the chance that the currently injured starlet Callum Hudson-Odoi might also leave in the direction from where his head has been turned by German club interest, and you see a club that could fall apart in football terms…as well as corporate terms. The turbulence building up around Chelsea is not all that far removed from the mood in camp at Old Trafford.

So, with the fight between Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United for third and fourth spot increasingly looking like two bald men fighting over a comb, with all four dropping points as easily as they win them, with just three more fixtures left in the season, the encounter today between The Reds and The Blues, is a real head-scratcher. Chelsea, of course, have been a nightmare this season with their visits to North-West England, their fixtures with Everton and Liverpool highlighting a mental inability to play the second half with anything like the intensity of the first. But, then, you have a Manchester United that has struggled to convince ever since Solskjær was announced with crowd-pleasing intent as the club’s full-time manager at the end of March. And that includes last Sunday’s abject, 4-0 capitulation to Everton at Goodison Park.

Today’s game may just prove to be a damp squib: two beleaguered (relatively speaking) teams, drained mentally and spiritually, trying to summon the energy to win a hotly-contested Champions League spot at the arse end of a season where two other teams are outperforming everyone in just about every dimension. By contrast, go back 11 years and United and Chelsea were meeting at the Luzhniki Stadium in the 2008 Champions League final. Two English teams at the very summit of European football. One, a team with a sainted reputation in world football, the other, an arriviste outfit managed by an unlikely champion-in-contention, Avram Grant. While it may have been decided by John Terry’s unfortunate slip on the penalty spot, these teams were a credit card’s width apart in terms of talent. Today, they might have the talent, but that talent is doing little to justify such a tag.

Both teams today are managed by individuals yet to prove their case, though in fairness, the likeable Norwegian in the red corner has only had a month or so. Both, though, are painfully and obviously lacking the leadership figures that made them each a different proposition in Moscow in 2008. Then, United had Rio Ferdinand, Paul Scholes, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Edwin van der Sar and Nemanja Vidic, while Chelsea had Terry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba and Michael Ballack. And today? As much as I like César Azpilicueta as a right back, he has been made Chelsea’s skipper by default. He’s not a leader on the pitch, being somewhat anonymous at a time when Chelsea’s players need a kick up the backside. For Azpiliqueta, read Ashley Young in the exact same situation at United. These are, of course, isolated, individual problems out of the many more that exist for United and Chelsea. When you add them up, the great portent of today’s fixture starts to diminish. Quite a bit. Yes, it will be an encounter between a couple of prize fighters, albeit prize fighters who’ve lost their punch and with it, their fear factor. And that’s why it could be a downright let down.

In fact, whether United or Chelsea succeed in reaching that coveted fourth spot (and it’s still numerically possible for third to be reached, too), both sets of fans should be prepared for disappointment. Because whenever they play their European football next season - on a Tuesday or Wednesday, or the less illustrious Thursday night - who owns these clubs, who plays for these clubs, who runs these clubs and even who manages these clubs are all, right now big, open questions. To have one of those questions looming might be troubling, but to have all four? That’s an awful lot to have at stake at once.

Sarri seems to be the hardest word - part 3

Time's up?

Let me get this out there from the start: there is no shame losing to this particular Manchester City team. I might even claim it’s a badge of honour. But going into yesterday’s game at the Etihad, I wasn’t expecting much, as a Chelsea fan. Not that I don’t have any faith in Chelsea, even given their recent run of away results, but Pep Guardiola is currently custodian of a team that will punish anyone with elan. That doesn’t make them infallible, as they found at home to Crystal Palace before Christmas, but their results against opposition, big and small, have shown a propensity for telephone number scorelines. Which should have put Chelsea on their guard before the abject capitulation at the Etihad.

Before 4 o'clock yesterday I wasn’t even that concerned that I’d be spending the first half listening to radio commentary of City-Chelsea while driving home on the M25. I just didn’t expect to be 4-0 down by the 24th minute. At that point I came close to petulantly switching the radio off, but even then Dion Dublin, BBC 5 Live’s co-commentator with John Murray, was still of the opinion that Chelsea might be able to dam the flow of City goals and restore some pride. I was less positive: scorelines like that rarely get turned around, if ever, and if they do, you wouldn’t get this Manchester City team folding up and switching off. As they showed against Burton Albion, they are decidedly ruthless when on a killing spree. And thus they proved. 6-0.

So, hats off City, I knew you’d beat us. I just didn’t know how painfully you’d do it. Which brings me to Chelsea and Maurizio Sarri’s future. There’s an interesting comparison to make here between the two managers on the touchline yesterday at the Etihad: Guardiola has been given the time, space and resources to create this squad. Chelsea won the Premier League title in Pep’s first season at City, implausibly accelerating away from the chasing pack by Antonio Conte’s tactical switch to a wingback system that caught everyone off their guard. Meanwhile, Guardiola was rebuilding. Down the M64 at Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp was in the midst of doing much the same. Between them, they’ve had two and four years, respectively, to get their teams to where they are now. Will Sarri be afforded the same latitude?

It’s unlikely. Chelsea’s philosophy in the Abramovich era has been consistently short-termist, even if it looked like a slight change of strategy had been adopted with Sarri. If Chelsea would only come out and say that’s how they do it, we’d all accept it. Only the most naive manager would join the club in the expectation of seeing out their career there which, I suppose, is fine. The chances of another Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger putting in double-digit tenures at a Premier League club (or, indeed, anywhere else) are now unlikely, anyway. Again, fine, but in the case of Chelsea, there has been a distinct lag between head coach turnover and squad evolution. The elephant still in the room after yesterday’s horror show in Manchester is that the squad Sarri is playing with, or at least trying to convert to his philosophy, is still rooted in the Mourinho Mark II and Conte group of players. Change seems to be a problem for them. So yesterday’s game, plus the recent pounding from Bournemouth, should be attributed to a combination of Sarri’s unbending view that his possession-based system is the one and only, and that the players can switch off just when they need to dig in and fight. Much is said about Sarri’s lack of a Plan B, and when, yet again, you see like-for-like substitutions being made (though at least Kovačić on for Berkeley came in the 54th minute, rather than the usual 72nd…), and nothing changing in the fundamentals, you wonder if the Italian’s rigid adherence to Plan A will ever shift. Some might even admire his obstinacy, but he’s now starting to look like King Canute.

Sarri’s appointment last July was always going to be a gift to headline writers, which is why this is the third time I've blogged about Chelsea and used the generous pun you see at the top of this page (and thanks, too, to Elton John). Yep, I know it’s lazy, but the Italian is a gift that keeps on giving. His protracted appointment - delayed by Napoli, somewhat childishly, stalling his release while they onboarded former Chelsea boss Carlo Ancelotti as his replacement - was made just three weeks before the Blues’ first competitive game of the season, the Community Shield, which they lost 2-0 to Manchester City. At the time (and since) Sarri was cut some slack, the line being that it takes time to build a team, to get them to adopt a philosophy. Sarri was appointed largely because of the attractive football he’d instilled in Napoli, which enabled them to keep pace with runaway Serie A leaders Juventus. Six months on, it’s patently clear that what worked at Napoli is not working at Chelsea, what may have fitted the pace of Serie A is not fitting the Premier League.

What is most troubling is that Sarri is starting to exhibit the same truculence that Conte adopted, and that didn’t fair well for the previous Italian in charge at Chelsea. Though not as obvious as Conte became, Sarri’s current demeanour is not the kind that Mr. Abramovich and his acolytes appreciate. But before the inevitable P45 is dispatched Sarri’s way, I seriously hope that Abramovich, his de facto chief executive, Marina Granovskaia, chairman Bruce Buck and the other members of the club’s football board, David Barnard, Guy Laurence and Eugene Tenenbaum, take a good long look at the state of the team. Until yesterday, Chelsea had maintained a top four position in the league, which is probably all that could be expected at this stage of a new head coach's tune with this particular squad. And even when the wheels first fell off, against Spurs in November, they were lashed back on to record wins, including a 2-0 defeat of Manchester City at Stamford Bridge However, the bolts securing those wheels keep shearing. Yes, Chelsea remain in four competitions, but the topography of results that got them to this point is decidedly uneven, perilous even.

Next up will be Malm ö away in the Europa League on Thursday night, then a resurgent Manchester United next Monday in the FA Cup 5th Round, followed by Malmö at home in a second leg, with the run of immediate challenges ending with Manchester City, no less, in the League Cup final at Wembley. Big decisions, then, for the football board at Stamford Bridge. Fire Sarri now (and I wouldn’t expect club legend Gianfranco Zola to remain on the management team, either) and the club enters dangerously familiar territory: the final third of a season with honours on offer, but a caretaker in charge. Yes, that worked a couple of times with Guus Hiddink, Robbie Di Matteo even won the Champions League, and the toxic appointment of Rafa Benitez still netted Chelsea the Europa League trophy. But there’s only so many times Hiddink can be parachuted in, and you don’t see Zidane donning a hazmat suit to join Chelsea for the remaining four months of the season, unless there’s a desire by both him and the club to make it permanent. Plus, it’s just not going to happen, anyway.

However, all this is grist to the mill. Something has to change fundamentally at Chelsea. First up, is the relationship between head coach and the club’s football board. After technical director Michael Emenalo left for Monaco in November 2017, the link between the board and the club’s playing elements disappeared. Marina Granovskaia assumed all control over player acquisitions and divestments. The coach appears to become nothing more than a consultant in the recruitment process (although Sarri managed to persuade the club to bring in his trusted lieutenant Jorginho from Napoli, as well as - finally - Gonzalo Higuain on loan, another player with positive Sarri experience). But that has been all. Questions must also be asked about the state of a squad with access to so much academy talent, and yet no intention of using it. I’ll come back to Callum Hudson-Odoi in a moment.

The lack of true leadership on the pitch is the other major area of concern. Yesterday’s match in Manchester highlighted the absence of blood-and-guts at Chelsea. That was never the case when it had, at its core, leaders like John Terry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba and Petr Čech, a spine that would take the game by the scruff of its neck when it was needed. As much as I like César Azpilicueta, he’s no Terry, and having been one of Chelsea’s best performers over the last couple of seasons, has not looked as effective this term. That may be down to his captaincy (favoured over the unfavoured Gary Cahill), something that has a habit of diluting ability (once dubbed 'The Botham Effect" after the mullet-haired cricketer's powers wained after he was made England captain in the disastrous 1980 test series with the West Indies).

However, when there are players who need no motivation at all, Sarri doesn't use them. Principally I'm talking about Hudson-Odoi: the precocious 18-year-old may well still need to know his place, but his pace and strength are the very attributes Chelsea have lacked in recent performances. Sarri clearly isn’t sure about the teenager, and with Chelsea managing to ward off Bayern Munich in the transfer window, the club needs to reach agreement on what they do with him. It was almost painful to see the teenager yesterday, not even on the bench but in the seats behind the dugout reserved for squad members who travel but are not on the team sheet. Sarri’s treatment of Hudson-Odoi has been nothing short of scandalous. A player who wants to play, who can play, who can give the fans something to cheer about. And what did Sarri do, once Bayern Munich’s overtures had been conclusively (for now) rebuffed in January? Drop the player for the Bournemouth match on the grounds that he’d only played three days previously. Hudson-Odoi might as well start learning German now, because he’ll be out the transfer window as soon as it opens in the summer.

José Mourinho spent the last four months of his time at Chelsea playing Russian Roulette, almost literally. Then, he was sacked when Chelsea had plummeted from previous season’s league champions to 17th, just above the relegation zone. He was sacked in mid-December when it was still possible he could have turned things around. The Chelsea board didn’t see that as possible, and fielded then-technical director Michael Emenalo to tell the press about the “palpable discord” between manager and players. Today, Chelsea are only in sixth, on points. At any other club, that - and the fact they’re still battling on four fronts - would not set off any alarm bells. Chelsea, however, are not any other club. Sarri, or anyone else, should not think for one minute that Abramovich’s visa or business issues should be a distraction. The next few days - or even the next few hours - could prove to be another disrupting chapter in the recent history of Chelsea Football Club. Sarri would be the expected casualty, but if he does go, serious questions need to be asked about how Chelsea’s boom-and-bust cycle needs to come to an end.

Do you know the way to sack José?

I'm not even considering the fact that Tottenham beat Manchester United 3-0 at Old Trafford last night, nor even how they did it. Sorry, Spuds fans, this one's not about you. José Mourinho made sure of that. It wasn’t necessarily about how Manchester United lost at home, either. It is - because it always is - all about José.

Turning up half an hour early for his press conference the other day only to stick around long enough to deliver a handful of surly answers; then last night, almost theatrically applauding the home fans after the match was over, lapping up their adulation as if what had happened in the previous 90 minutes or so hadn’t mattered one bit; and then another post-match presser in which The Sulky One asked of the assembled [on time] journalists: "What was the score?" before angrily holding up three fingers and asking "What is this also? Three Premierships I have won, more Premierships than the other 19 managers put together. Me three, them two," followed by "Respect, respect, respect", repeated as he made his exit.

The fact is, if José wants respect, he’s got to show some himself. On Sunday Genovese fans maintained silence for the first 43 minutes of Genoa's home fixture to Empoli, one minute for every victim of the Morandi bridge collapse. Now that is respect. Respect is earned or deserved, not petulantly demanded from journalists asking legitimate questions about how Manchester United managed to lose at their supposed home fortress to one of the Top 6 by a three-goal margin. Yes, it's only three games into the season, and a season's results can never be gauged over just 270 minutes of football at the sunburned end of the term, but it's worth pointing out that in Mourinho’s first season at Chelsea the team conceded just 15 league goals all season. Whether by parking the bus or not, Chelsea were ultra-disciplined at the back, and ultra-watertight. Manchester United are already halfway towards that goal record, and we're not yet out of August.

Whatever it is causing Manchester United to be so poor, the root lies with Mourinho. Once again, he has adopted the truculent manner that led to "palpable discord" between him and his Chelsea players in that disastrous, four-month nosedive in defence of the 2014-15 Premier League title. It left Chelsea in 17th place at the point of Mourinho's departure...ironically, following another defeat to Tottenham. That was when Third Season Syndrome became a thing: it was the realisation that in Season 1 he builds, Season 2 he achieves and in Season 3 it all falls apart. Well, this is a blockbuster Netflix would probably pass over. Because Season 2’s pattern was ignored, mainly by the supposedly classless Manchester City.

Mourinho’s demeanour last night as he boorishly lectured journalists was nothing new. This wasn’t a sudden, Keeganesque implosion, one where sympathy might be afforded Mourinho’s mental state. No, because this is José. When he first appeared on these shores in 2004 to declare himself a "special one", the press went giddy. Sports desks ordered extra notepads from stationery departments at the lip-smacking prospect of a new and highly quotable Clough, funded by Roman Abramovich’s largesse, and with success with Porto behind him to underwrite the hype. And so he delivered Chelsea’s first league title in 50 years, and then another. Buying the league? Nah. We loved him, and sang ebulliently from the Stamford Bridge stands, “José Mourinho! José Mourinho!”. And then, within a few weeks of The Third Season starting, he was gone. One indifferent performance in the Champions League, and mutterings of discontent over Avram Grant’s role as Director of Football, and club and manager parted company.

The cycle was in full effect, and thus it would repeat itself at Internazionale and Real Madrid, coming back to Chelsea in what might seem now like an ill-fated marriage of convenience in 2013. But this was no Burton and Taylor giving it yet another go: the suspicion was always that José coveted the-then unavailable Manchester United job. So Chelsea just had to do. And so he dutifully added another Premier League title before it all went horribly wrong on the opening day of the 2015-16 season, and José jumped up and down like a enraged, tanned Basil Fawlty as Dr. Eva Carneiro and her assistant ran onto the pitch to attend the felled Eden Hazard. This was just 8 August. And it set the tone for the next four months, with Mourinho publically demoting Carneiro, and team morale disappearing before our very eyes. Week after week, the Mourinho mood worsened, some genuinely fearing for his mental state as press conferences and post-match interviews became increasingly monosyllabic. All leading up to the inevitable parting of the ways and Michael Emenalo's extraordinary admission of discord between manager and players. On that occasion there was suspicion that Mourinho had engineered the whole thing to get himself out of his Chelsea contract and onto the radar of Manchester United's HR department (despite there being no vacancy to fit his experience and talents).    The idea of Mourinho attempting 'suicide by cop' by appearing to invite Roman Abrmovich to fire him might seem extreme, but if there's one thing we know about José, there are no rules for him to follow. There are times when everything about him seems staged and contrived; even his march last night to the Stretford End looked rehearsed, at least in his mind, to calculate maximum effect when he faced the press afterwards.

There was a time when we believed that all of this egomaniacal behaviour was a distraction, that by pulling the supertrooper onto him, Mourinho would deflect attention away from his players. But if there's one thing we took out of that dismal four months in 2015, his actions did everything but. He was, by all accounts, a miserable sod to be around, and that appears to have replicated itself over the summer at United. Even if he managed, miraculously, to get Paul Pogba onside, that scowl and the apparently demeaning comments about some of his players will have been felt throughout the squad.

So, three games in to this season and we have already reached the level of petulance that provided the weekly narrative of those final few months of Mourinho’s time at Chelsea. Chelsea’s PR people must have needed counselling during that period and I can see United’s media team going in the same direction. Surely Manchester United must be alerted to the warning signs? Could he be sacked sooner than later? Logic says he won't go just yet: even in this insane world of football, three games - one of which won - does not lead to dismissal. But the look on executive vice chairman Ed Woodward's face at the final whistle yesterday was not one of stoic reflection. Even if, as the Daily Mail has revealed today, he and Mourinho had a "positive" conversation, drawing on United's first-half performance, rather than its second-half collapse, there surely must be those in the Old Trafford board room wondering whether history is repeating itself before their very eyes, and not necessarily in the best way, either...