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

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

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

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

Twitter/Chelsea FC

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter/Chelsea FC

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

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

20 years on: the rebirth of cool...and Apple

Last Wednesday Apple reported quarterly earnings of $61.1 billion, almost $10 billion more than the same quarter a year ago. Its 2017 annual revenue was $229 billion. To put that into perspective, the UK's annual defence budget is about £50 billion. That Apple is loaded is common knowledge. That consumers like me are still prepared to fork out for premium-priced products to keep that turnover going says much about the company's brand resilience, despite it lacking any true, must-have innovations for some time.

But at risk of sounding like a Apple fanboy, my ownership of multiple iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs (including the MacBook on which I write these words), is the product of an infatuation that began almost 30 years ago. In the very early 1990s I, like many others in the media professions, was introduced to the Mac as a production tool. Apple's desktops were in most newspaper and magazine offices as the digital, desktop publishing revolution transformed the business of ink. Working, first, on Apple's SE PCs, I migrated to larger machines as I moved from the Sky TV press office to the company's in-house creative services department. There, the ease and simplicity of the Mac I was provided with allowed me, completely untrained, to master the production of print advertising. Within my first week I'd mastered programmes like QuarkXpress and Illustrator, and had produced my first billboard - a poster for The Simpsons, which was about to launch on Sky One. Six weeks later, I saw the finished poster for real on a 96-sheet billboard on the A3 in New Malden.

Near Sky's offices in Osterley was an Apple reseller. Occasionally I'd go past it and, like Mike Myers in Wayne's World eyeing up that white Fender Stratocaster, would press my nose up against the glass window, drooling over an Apple PowerBook. Clever product placement of these laptops in various films had made them extremely desirable, which also made the one I kept drooling over completely out of range of anything I could afford. And, to be frank, there wouldn't have been much justification for me owning it. But it did look effortlessly cool.

Apple ownership arrived, eventually, 20 years ago, on May 6, 1998 when, under the leadership of the late Steve Jobs, the company unveiled the product that would, finally, satisfy my Apple infatuation, and at the same time, would set the company on the path to unprecedented riches that it enjoys today. That product was the iMac. Essentially a 15-inch portable TV with a computer built into it, that, however, wasn't the appeal, or the point. With its translucent 'Bondi Blue'-coloured casing around a 15-inch CRT tube screen, matching keyboard and mouse, it was everything the home PC user needed in one, neat unit. Even the grab handle led some eccentrics to treat it like a laptop.

The first model was somewhat rudimentary, and functional upgrades progressively followed, along with the expansion of more colour choices ('Blueberry', 'Grape', 'Tangerine', 'Lime' and 'Strawberry'). But that first iMac, however, was an instant design classic. Jobs and his team - in particular, Sir Jonny Ive - had brilliantly thrown away all the aesthetic norms of a PC - beige or grey boxes - and created something that looked good out in the open, not just hidden away in an office. Even the mouse and keyboard matched the 'fruity' colours of the computer itself. The iMac was (and, seven generations on, still is) an extremely daring move. It was also relatively affordable, too. $1,299 might not sound cheap, but that was half the price of most other Apple computers on the market. Finally, Mac ownership was within reach.

The iMac was an instant success. By January 1999 the previously struggling Apple had more than tripled its quarterly profit. Demand was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "insatiable". Moreover, the iMac reinvented Apple as a cool consumer electronics brand, and by introducing a machine with such popular appeal (the word "fun" had never been previously associated with computing) the naysayers who believed that Apple was just a niche brand selling to professionals were soon being proven wrong. Visit a coffee shop today - especially one within the catchment of a major university or college - and that ubiquitous, illuminated Apple logo will be glaring right at you from the lids of MacBooks. So much for niche.

I bought my first iMac in Amsterdam in 1999, a year after Apple had launched it. Now, I was not only owning my first PC, but I was also finally owning a Mac. At the beginning of 2001 I moved to Silicon Valley and bought my second iMac, a second-generation model front-loading CD slot and better connectivity. Soon I was embracing the "digital lifestyle", thanks to a USB-based 'hub' device as attractive as it was functional, colourful and, relatively speaking, powerful, too. With its convenient means of ripping and storing CDs, I now had a digital jukebox. The purchase of my first digital camera in the summer of 2001, followed by the iPod's arrival the following October (an introduction somewhat overshadowed in the US by the pallor left by 9/11 a month before) completed my conversion to the twin cults of Jobs and Apple.

It's not an exaggeration to say the iMac saved Apple. It turned a professionals-only computing business into a consumer brand. In the 20 years since that first iMac was unveiled, I've upgraded my Apple fleet in overlapping steps: the original iMac gave way to the first flat screen model, that gave way to sleeker and thinner models. The iPod gave way to larger capacity models, Nanos and then Apple's next masterstroke, the iPhone, followed by the iPad. There are parallels here to the tale of Trigger's "award-winning" broom in Only Fools And Horses - owned for 20 years, but with 17 new heads and 14 new handles. Of course, this continuing Apple fandom is partly the result of clever Apple marketing, but it shouldn't be dismissed, either, that Apple's design excellence - both inside and out of its products - has kept me on board all this time.

Apple has its justified critics (not least of which the mess it has made of iTunes - transforming what has been a brilliantly efficient music management program for the iMac into a morass of user-unfriendly layers designed to push consumers to the Apple Music platform). But much of what drew me to that first iMac, 20 years ago, continues to draw me to its products today - design, simplicity and, yes, just a little sprinkling of fairy dust.

Record store daze

Two weeks on from this year’s Record Store Day, Danny Baker may have finally calmed down. His Twitter rant, on the eve of RSD, about record company "vampires" exploiting poor saps like me with limited-edition, available-for-one-day-only pressings of records we probably already own, was particularly fruity. Over several tweets Baker (for almost half a century a voracious record collector himself) frothed with some justification about the Record Store Day "racket" and "this stupid treasure hunt" being "so much less about indy [record] stores than creepy eBay limited editions". And those were some of the milder remarks.

While some of Baker’s eruptions were a tad overblown, he made a good point in that local independent record shops - much like a Christmas present puppy - should be for life, not just one single day. This is an argument supported by Garth Cartwright, who has just written the deliciously insightful Going For A Song: A Chronicle of the UK Record Shop.

"Record Store Day certainly increases turnover for shops and gets them some attention," says Garth, "but the whole RSD 'limited edition vinyl' thing is a scam. You need to be nice to record shops like you are nice to your mother - all year round, not only one day a year!".

Nevertheless, record shops this year reported another day of boffo business, with some doing as much turnover on that day's trading than in the usually moribund entire post-Christmas period. This year’s best sellers, such as David Bowie’s triple-live LP Welcome To The Blackout, helped generate a 16% increase in RSD album sales, with 60,000 LPs sold in the UK as part of the exercise. Rachel Lowe of Brighton’s Vinyl Revolution told the industry trade magazine Music Week that April 21 had been "the best day we've had since opening" and that "the revenue will help our young shop immensely but the publicity and goodwill will last much longer".

Picture: Surrey Comet

Jon Tolley of Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames said that RSD was "hands down our busiest day of the year" and a "great shot in the arm" for the business. He told Kingston’s local newspaper, the Surrey Comet, that Banquet had seen more than 1,000 people queuing up, some since 6.30am the previous morning. "Our business year revolves around Record Store Day, which really lasts at least a fortnight," he said. "It’s a great time to not only celebrate physical music but also the weird and wonderful independent shops who sell it."

Such "weird and wonderful" shops provide a strong component of Garth Cartwright’s book, for which the New Zealand-born author travelled the UK, talking to shop owners, record collectors and even musicians to map both the national history of record shops as well as the state of play today. Going For A Song builds a fascinating picture of record buying culture that transcends the traditional tropes of musty shops staffed by cocky cynics like Jack Black's High Fidelity character, as well as some of the characters who made record shops cathedrals of their worlds - famous patrons such as Bowie and Elton John, and former employees like Dead Or Alive's Pete Burns, Dusty Springfield and, of course, the aforementioned Baker. Some shops, such as Dobells in London's Charing Cross Road, played an integral part in the evolution of Britain's post-war musical habits as a mecca for jazz, blues and folk records, while Liverpool's NEMS department store - whose record section was managed by Brian Epstein - became key to The Beatles' own story, and was, by the 1960s, the most successful record shop outside of London.

Garth Cartwright

Incredibly, though Ground Zero for the British Record Shop was neither in London or in the rock and pop era: it was Cardiff. "Cardiff is home to Spiller’s, the world’s oldest record shop," reveals Garth. "It was founded in 1894 to sell wax cylinders (amongst other electrical goods) and developed its focus on only selling records in the 1920s - and continues doing so today. Why is sleepy Cardiff home to such a historic shop? Because in the late 19th Century it was a booming port and much of the coal trade came through here - a boom town - which meant there were people with lots of money around. And people with money tend to buy new technology. Wax cylinders and wax cylinder players weren’t cheap when they came on the market."

It's long been believed that, as word reached these shores in the 1950s of rock'n'roll, Elvis and the blues, cities with strong maritime links became gateways for imported American music. Garth says there's a little bit of myth to this theory: "Liverpool, another booming port city, and Manchester, a massive industrial city, became home to important record shops," he says, "but I actually don’t think the transatlantic liners provided so many records. What I’ve learnt is that the UK has long been obsessed with American music - minstrels were popular here in the 19th Century and there was a banjo craze at the start of the 20th. Then jazz exploded across the UK, post-World War One, and record labels - both majors and indies - were releasing some jazz, blues and country '78s from then on."

Garth notes that the record industry in the 1960s was (and still is) profoundly London-centric. From a record shop point of view, however, London is only a bit-part player in the story. "Brian Epstein could not get The Beatles a record deal as the London-centric labels were absolutely contemptuous of music from outside 'the Smoke'. That he did came through him being such a good client of HMV, with NEMS selling large amounts of [their] records."

Regional shops became intertwined with their local music culture. "There were regional music scenes, like Merseybeat, across the UK and all reliant on their local record shops," Garth says. "There was no Radio 1 until 1967, so the record shop was where you went to hear new music. The Beatles used to colonise NEMS’ listening booths! The Diskery in Birmingham - still trading today! - was a big place for the early Northern Soul DJs. Selectadisc in Nottingham too. Not that these shops were specialist soul shops - they sold everything but ensure they got R&B 45s for the local mod scene."

Specialist music shops, however, continue to be resilient in the UK music scene, albeit in proportionally smaller numbers than mainstream outlets. "There remain a handful of 'ethnic' record shops that continue to sell music related to their communities," says Garth. "Southall - which once was home to great Indian record shops - now has the Afghan Music Centre. At the bottom of Brick Lane there’s Sangeeta Ltd which still stocks CDs and cassettes from Muslim artists in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Melodi Muzik in Green Lanes is a Turkish shop that focuses on Turkish music and musical instruments and football paraphernalia. Supertone in Acre Lane, Brixton, is an old school reggae shop that also stocks what the owner calls 'big people music', i.e. old R&B, Elvis and Jim Reeves LPs that older West Indians love. In Brighton there’s The Record Album, a vinyl-only shop established in 1948 and run since 1960 by George Ginn - he specialises in soundtracks and showtune albums. George is a lovely man and has a very eclectic stock in the sense of stocking some really weird albums - John Wayne’s one spoken word album! Fabulous!".

The depth and scale of Garth's research for the book is impressive, as is his clear enthusiasm for the characters and stories he encountered along the way. But the book does also reflect the clearly changing landscape: "I landed [in the UK] in 1991 and record shops then were everywhere - from megastores run by Virgin, HMV and Tower Records, to junk chains on the high street like Our Price and basement dance shops selling techno 12"s and beyond. Today very little of that remains: I miss places like Mole Jazz and Beano’s - Europe’s largest second-hand record shop in Croydon. The Tower Records in Piccadilly had really deep stock."

Greenwich's finest - Casbah Records on Record Store Day

© Simon Poulter 2018

Today, says Garth, there are still plenty of good independents on offer with, even, new players opening up: "After the crash of the CD and the megastores, and the high street Top 40 chains, people have retrenched and decided that they like buying vinyl and going to good independent stores. Eel Pie Records [in Twickenham] is a great example of a new shop that has a musical vision - Phil and Kevin love music and have worked in the industry for years so they’ve gone about opening a record shop that reflects their passion and knowledge. They’re not attempting to compete with the supermarkets. Instead, they’re championing fresh, independent music. This is the way forward."

"There’s lots of good shops," he adds, from the specialists I mentioned before through to longstanding outlets like Reckless Records, Sound Of The Universe, Honest Jon’s, Soul Brother and new places like If Music in Soho and Lorenzo’s Record Shack in Peckham." Garth, who lives in south-east London, regularly visits Camberwell's Rat Records as well as my own local emporium, the very brilliant Casbah Records in Greenwich (dangerously located just 600 yards from my front door...).

While the record shop landscape has changed, as chains like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and Our Price have vanished from high streets over the last couple of decades, the business is still relatively vibrant. Margins might be thin and rents might be high, and while we shouldn't get too carried away by the so-called vinyl "boom", shops like Casbah remain the knowledgeable, if slightly intimidating experiences they've always been. Garth is somewhat cautious: "I think the club-going, DJ-ing youth are into buying records on vinyl, but most people just want to listen to music on their phones." Times have changed, he says: "Back in the 1950s and '60s most people bought their records in Smiths and Currys, and Mantovani was the most popular album seller in the UK," but adds that there remains a resilient core of consumers - semi-obsessive middle-aged blokes like me as well as Millennials and hipsters - keeping the trade going. "So long as there is a developing community of record shoppers I believe there’s a future for good record shops," he concludes.

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Garth Cartwright discusses Going For A Song: A Chronicle of the UK Record Shop in the next Word In Your Ear podcast - details of which will be published here. The book is published by The Flood Gallery and can be ordered via their website.

Mood music

Picture: Philips

If there's one thing I know about music it's that it's there when I need it most: soothing on a Sunday morning, uplifting on a Saturday night, energising on my way to work and relaxing on my way home. Just yesterday I finally got around to playing my Record Store Day purchase of David Bowie's Welcome To The Blackout (Live London 1978), and hearing rich and previously unreleased arrangements of Heroes, TVC15, Ziggy Stardust and Alabama Song put me in an extraordinary soak of good humour.

Several years ago, when I was working at Philips, we collaborated with the Canadian neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in a PR exercise to tie together the findings of his book, This Is Your Brain on Music - a deep examination of how we humans relate to music - with our personal audio products, used by gym bunnies in their endorphin-generating, natural high-producing workouts.

Levitin's book outlined how elements of music - timbre, rhythm, pitch, harmonies and so on - influenced neural function, neurochemistry and even cognitive psychology. Music, Levitin revealed, has a profound effect on cognitive, emotional and even physical health, and from an early age, too: the auditory system of a human fetus is fully functional after just 20 weeks and year-old infants will respond to the music they’d been exposed to while still in the womb. At the other end of life, Levitin wrote, music had a beneficial part to play in the care of Alzheimer’s patients, helping them connect with the depths of their ravaged memories. Music therapy has indeed been a well known practice for almost 60 years, dating back to 1959 when American composer Paul Nordoff and special needs teacher Clive Robbins started the work that would later lead to the Nordoff-Robbins charity and the incredible work it does in helping children and adults (such as stroke victims) with cognitive skill development.

Picture: Bank of England

So, knowing that music has a profound effect on mood, what about its effect on the economy? In a speech published earlier this week by Andy Haldane (left), the very forward-thinking chief economist of the Bank of England, he outlined the role of so-called 'Big Data' in providing semantic insight into human behaviour and how, in good times and bad, that might influence the economy. "Capturing people’s true sentiments and preferences is devilishly difficult," Haldane revealed, saying that "non-traditional" methods of opening up the consumer's mood were under examination.

"To give one recent example, data on music downloads from Spotify has been used, in tandem with semantic search techniques applied to the words of songs, to provide an indicator of people's sentiment. Intriguingly, the resulting index of sentiment does at least as well in tracking consumer spending as the Michigan survey of consumer confidence," a reference to a study which interpreted key themes from lyrics in songs in the Billboard Top 100 in the US and how their popularity corresponded rises and falls on market indices like the Nasdaq, Dow Jones and the S&P 500. The study, called The Rhythm of Markets, found that even a 1% increase in the frequency of the word "anticipation" led to a 0.444% drop in the Nasdaq.

Haldane also suggested that music might not be alone: "People’s tastes in books, TV and radio may also offer a window on their soul," he said, adding that gaming , in particular, might also be useful, since some games providing virtual environments that made observing behaviour easier than in the real world. Multiplayer online games and the fantasy World of Warcraft already had "primitive" economies that economists were studying, Haldane said, adding that such games could facilitate the study of player reactions to policy intervention on monetary and regulatory issues.

Quite how all this will have a defining impact on fiscal policies remains to be seen. I'm sure Mr. Haldane's need to be tapped into every vital sign affecting economic mood gives credence to mining Spotify download statistics to see what its subscribers might be feeling, given the sometimes impulsive nature of plugging into the platform to satisfy a particular musical craving. But as someone who still prefers physical music formats (and the purchasing of it) to lift my mood, the only fiscal correlation I can draw from the mood created by musical habits is that my disposable income will be significantly less in the days and weeks immediately after Record Store Day, or when there's a decent-sized box set on the way.

Picture: Spotify

A glimpse into the future...but for whom?

Twitter/Chelsea FC

In three weeks' time Antonio Conte could be collecting a FA Cup winner's medal from whomever Prince William deputises to the task while he's busy delivering the best man's speech at his brother's wedding. If Chelsea do beat Manchester United at Wembley on May 19 it will be a welcome reversal from last year's abject display against Arsenal in the same contest (one for which - without any bitterness at all... - I bought a ticket for myself and my best mate for his 50th birthday...), in which Conte's then-Premier League title winners forgot to turn up. Or, at least, they turned up with Victor Moses, who forgot what occasion he was playing in.

Some say Chelsea are cup specialists. There are those, too, who maintain that no other club in the modern era has made the FA Cup Final quite their own. In this regard, they have a point: in the competition's modern history Chelsea have won the cup seven times out of a total of 12 appearances. They won the last final at the old Wembley in 2000 and won it in the first final of the new stadium in 2007, beating Manchester United by a single Didier Drogba goal. For those of us who were there, this was sweet revenge for the humiliating 4-0 defeat by United in 1994 (even if that experience - which led to a European Cup Winners Cup run - somewhat marked the 'return' of Chelsea to the big time, having spent the 1970s and 1980s in a dark, financially ruinous an largely anonymous, success-wise, place).

Indeed, it would be three years later when the team, under Ruud Gullit's management, captained by Dennis Wise and peppered with internationals like Gianfranco Zola, Frank Leboeuf, Gianluca Vialli and Roberto Di Matteo (who famously scored after just 42 seconds), would beat Middlesborough 2-0 and win their first 'grown-up' silverware for a quarter of a century.

"Chelsea are back!" we sang, and they were. I won't bore you with all the stats that have followed, save to say that the FA Cup has been an ever-constant in much of the Abramovich era, a period that, yes, has seen Chelsea win the Premier League five times, but has also seen them win the Cup four times in the last 11 years. That, however, isn't the point of this post. Nor is the cycle of management - you know the drill: Chelsea hires head coach, wins a trophy or two, parts company with head coach, hires head coach, wins a trophy or two, parts company with head coach, repeat ad nauseam. Nope. Not this. Even if, surely, Conte's appearance with Chelsea at Wembley later this month will be his last in charge.

No. Because when Roman Abramovich assumed ownership of Chelsea, apart from wanting to turn it into London's AC Milan, he also gave instruction to his minions to create a successful academy system that would generate future stars for the club. On paper, at least, that hasn't happened. John Terry is, arguably, the last youth product to have achieved first team regularity (although, this season, Andreas Christensen could be considered to have broken through, tentatively). Looked at from a broader, historic perspective, the Chelsea academy hasn't been without longer lasting successes: Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Tambling, Peter Bonetti, Terry Venables, Ron Harris, John Hollins, Peter Osgood and Ray Wilkins all came through its system, along with more recent graduates like Terry, Ryan Bertrand and Robert Huth. However, the absence of sustained careers at the parent club remains a key issue for the current era. Perhaps it's not even the academy's mission? Perhaps generating new talent, who glimmer with prospect for first team appearances before being sold or loaned out is merely the business model, nothing more than a form of husbandry and a secondary process to first team recruitment? For fans this isn't without its frustration. Chelsea loaned out academy product Ruben Loftus-Cheek and replaced him - for £40 million - with the profoundly disappointing Tiémoué Bakayoko. There are many more examples.

Twitter/Chelsea FC

Which brings me - six paragraphs later - to events last night at the Emirates Stadium and the point of this post. Chelsea won their fifth consecutive FA Youth Cup, an achievement you have to go back to the Busby Babes of the 1950s to match. Thrashing Arsenal 7-1 on aggregate recorded the Chelsea Under-18s their seventh FA Youth Cup trophy in all since 2010. The feeling amongst football writers is that it is unlikely to be their last, either, and that a fifth consecutive trophy could easily become a sixth, seventh or more.

Imagine a first team recording such persistent success. They'd be regarded with the same superlative as Manchester United's dominance under Sir Alex Ferguson, or the modern Barcelona, or Liverpool in the late '70s and early '80s. And yet, when you think about it, seven years of success for a youth side should mean, applying basic mathematics, that there has been a steady flow of graduates into the Chelsea first team. The truth is, there hasn't been. Amongst the current crop, Callum Hudson-Odoi (who scored twice last night) has had a few runouts this season under Conte, during which he has looked a very exciting prospect, with lightning pace and an exceptional turn of foot. Others, like Dujon Sterling and Ethan Ampadu have also enjoyed the odd taste of the big time as substitutes. The $64,000 question is - what next? Will that be it?

Another key question is about the future of Jody Morris, the Under-18s manager. A Chelsea academy graduate himself, once a combative midfielder who came through the ranks alongside Terry and made 124 midfield appearances between 1996 and 2003, he has quietly got on with playing a huge part in the youth team's remarkable run of success since being appointed four years ago. While it might be highly unlikely that he would be considered an immediate replacement for Conte, should he leave (and with a predictable list of European exotica being lined up), surely a record like his won't go unnoticed?

All of which begs the more existential question about what is Chelsea's strategy when it comes to players and managers alike? To win five consecutive trophies suggests that the club is sitting on a gold mine in Morris and his players. No one, though, would be so naive to suggest that any of their success would translate instantly into the first team: but, all the same, it would be a tragedy to see that talent just ebb away to other clubs. I might be ludicrously idealistic, but why not get some of these youngsters blooded in properly at the top level, and see what raw, precocious talent can do? Alan Hansen's infamous statement in 1995 that "You can’t win anything with kids" has often been proven right, even if it was immediately proven wrong by Fergie's youngsters (Gary Neville, 20; Paul Scholes, 20; Ryan Giggs, 21; Phil Neville, 18; Nicky Butt, 20; and David Beckham, 20) going on to win that season's Premier League. The trouble is, is any club willing to give it another go now?

Gone in 60 seconds - Record Store Day comes...and goes

© Simon Poulter 2018

There is something clearly perverse about standing in a queue at seven in the morning for a shop that doesn’t open until 10am, purely to get your hands on some plastic that, probably exists in some other form or another. Actually, let me correct that statement: there is something clearly perverse about sitting on a pavement still stinking of unidentified Friday night detritus, queuing for a shop that doesn’t open for at another two hours at least.

But then buying and owning records is one of those pastimes that teases out the obsessive. Not quite as bad as standing at the end of a Clapham Junction platform all weekend, I grant you, and compared with buying comic books or football stickers, relatively tame. But the return of vinyl record ownership has, I’ll admit, reawoken a certain “fetishism”, to quote a particularly lively Twitter rant the other evening from Danny Baker - arguably Blackheath's leading record collection owner - on the subject of this year’s Record Store Day.

The main source of Baker’s ire was his belief that artists and their labels use RSD cynically to lure in punters to buy limited edition, available-for-one-day-only, copies of records which then get sold on for profit. “Record Store Day is a racket,” he opened with. “Just press up hundreds of copies for these stores you vampires. What's with this stupid treasure hunt? Its [sic] so much less about indy stores than creepy eBay limited editions. Fuck off Record Store Day.”

So, at least we know where he stands on the topic. But he went on: “Having a record only pressed up for Record Store Day is like owning one of those commemorative dinner plates offered in the back of Sunday supplements. ‘To honour Lady Diana, this once in a lifetime...’” And, inevitably, Baker was not done there: “Hey kids! Does Record Store Day raise your awareness of that little shop around the corner that you'd never seen before?  Or is it for a load of old boys to grab cynically limited, but basically worthless, stock for later profit on eBay?”.

© Simon Poulter 2018

On this last point, he may have something. Most of the individuals ahead and behind me in the queue at Greenwich's excellent Casbah Records this morning were men, well into middle age, and clearly the type who take RSD seriously. Whether they were indeed planning to make a fast buck on eBay, I couldn’t tell and wasn’t that bothered to ask.

Record Store Day may, ultimately, be a marketing gimmick, and even if Baker argues that most of those in the queues are discovering their local music emporium for the very first time, that is largely the point. Independent record shops - the intended beneficiaries of the entire exercise - will make more money on this one day than they do in the traditionally impoverished first three months of the year.

However, while the vinyl revival is going great guns (an £88 million business), with LPs continuing to sell relatively well in the face of other physical and digital formats, the humble record shop is still an endangered species, and for that reason alone, Record Store Day is a great way to show support, although consistent, year-round custom would be even better. So, Danny, call me a fetishist if you want, but I’m more than happy to join in the absurdity of dossing on the pavement for three hours in the hope of landing a Bowie album that inevitably will be on sale later in the year as a CD. Because it is about supporting my local record shop, one I actually visit throughout the year.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve spent many a happy Saturday afternoon browsing in record shops and, at the age of 50 - cliche as this might sound - I still do. I still enjoy the discovery of new music, just as I enjoy relistening to familiar music on new formats. Vinyl has given me an excuse to hear anew things I’d previously only heard on cassette, or on early-issue, poorly mastered CD. Record Store Day is part of that curation.

There are those - girlfriends and wives, mostly (emitting disdainful grunts as the front door slams at Stupid O'Clock) - who will think of us as suckers, victims of a gimmick designed to entrap the weak-willed desperate to own some obscure reissue purely because it's a) now on coloured vinyl and b) because it will give them an air of Nick Hornbyesque cultural superiority (may I hear quote John Cusack's Rob Gordon, proprietor of Championship Vinyl in the film adaption of High Fidelity: "I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I'd feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn't... well... kinda one of them."). These are experiences you don’t get from Spotify.

Record Store Day is a glorious celebration of the absurdity of record buying. The exclusive releases are hardly rare Picassos at Sotheby’s, but that’s not why they’re bought. In fact I'm not entirely sure why they’re bought but, speaking from trouser-emptying experience, there is a distinct, momentary pleasure about buying something unique, taking it home and - yes, here comes the 'tactile vinyl experience trope' - desleeving that new purchase to stick it on the turntable in order to find out what all the fuss was about.

© Simon Poulter 2018

If you do it right, you’ll walk into your local emporium armed with a carefully compiled list in the hope that at least some of it has been stocked (RSD is a tricky business for record shop proprietors, who have to take a punt on what will sell on the day out from the 500 artists releasing albums and singles as part of the programme). Inevitably that means some disappointment, but if you’re prepared to be in that queue early, and have organised your wishlist, you'll usually come away happy. And broke.

Like Christmas Dinner, it’s over in a matter minutes after a lengthy build up. And worth it. This year I walked out of Casbah Records with pretty much what was on my shopping list - including a reissue of Prince's 1999, Bowie's Welcome To The Blackout (Live London 1978), The Who's Kids Are Alright soundtrack and Steven Wilson's RSD exclusive 12" single How Big The Space. A tidy haul. Was any of it essential? No, but again, that wasn't the point. And if you don't understand that, you probably never will.

© Simon Poulter 2018

Murder most foul

Picture: BBC

If, like me, you watched the BBC's three-part documentary, Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation, we will have a shared frustration. Without trivialising the racist murder, 25 years ago, of teenager Stephen Lawrence, the series at times felt like one of those exalted police procedurals, like Line Of Duty, where you already know who committed the crime, but watch in edge-of-the-sofa agitation over consecutive nights as the perpetrators evade justice. Sometimes, justice prevails, sometimes it doesn't.

In the case of Lawrence, it largely hasn't. There has been some closure, as last night's final episode recounted, with the remarkable story of retired Detective Chief Inspector Clive Driscoll who, in perhaps an example of old-school coppering, took command of Operation Fishpool, the investigation into Stephen's murder. This lead to the engagement of a private forensics company to conduct new examinations of evidence from the fatal stabbing of the 18-year-old architecture student at an Eltham bus stop on 22 April, 1993. Blood traces on clothing fibres led to the conviction, in January 2012, of Gary Dobson and David Norris. To date, they remain the only suspects in the Lawrence case to be jailed.

What Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation so compellingly compiled was the multiple layers of the case and its actors. Movingly, we heard from Doreen - now Baroness - Lawrence, Stephen's mother who became the reluctant public face of, not only the campaign to bring her son's murderers to justice, but also to draw attention to perceptions of institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police. We also heard from Neville Lawrence, her estranged husband, who so visibly bore an unfair weight of guilt on his shoulders for "not being there" for his son, and has only found some peace by relocating to Jamaica.

Picture: BBC

And who couldn't be blamed for banging their head against the wall in frustration for Duwayne Brooks, Stephen's best friend, who was with him when the gang of white youths set upon the pair in Well Hall Road that night in 1993. Brooks has taken his own share of shaming, both from police who appeared to treat him more as a suspect than victim, and from an apparent rift between him and the Lawrence family. We saw how Brooks - who has since engaged in local politics in Lewisham and was awarded an OBE - identified two of the five main suspects in a police line-up three months after the murder, only to have his evidence dismissed as "unreliable". We also saw how Brooks was arrested at a protest outside the British National Party HQ in Welling shortly after the murder, part of a police surveillance operation into members of the Justice For Stephen Lawrence campaign.

It would have been very easy to simplify the subject of this series into three acts - the police as bad, the prime suspects as even worse, and the Lawrences as victims. But over the three episodes, Asif Kapadia, James Gay-Rees and James Rogan carefully, respectfully built up a powerful, tragic and, ultimately, disappointing picture of British social justice via the many layers of the case.

Like a good drama, there were intriguing sub plots, which left the bitterest of tastes in the mouth: the Martin Bashir interviews with the chief suspects, who brazenly weaselled their way out of any responsibility, despite the sickening weight of evidence against them, such as the police surveillance video showing them talking about what they'd like to see happen to black people ("I'd go down to Catford and places like that with two submachine guns and I'm telling you I'd take one of them. Skin the black alive, mate. Torture him, set him alight."), with another seen practicing stabbing motions with a large knife.

These suspects - whose names, we learned, had been listed on a piece of paper left for police within hours of Stephen's murder - were and still are known in the Eltham area. Their Facebook timelines still receive complimentary messages from racists. The nation, though, formed its own opinions of the group when they arrived, strutting, goading, wearing sunglasses and looking like they were on a Friday night out, at the McPherson public inquiry in March 1988. The composure of their interviews with Bashir had been dropped. The image of Norris, in particular, snarling and bearing his teeth, will remain ingrained in the memory as a totem of the entire Lawrence murder. As will the Daily Mail's challenge to the gang, with editor Paul Dacre's infamous "MURDERERS" front page splash and its sub-deck challenge: "The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us." I'd hardly call myself a fan of the newspaper, or indeed Dacre, and even if his personal connection to the Lawrences was simply that he'd employed Neville as a decorator, the line he took, and the subsequent persistence in the story, deserves some credit. Inevitably, the attempt to tease the Eltham gang out didn't succeed, but an important addition was made to the tabloid front page hall of fame and, for once, a newspaper like the Mail campaigning for social justice.

Picture: BBC

As for the police, it would be hard to say - Clive Driscoll's remarkable dedication and endeavour not withstanding - that the Metropolitan Police came out of this documentary with it's historical reputation in good shape. Current commissioner, Cressida Dick, maintains that the Met has, today, a completely different culture to that which existed in 1993. One would hope so. The documentary's clips of interviews with detectives serving back then left little faith that the system was ever going to deliver justice for the Lawrence family. New interviews didn't add much, either, with retired Detective Superintendent Bill Mellish, who led the second investigation into Stephen's murder, focusing on Brooks, almost gleefully stating: "He knows he forever will be the man that ran away and left his mate. He knows that."

Attitudes might be one thing, but the role of corruption in the Lawrence case became another intriguing aspect of the documentary, adding another bitter ingredient to the overall shambles. Commenting on one specific allegation of a particular detective's alleged connections to David Norris' drug dealing father, Cressida Dick says that today she would shut down any corruption fast. The disturbing thing is, we're talking about police corruption in the mid-1990s, not the 1960s and 1970s, when London's crime gangs had detectives in their pockets, and when dodgy handshakes came in handy to get people out of parking tickets and much more serious offences. This was when the fictional Gene Hunt and Jack Reagan were very real, unreconstructed individuals who could politely be described as "cutting corners" in getting the job done. The idea that such practices actively hampered the Lawrence investigation in, what should still be regarded as recent history, is more than unpleasant.

In the end, Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation painted a picture of a police service which had both unconscious and conscious bias towards the black community, in which racism was almost a casual aspect of the Met culture. An archive clip of former Police Federation chief Len Curtis questioning whether "nigger" was an abusive term appeared to underline the suggestion, stated so strongly in the McPherson Inquiry outcome, that the capital's police service was riven by "institutional racism". Racism, it should never be forgotten, remains at the core of the Stephen Lawrence story. He was not only murdered by racists, but the subsequent investigation was either handled indifferently and incompetently, or with intentional reluctance and scepticism towards the victim's story, making that racist, too.

That two of the gang have been convicted for Stephen's murder will be only of limited comfort to the Lawrence family. Doreen Lawrence has said she wants to focus on her other son and grandchildren. She has given what she says is her last interview on the subject. The Met is maintaining an open case on the murder enquiry, something I suspect they will be obliged to do out of embarrassment as much as due process. I'm a big fan of what the police do. Under ever-shrinking resources, and increasing pressures from terrorism and, in London, knife crime in general, the thin blue line has grown thinner. They deserve our admiration and support. But the Stephen Lawrence murder, is a chapter in the Met's history that should not only never be forgotten, but continuously referred to. Racism is ugly to begin with, but when it yields the violent death of a bright, talented, likeable teenager - no matter what his skin colour - there should be no place for it to be investigated as a lesser priority. All lives count. All lives matter. Kudos to the BBC for, over the last three nights, reminding us of that fact.

Picture: BBC

Unplugging the social network

There is, already, an irony to the post you're about to read, in that it will be promoted on the very social media services it concerns. But that's purely because, like most people who use social media, I can't help but want attention. Which, let's face it, is mainly how social media came about to begin with.

It is also behind the news today that pub chain JD Wetherspoon is departing social media for good. Now, given the state of the world - not least of which, a third world war in the offing... - this is "probably" not big news. But, partly as a result of social media, news that Wetherspoons is calling "timegennelmenpurleaze!" on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is...er...indeed news.

According to the chain's not-particularly publicity-shy chairman, Tim Martin, social media is a waste of time and even a drain on his pub managers' time. Well, that's one possible reason. Two others are that 1) Wetherspoons doesn't exactly have a massive following on any of its social accounts and 2) the chain has been mercilessly trolled for taking a pro-Brexit stance (in November last year it had 500,000 beer mats distributed throughout its 895 pubs in the UK with a three-point "Brexit Manifesto" calling on the leaders of the main political parties to get a move on with leaving the EU). Another suggestion is that this is all just a publicity stunt - which, given the fact I'm blogging about it, would mean 'mission accomplished'.

Either way, Martin has raised a valid question about the role of social media in the commercial world. "We are going against conventional wisdom that these platforms are a vital component of a successful business," he told the BBC, saying that society would be better off if people cut the amount of social media use, adding a clear dig at Facebook with a reference to the "misuse of personal data".

Somewhat less convincingly, Martin chose to bring up time consumption amongst employees as another reason to leave social platforms behind, saying that "90-to-95%" of his pubs' managers "felt using social media was not helping the business" due to its "addictive nature", adding: "We were also concerned that pub managers were being side-tracked from the real job of serving customers. I don't believe that closing these accounts will affect our business whatsoever."

While I'm sure some Wetherspoons customers might have reason to complain about inattentive bar staff, I very much doubt that they are too busy tweeting out special Friday night offers on jugs of sangria (for reasons of transparency, my local when I lived in Paris - The Bowler - once tweeted me personally because I hadn't been in for a few weeks. Now that is customer engagement!).

Time will tell, though, whether the Wetherspoons departure from social media will have any impact. Conventional wisdom does dictate that a digital presence is essential in the modern world, whether to drive sales, corporate reputation, customer loyalty or all three. Many marketeers believe that Facebook, Twitter and its ilk are simply free advertising platforms which can be augmented by so-called "paid promotion" (essentially, the nub of these networks' business models). The issue, however, is that whether you're an advertiser or simply someone desperate to see friends' cat videos, social media is still, by and large, whatever you want to make of it.

As I wrote, some many posts back, Twitter can be a little like the river of demonic ooze running beneath New York in Ghostbusters, if you dare to be sucked into the reactionary trollery and right wing nutjobs lurking barely below the surface. But it can also be a tremendous expression of democracy, or a wonderful outlet for distributing questionable humour, or the most efficient news feed this side of buying a Reuters subscription.

As for Facebook... Well, the almost-original social network (Friends Reunited, anyone?) clearly has its faults. I won't dwell on the Cambridge Analytica debacle, but there is something intrinsically creepy about suddenly seeing promoted posts for travel companies like Thomas Cook and First Choice on my timeline barely a day after I was looking at summer holidays on my iPad with these very companies. As innocent as it might look, the data harvesting practices of social media networks and their clients concerns me more than anything. They are sitting on a vast amount of information about me, my interests and buying habits which, surely, should be mine to know and for commercial organisations to find out when I choose to buy something from them, and not before.

But back to Charles Martin, who rounded out his decision to take Wetherspoons offline by declaring that people would be "mentally and physically better off" if they limited their social media use to just half an hour a day. Here he may have a point. We certainly know that social media has only added to the complications of modern teenage life, especially amongst girls who, on top of all they've always had to go through, now have to put up with social exclusion, fat shaming and even sexual abuse via the various 'must have' social media platforms they sign up to. Adults are not immune, either, with some living vicariously through Facebook and Instagram, while others suffering feelings of inadequacy as a result of pictures posted of their perfect friends living it up.

The question is, could you do without social media? Would your life feel more complete, rather than less, without it? Those older than the Millennial generation will, of course, have enjoyed life pre-digital. We talked to each other, face-to-face or by phone. If we wanted to show off where we'd been on holiday we handed round a packet of prints from Boots or suburban bores invited friends round for a slide show with fondue.

Now we can share the beach vista as we're sitting in it; we Facebook the meal we're about to eat (though, thankfully, not the final third of the digestion process...); and children will live their entire lives, from the moment they burst out of the womb, in Instagram pictures and stories. And we will lap it all up, so to speak. Because, thanks to the smartphone, we have social media at our fingertips constantly. Just look at a train station at rush hour - banks of stooping commuters, thumbing through their timelines.

And it is exactly this point why, I suspect, JD Wetherspoon will be in a very small minority. In the early days of 'websites', digital interaction was via the PC. Now, it's constant via mobile devices - even smart watches. We fill every unaccounted-for eyeball time with social media sites, on trains and buses, as we walk and as we fly. For some, it's their entire world. For others, it's their only means of self expression. And for others, it's simply a way of avoiding talking to others.

The Wetherspoon chairman's assurance that his company would "still be as vocal as ever" might hark back to the pre-digital age when other media platforms gave companies a voice to the outside world, but the reality - the unbearable truth, if you like - is that in 2018, social media is part of the daily fabric. Rather than leaving such services, corporations should be doing more to make social media a safer place to inhabit. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal and recent stories about the role social media plays in London's epidemic of drug/gang violence should serve as a warning to the vast majority of corporate concerns who do still believe in social media. If there really is a reason for corporates unplugging from social networks, it's that for all the good these platforms do in connecting friends or allowing those without a voice to have one, there is a dark side not worth associating with. That's the minority who take it too far. Yes, you Mr. President.

It ain't over 'til it's over. But it's over.

I'm OK. No, really. I'll get over it. I've been through worse.

Painful, as it was, to see Chelsea's 28-year home record against Tottenham come apart at the weekend, there was, perhaps, some inevitability to it. That doesn't soften the blow of Chelsea - yet again - giving up a lead, or the worst thing of all, allowing the odious Dele Alli to score twice, affording him the opportunity after his first of provocatively - and, in my view, illegally - celebrating in front of home fans in the Shed.

What had already been the traditionally ugly atmosphere for this fixture got steadily uglier after that moment, albeit one brilliantly captured by a pitchside photographer who caught a wonderful array of emotions - the Asian lady vituperously extending both middle fingers, the enraged individual several rows back being restrained (presumably with the words "leave it bruv, he ain't worth it") and the stoic feller at the very front, nonchalantly nursing a cup of coffee. BuzzFeed's Chris Applegate tweeted that it looked like "a giant Renaissance canvas. The more you look, the more characters and possible back stories you discover." and, indeed, there is some baroque artistry about the picture - like a Caravaggio or a Rembrandt, capturing the human condition in all its varied forms.

Notwithstanding Alli's moronic behaviour (and even the Spurs fans' disgraceful chant about Marcos Alonso - irrespective of the morality of the actual event it referred to), Tottenham deserved the win. That's as agonising a set of four words as I'll ever commit to a keyboard. But it's true. Something is rotten at Chelsea. To lose or draw the odd game to a last-minute opposition strike is annoying but happens. For Chelsea, it's been happening too much this season. Worse, still, there's been no Plan B to put things right, and the fault for that lands firmly on the shoulders of Antonio Conte.

With the exception of Rafa Benitez (whom we didn't want) or André Villas-Boas (whose appointment we just didn't get), Chelsea fans have been remarkably loyal to the club's myriad managers over the decades I've been following the club, and regardless of the condition the team has found itself in. Even in that poisonous final few months of the Second Age of Mourinho, when a "palpable discord" was tearing the team asunder, the rallying call of "José Mourinho!" (to the tune of Verdi's La Donna è Mobile) still resonated - weakly, it has to be said - around Stamford Bridge. On Sunday, there was a vaguely similar flimsiness to the sporadic choruses of "Antonio...! Antonio...!".

And, yet, Conte knows his time is up. We know his time is up and, I suspect, so does the club. So why hasn't the notoriously capricious Roman Abramovich fired him already? Whether he goes now or during the final year of his contract, it will still cost the Russian a reported £9 million, so that isn't necessarily a factor. A summer break might also be cleaner, allowing the replacement (be it the widely expected Luis Enrique or - today's rumour - Juventus coach Massimiliano Allegri) a chance to rebuild. But that does leave Chelsea open to the risk of not qualifying for next season's Champions League, the one thing Abramovich appears to hold dearest to his ambitions. Then again he may just not be bothered: perhaps the diplomatic spiral the West is currently caught in with Russia is weighing more heavily on the oligarch than we might expect.

Abramovich may just, uncharacteristically, be wearing a beatific smile. The worst has been done and Chelsea can't, now, repeat their 2015-16 near-denouement. That said, they currently lie in fifth place, 28 points behind league leaders Manchester City. The task, for the remaining few games of the season, is to secure European football for next season, even if that means the Europa League, as well as hang on to FA Cup contention. It's all thin gruel, though. Not even another parachute appearance from Guus Hiddink would make much difference. It's hard to translate Conte's constant niggling about squad depth and player acquisitions onto how his players go about their business, but certainly Mourinho's demeanour had an effect, and Conte's must, too. But, perhaps, the biggest cause-and-effect is Conte's tactics. On Sunday he didn't make any substitutions until long after they would have any effect. It was almost as if he didn't care any more: throw on Giroud on 80 minutes (for the woeful Moses), the little-played Emerson on 83 for Alonso, and the genuinely exciting youth product Callum Hudson-Odoi for just the final four minutes of the tie, to no effect.

The kindest words that can be said about Chelsea, at least since Christmas, if not before, is that they look out of sorts. Games that should have been easily won have been too easily lost. Defensive mistakes - which happen - have happened too regularly. There will be excuses; Morata, for example, is still only in his first season at the club, and is adjusting from being a second-stringer - but given that Chelsea are still one of the most expensively assembled teams in the Premier League, even if that expense has included the likes of Bakayoko, Berkley and indeed Morata - they should still be competing as keenly in the top four as any of those now above them. Then there's the constant riddle-wrapped-in-an-enigma that is Eden Hazard, never happiest than when playing in from the left, and yet frequently played as a false 9, even when centre forward options have been available. Hazard's petulant departure after being subbed against Manchester United last month spoke volumes about his working relationship with Conte, and Conte's demeanour in general.

The general belief is that his heart just hasn't been in it this season, that he was prepared to walk last summer, and only agreed his contract revision reluctantly. Even Chelsea legend Gianluca Vialli has confirmed to Sky Italia that his compatriot "can't wait to leave Chelsea", even if he remains verbally committed to seeing out the remaining 12 months of his contract.

They say that 90% of all communication is non-verbal, and Conte's body language has been telling volumes. Coupled with his continual abrasion of the Chelsea club leadership over transfers (or the lack of), it would be safe to say that it would be in both parties' best interest if they parted company. Perhaps, just not yet: with Chelsea still needing to redress an eight-point gap to fourth place with just seven games to play, you'd hope that the Italian has enough personal pride left to see the job out.

That Mourinho meltdown in full

It's not the first time José Mourinho has told it like it is. His pre-match press conferences have frequently been used to lengthily pontificate on perceived slights about himself and his teams. And, on other occasions (notably the final days of his second spell as Chelsea manager), he has been petulantly monosyllabic. Either way, it's always about him, theatrically, the focus of attention, usually with an exaggerated sense of victimhood. While it is generally viewed that this behaviour is intended to deflect attention away from his players, the reality is that Mourinho's obsession is, simply, with himself.

So, yesterday, the Portuguese went into an extraordinary, 12-minute rant, prompted by the wave of criticism about Manchester United's negative tactics in is home exit to Sevilla in the Champions League. It reads quite manic to begin with, but becomes fully Colonel Kurtz-gone-native when you hear it or watch it. Either way, it is compelling:

REPORTER
I’ve spoken to a few of the supporters this week who said they were a bit disappointed by some of the performance levels against Seville. What would you say to those fans?

JOSÉ MOURINHO
“I say to the fans that the fans are the fans, and the fans have the right to have their opinions and to have their reactions.

“But there is something that I used to call football heritage — I try to translate from my Portuguese, which is almost perfect, to my English that is far from perfect.

“But translation, word by word is something like football heritage and what a manager inherits is something like is that the last time Manchester United won the Champions League, which didn’t happen a lot of times, was in 2008. The final was 2011.

“Since 2011, 2012 out in the group phase. The group was almost the same group as we had this season: Benfica, Basle and Galati from Romania. Out in the group phase.

“In 2013, out at Old Trafford in the last-16. I was on the other bench. In 2014, out in the quarter-final. In 2015, no European football. In 2016, comes back to European football, out in the group phase, goes to Europa League and on the second knockout out, out of Europa League.

“On 2017, play Europa League, win Europa League with me and goes back to Champions League. In 2018, win the group phase with 15 points in possible 18 and loses at home the last-16.

“So, in seven years with four different managers, once not qualified for Europe, twice out in the group phase and the best was a quarter-final. This is football heritage. And, if you want to go to the Premier League, the last victory was '12-13 and in the four consecutive seasons, United finished fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh — or seventh, fourth, five and six. So, in the last four years the best was fourth. This is football heritage.

It means that when you start the process, you are here, you are there, or you are there. It is heritage. It’s heritage.

And if the fans, that I will always respect, always respect...if the fans...and many of them are the ones you [in the media] speak with, many of them are the ones I speak with, or I am very lucky and very unlucky [with the fans you speak to].

“But the ones that speak with you are very disappointed and the ones I speak with knows what is football heritage. They know what is a process and know when they arrive.

“When I arrived in Real Madrid, do you know how many players played quarter-final of Champions League? Xabi Alonso with Liverpool, Iker Casillas with Real Madrid and Cristiano Ronaldo with Real Madrid. All the others, not even a quarter-final. That’s football heritage”

REPORTER
José, those stats . . .

JM
“They are real, they are real. Do you want other real? I’ll give you a couple more real. In the last seven years, the worst position of Manchester City in the Premier League was fourth.

“In the last seven years, Manchester City was champions twice and if you want to say three times because they will be in one more week, two, three or four [weeks] and they were second twice. That’s heritage.

“Do you know what is also heritage? It’s that Otamendi, Kevin De Bruyne, Fernandinho, Silva, Sterling, Agüero — they are investments from the past, not from the last two years. From the past.

“Do you know how many of United players that left the club last season? See where they play. Where they play, how they play, if they play. That’s football heritage.

“And one day when I leave, the next Manchester United manager will find here Lukaku, Matic, of course De Gea from many years ago, they will find players with a different mentality, with a different quality, with a different background, with a different status, with a different know-how.

“And for some reason you go to the Champions League quarter-final like today and there are four clubs that are always there. Always there.

“Barcelona is always there in the past seven, eight years. Real Madrid is always there in the past seven, eight years.

“Juventus is always there, Bayern Munich is always there and then, of course, appears now and again another club like my Inter, like some other clubs like Monaco last season.

“Some clubs but the ones that are always there is for some reason. Is for some reason.

“And the good thing for me and the amazing feeling for me is that I am [on] exactly in the same page as the owners, as Mr Woodward, as Mr Arnold. We are exactly in the same page.

“We agree in everything. We know that we have a process. We agree in the investments, we agree that we have what we have, the investments we are going to do are going to be progressively season after season.

“We need more than the investments, we need also the time. We are exactly in the same page.

“So, life is good.

“I have an amazing job to do. Yesterday I met a new person that we have in the club working in a different area, nothing to do directly with my job but it is as a person that come from another club and I asked, ‘Why did you decide to come?’

“And the person told me, ‘Because I did a fantastic job in another club and I know that this club I have a big, huge job in front of me to do, so I come for the challenge’.

“Well done, well done — my decision to come here was the same thing.

“I could be in another country with a league in the pocket. The kind of league you win before the league starts. I could be - I am not, I am here.

“I am here, and I am going to be here, and no way — no way — I am going to change my mentality.

“For me, I don’t know if you know the expression, I don’t know if the translation to England makes you understand, but there is quote that I like which is something like, ‘In every wall is a door.’

“You know, every wall is a door?

“I am not going to run away, I am not going to disappear, I am not going to cry because I heard a few boos.

“I am not going to disappear from the tunnel, running immediately.

“The next match I’ll be the first to go out. I respect the fans, I am not afraid of anything. I am not afraid of my responsibilities.

“When I was 20 years old, I was nobody in football. I was somebody’s son.

“What I was, with a lot of pride, when I was 20 years old was somebody’s son. You know?

“And now, with 55, I am what I am, I did what I did because of work, because of my talent and because of my mentality.

“So, they can be together. You know, I understand that for many, many, many, many, many, many years, it was really, really hard for the people that doesn’t like me.

“‘Here he is again’, ‘here he wins again’, ‘here he is again’, ‘here he wins again’, so for ten months I win nothing.

“For ten months, I win nothing. The last title I won was ten months ago, you know?

“I beat Liverpool, I beat Chelsea, I lose against Seville and now is their moment to be happy.

“OK, I also learnt that in my religious formation be happy with others’ happiness even if the others are your enemies.

“So be with it. I am a very lucky guy and I am really happy to be what I am.”