Recently The Observer asked PL fans to assess the season to date and to look at the run-in, predicting the finish for their own teams as well as the final top 4 and the relegation spots. Our representative observed that the Bluebirds are the only team in the bottom three with a reasonable chance of avoiding the drop, we’re staying positive, the fans are behind the team, we’re hoping that results go our way and that we have to go for it. Well, yes, quite, and thanks for the insight cardiffcity-mad.co.uk
After the West Ham win, drawing from the sporting lexicon of preserve-based analogies we’d progressed from being in a pickle to merely in a jam, albeit a quality pulp suffused with the finest hand-picked fruits in a light delicate jelly but with seal broken, the lid slightly askew. This is still at the higher end of pre-season expectations. Huddersfield had long since assumed the role of ‘no-hopers’ and relegation by the end of March is a sad end to their brief stay in the top flight. Fulham’s inexorable demise has been all the more painful for failing to carry the burden of expectation. It is encouraging to read that there’s no consensus amongst other fans that we’re doomed, and our relegation rivals are more than a little jittery, describing their teams’ form as ‘desperate’ ‘abysmal’ ‘inconsistent’ etc.
But by far the most savage and witty assessment of their team comes from the Chelsea Supporters Group who characterise their season as one of ‘boring predictable dross’ with fans ‘wincing their way through 90 minutes then heading straight to the pub to make us forget’. They brutally characterise their manager Maurizio Sarri as ‘dressed like a car park attendant chewing on a cigarette butt’ before having a snipe at the club’s penchant for vegan pies: ‘It used to be that you bought a pie and knew it contained vague meat in a gloop. We knew where we were with that. Now it’s all butternut squash, tofu and spinach…’ All good fun but I detect a sense of entitlement amongst the drollery.
You won’t find many resentful Bluebirds taking a break from the boring predictable dross munching on their half-time Grazing Shed Super Tidy, Spicy Uncle Pedro or Vegan Wah Wah locally sourced sustainable eco-friendly artisanal burger washed down with a skinny frappuccino harking back all misty-eyed at the memory of a soggy half-time gristle ’n’ gravy Ninian Park Clarksie and a thermonuclear Bovril still capable of cauterising the oesophagus 20 minutes into the second half. Nope, all’s just fine and dandy at the CCS, no complaints, we’d just like to keep this going for as long as possible please.
It’s no understatement to describe the Chelsea squad as an embarrassment of riches and it boggles the mind (and gladdens the heart, lifts the soul) that an experienced manager seems incapable of inspiring the likes of Hazard, Kante, Willian et al to challenge for a top trophy just two years after Antonio Conte was discarded for ‘underachieving’ in winning the Premier League with the second highest points tally in PL history.
Backing up their stellar squad Chelsea have used their financial clout to eschew a youth development programme in favour of cynically buying up young talent and then farming them out to clubs mostly in lower leagues away the clutches of their rivals. They currently have 44 players out on loan. In any other area of business this practice would be regarded as anti-competitive and appropriate legislation would be introduced. But when did FIFA ever do ‘the right thing?’
It seems only reasonable to be resentful of Chelsea’s rise from near bankruptcy to the 7th most valuable football club in the world based on the laundering of its owner’s dubious acquisition of former Soviet state assets, but some of us were none too keen on them before Abramovich. An uneasy mix of self-regarding Kings Road Dandies (their ‘frilly nylon panties pulled right up tight’) and tooled-up skinheads, they were a stain on the game throughout the seventies and eighties when the local council declined chairman Ken Bates’ plan to erect electric fencing around the pitch to keep his fans in. The recent vile abuse directed at Raheem Sterling confirms that the club retains an odious hardcore of unreconstructed thugs.
It’s no surprise that in a recent fans’ poll ‘Chelsea’ was the top answer to the question ‘Which club do you dislike the most?’. So many reasons then for putting in a good performance today.
In the event the quality of the performance, although heartening and showing full commitment to the cause was frustrated by a display of calculated cack-handedness by referee Craig Pawson that is almost impossible to describe. Remember that name. You’re likely to hear it a lot over the coming years, context: ‘The ref had a ‘mare, a real Pawson’. How bad was he? To give you an idea of the scale of his incompetency, as a decision maker of historical ineptitude he’d have been advising Napoleon to invade Russia in winter, or driving the Archduke Franz Ferdinand through the backstreets of Sarajevo, navigating the Titanic’s path through the North Atlantic, barbering Chris Waddle’s 80’s mullet.
It’s a common default position of the blinkered narrow-minded partial fan driven by irrationalities and psychological inadequacies to claim that sinister forces are at play after a disappointing defeat, but, but, and but again, I’ve never left a game so indignant. What appeared at the time to be mystifying decisions have now been clarified as nothing short of outrageous.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist - that way madness lies - but it’s clear that certain officials are unable to detach themselves from being starry-eyed fans. The referee today betrayed a mindset that was fixed on giving the benefit of any possible doubt to the visiting luminaries, deferring to their celebrity status. The role of his assistants must also be questioned, in particular the linesman who refused to flag for the Chelsea equaliser claiming that his view was obscured ‘and anyway, Azpilicueta is in my fantasy football team’.
The result was all the more galling for our solid performance against a Chelsea team that was for much of the game lethargic, almost indifferent to the necessity to maintain a top four challenge. The bare facts might imply that they dominated the game, but their 75% possession was based primarily on lateral passing around the halfway line, their shots at goal mostly speculative or achieved out of desperation when the game seemed lost.
They came to life after the introduction of Hazard soon after City had taken the lead with a well worked Camarasa goal less than a minute into the second half which allowed us to seize the initiative, and which we looked more than capable of defending until the decisive non-intervention of officials.
Hazard, inexplicably left on the bench along with Kante, Giroud, Loftus-Cheek and Smacked-Arse, sorry, Hudson-Odoi threatened to change the balance of the game but was effectively shackled by a tireless Peltier who stuck to him limpet-like. Shout-outs also to Gunnarsson, Arter and captain Morrison who controlled the back line and was a constant threat from set pieces in the opposition box, cheated out of two unequivocal penalty shouts.
I’ve really seen a more deflated player than Sean Morrison in his post-match MOTD interview. Looking understandably bewildered after the sequence of events that turned a magnificent potentially season-defining victory into a defeat laden with dire implications for not only the season but the long term viability of the club, he was admirably restrained when describing being hauled down and having his shirt almost ripped from his chest in full view of the referee.
We draw no comfort from the TV analysis that concluded our misfortune was a test case for the merits of VAR technology. These decisions - clear penalties, an offside goal and the yellow card for Rudiger’s hauling down of Zahore when bearing down on goal - were not borderline, requiring the appliance of science to determine what is imperceptible to the human eye; neither did they require, in the words of Basil Fawlty ‘a degree in the bleedin’ obvious’. All that was needed was for the man in charge to perform with a modicum of competency.
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