I won’t bore you by going through the CFC board`s favored media yet again.
I`m sure you remember that when the board wants to state its case clearly and loudly, it goes to the board-friendly medium: the right-of-center, upper middle-class Daily Telegraph.
This weekend they put their case to the world via Telegraph mouthpiece, Sam Wallace, Chief Football Writer in a piece magnificently headlined:
Chelsea face a bigger question than how to stop Antonio Conte moaning
I would normally include a hyperlink straight to the piece, but the Telegraph, ever-arrogant voice of the haves, has a paywall of course.
The first paragraph of the piece is every bit as genius as the headline, aimed squarely at kicking every CFC board naysayer in the b***s:
A crisis at Chelsea tends to be the kind of season that many less successful clubs would consider good enough to commemorate with a special-edition DVD.
Wow! In just the left jab of the headline and the right cross of the first paragraph, the CFC board aka Sam Wallace has the readers on their heels.
Let`s go through what the Chelsea board has already conveyed in the two short sentences above:
1. Antonio Conte is nothing but a moaner; 2. He`s also irrelevant because CFC has bigger things to think about; 3. The success of the CFC ‘system` cannot be questioned; 4. What a marvelous time it is to be a Chelsea fan – look at Tottenham, what have they won??
It gets better. Next paragraph:
Such disasters as coming second after a double-winning season, two finishes outside the top four in 14 seasons, or the reign of Avram Grant, a man who perennially looked like he had wandered into the wrong movie and yet still came within one penalty of winning the Champions League.
Wow! Wow! Wow! The CFC ‘system`, where the board runs the team and managers are disposable nobodies, rocks!
The piece goes on to continue denigrating Chelsea managers, to remind readers that Chelsea flirted with relegation in past times but no longer (subtext: even the so-called greatest Chelsea manager ever was slung out a season after a double when he strayed too close to the relegation zone and the safe hands of the board set everything straight as ever).
We then go on to learn of the actual hands-on boss of CFC, Marina Granovskaia`s challenges, a plucky woman in a man`s world with bigger fish to fry than the latest managerial minnow.
Next, Wallace decides that Conte is clearly looking to get out. End of. Nothing embodies the current Conte nonsense, says Wallace, than wanting 31-year old Dzeko on a three-year contract “on a whim” when the manager`s leaving anyway.
Let`s just put that ageist nonsense in the trash where it belongs once and for all. Clearly some pseudo-scientist somewhere has sold Granovskaia some stats that show players` decline after 30. The fact that Wallace spews this nonsense on the day 36-year old Roger Federer won the Australian Open, and a week from 40-year old Tom Brady taking the field at the Super Bowl is all that needs to be said. But, like everything else, Wallace uses CFC board-fed ‘facts` to pillory and undermine yet another Chelsea manager.
At the bottom of all this praise for the brilliance of the Chelsea board, despite the entirely respectable numbers of wins, lies a fundamental melancholy, an odd emptiness felt by all true Chelsea fans.
It`s damnably difficult to put your finger on, but it exists – oh, yes it exists.
Why is it so? unsatisfactory to win the Premier League? Why have people forgotten all about it, ready to sling out the manager they adored less (often far less) than a year later?
Well, when you read PR posing as journalism such as Wallace`s article, you realise that there`s a powerful form of manipulation being carried out by CFC. Repeat over and over, “Managers are irrelevant, managers are irrelevant, managers are irrelevant” and eventually you come to believe it.
Like all forms of brainwashing, the victim lives in a permanently false state, feeling sad and empty much of the time.
That`s how true Chelsea fans feel when they are denied a true connection to the team.
Players can’t form that true connection, not least because they are naturally inarticulate.
Also, in the new world of the top club fighting on many fronts, players are interchangeable: the career-long single-club servants like John Terry – another connector between true fan and club – are a thing of the past.
No, the face of every single club is the manager. It`s he who the tv stations want to interview after the game, it`s he who can discuss tactics in a cogent way.
And, crucially, it`s he who creates and maintains the style of play.
For a club`s style of play, the product that fans come to see on the pitch, is the club`s culture.
That`s the real connection between club and fan.
In order for a club`s style of play to be effective and entertaining, it has to have a strong defence – but a strong defence that can transform itself into a killer attack in the twink of an eye.
Part of me understood why, even at times of biggest triumph, some fans felt annoyed by the former manager and his love for the 1-0 win (which meant fans had to spend large parts of games with their hearts in their mouths waiting for the imminent equalizer).
In between those triumphant seasons we`ve had the odd class manager who has either managed to benefit from the momentum of a previous manager`s regime; or, like Ancelotti, has installed a highly rigorous regime from the get-go that led to burn-out the season after.
True Chelsea fans have taken to Antonio Conte because he is the perfect balance of the two. Yes he is a tough trainer – name me one successful manager who isn`t? – but he also believes in scoring goals and getting forward. When he has the appropriate personnel.
And this, of course, is the big, BIG problem.
In order to inculcate a style of play, a system that fans can recognize and be proud of, a system that doesn’t require expensive superstars all the time for maintenance, a manager needs to be able to have some control over transfers. Just some.
As Sam Wallace`s CFC PR puff-piece makes clear, nothing like that will ever happen while Roman Abramovich owns Chelsea.
With a powerful and lasting style of play, a footballing culture, Abramovich and Granovskaia and the like are ‘reduced` to the same roles as they have at all other successful clubs: bringing in the right football management and letting them get on with it.
Sadly, it`s clear that the ownership didn’t splurge hundreds of millions to just be owners. They want to be the face of the club, but a face that never speaks or communicates or takes any part in footballing matters at this football club. And when the football manager shows any danger whatsoever of becoming a proper face, one that the fans take to their hearts, he signs his own warrant for death by a thousand cuts.
Many of which are delivered via CFC stooges like Sam Wallace and the Telegraph.