I had a very strange dream last night.
I’ve been drinking lots of green tea and vegetables, and went to bed with almost a pint of the noxious green liquid inside me. It made for a very interesting dream. I dreamt that our entire season hung on the trip to the Scousers at the weekend and that we went there and got destroyed 3-0 – Gerrard hattrick. It guaranteed that we would not finish higher than seventh. In the style of Championship Manager (on the Amiga, not the Playstation I should point out) our season fell apart. Drogba went on strike and Inter gave us £2m at the end of the season to take the troublesome Ivorian off our hands. Ballack retired, Ashley Cole, Riccy Carvalho and Michael Essien all left for Real Madrid, whilst Anelka went back to Liverpool and Malouda headed for the Championship with West Brom. We started the following season in fact with only seven players, as Kenyon failed to recruit any replacements as nobody wanted to come to Chelsea. As an FA sanction, we were relegated on a technicality and Middlesbrough took our place, having been relegated for finishing third from bottom. Roman Abramovich gave the club to a consortium of fans who appointed Ian Holloway (yes, really) as manager, with Dave ‘Rodders’ Lee as his number two.
We went down to the Championship and suddenly everything changed. The West stand went back to how it was, the benches sprouting from the earth like fungi, the East stand’s paint peeled and fell, revealing the rust coloured paint underneath, and the Shed went back to the huge concrete terrace we all know and love. They had even put the running track back in. Samsung quit as our shirt sponsors, and we went back to a dark blue Le Coq Sportif nylon effort that literally made your hair stand on end. As Hartlepool went one up at the Bridge on the opening day of the season, the rain came sheeting down, and even in the snug confines of my duvet with my girlfriend just inches away, I swear I could feel the cold snaking down my spine, and smell that heady mix of piss, horseshit, sweat and fried onions that only someone who has spent a lot of time in the (old) Shed will know. As the rain poured, we stood and sang, and there was not a steward to be seen. The Bridge was rocking, even though there was only only nineteen thousand there, and none of us had paid more than twenty quid to get in, most of us having bought tickets at the turnstyles. We ended up having dominated Hartlepool at home, created all the chances, but scraped a one-all draw, courtesy of a Frank Lampard screamer on eighty minutes. The playing staff looked unfamiliar, with only JT, Lamps and weirdly, Belletti, remaining from our Premier League days. Next up a trip to Norwich, where we would probably get hammered. No matter, five thousand of us were going anyway, as Norwich is always a good trip. We didn’t need to win at Norwich to stay in the league, so could afford to be pragmatic about our chances at Carrow Road.
So I ask you, dear reader, was this a nightmare or a nice dream? Perhaps a strange mix of both?
The weird thing is, I woke up with a huge smile on my face. I realised, that it was not the cold that was making me breathless, but the sheer exhilaration of it all. The wonder of having your Chelsea back…
Wonderful though all the glitter and glamour is, it brings with it a pressure. I happen to think Chelsea as a club has been diluted since the big money came in, compared to what it was and what it used to mean. What if we got relegated? Would wearing a Chelsea shirt mean more because so few people would actually be doing it? Could we go back to the days of greeting someone wearing a Chelsea shirt in the street because you knew he was a True Blue? Our fanbase might shrink back to its pre-Premiership levels, and we’d go back to considering a good cup run and avoiding relegation as a successful season, instead of all this nonsense about having to win trophies. Don’t get me wrong, it would not mean us going back to being a small club, as we never have been, but we would go back to being proud and fierce in our support – and when the words to ‘Carefree’ actually meant something. Imagine it as peeling away all the layers of hangers-on, sycophants, marketing and all the other rubbish, and just stripping Chelsea down to its blue core. In my dream, we would be run by people who know about football and who are more interested in Chelsea the club and the family than Chelsea the global brand and Chelsea the consumer product.
Might this be my subconscious telling me that I am growing disillusioned with it all, and that today’s Chelsea is alarmingly different from the one I fell hopelessly in love with all those years ago?
We have some old guard’ on here – who remember the 70s and 80s and early 90s when we were a big club, but rather downtrodden, and when to be a Chelsea fan was quite a different undertaking (not to mention a substantially cheaper one) to what it is now. We were fans, loyal soldiers of the Blue Army, not Matchday yield statistics. Again, not to be misunderstood, it was cold, miserable, we were shite, and we ran the risk of getting our heads kicked in whenever we went away. It wasnt nice, it wasnt comfortable, but it was Chelsea, and perhaps the Chelsea of 2009 has moved away from that in a good way, but also in a bad way. So I’ll ask you again – my dream – was it a nightmare or a nice dream?
Personally I think it comes down to pain. I think we as football fans are defined by how much pain we take, and the 80s in particular were pretty painful for us as a fangroup. It moulded us and shaped us into the best fans in the world, and perhaps it is not the money men but the lack of pain – ie: the trophies and the success spoiling us – these last ten years that has seen us lose that something just a little bit. I dont think it is any coincidence that the pain of the last 18 months, still stark and urgent in the memory, has seen us get noisier and more passionate at home.
Of course, getting relegated (eventually) would be awful. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world, and in our case at least, there would be some positive aspect to it in my mind.
But then it was only a dream.
CAREFREE!!
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