OK, I was only joking when I suggested the rats on the Chelsea board would be after Antonio Conte next – but by jingo it`s happening!
How can it possibly be?
How can this club take the world`s greatest managers and systematically drive them out of their minds?!
Sorry – the word ‘club` is wrong; what I mean is this regime.
It`s a regime with an iron-willed determination that this will never be a place run by blue-collar football people.
Perhaps the regime has been gazing wistfully at the rise of analytics in American sports – in baseball, analytics drive things so thoroughly now that team managers are treated like office boys.
Sound familiar?
The problem is, while games that resemble little more than human chess may be susceptible to analytics, people have tried and failed to institute that kind of stuff with football – see that massive trophy-winner lol Arsène Wenger for details.
I`d love to see how much science went into Leicester`s Premiership victory – I`m guessing around about, er, zero. No, all that happened was a clever manager got a run-of-the-mill squad to play above themselves for a season.
End of.
And guess what? That run-of-the-mill squad was full of players who were also human beings: having thrashed their bodies one season they were hoping for a bit of reinforcement the next.
Not for somebody to just say, “More of the same please!” That was never going to cut it with Premier League champions.
At Leicester, just as at Chelsea in everything but Mourinho`s double season, a business decision was taken that the existing ‘inventory` still had another season left in it, so why splurge valuable profits and board director pay-outs?
Needless to say that didn`t cut it with the players.
It’s now clear to anybody with half a brain that Mourinho`s second successive Chelsea Premiership title was the most important event of the current regime.
It set the precedent for everything that would happen from then on.
First, at the height of unprecedented success, the victorious Chelsea manager was not doubly-trusted and given leeway as would normally be the case (see Fergie for details), instead he suddenly had to accept extra supervision from above with directors of football, technical directors or whatever nonsense.
And the whole transfer business, once so smooth, suddenly became an unhinging can of worms.
Why did such massively counter-intuitive stuff happen? One reason and one reason alone fits: rather than being delighted with the manager`s progress, his superiors were terrified by it.
There is simply no other solution.
It`s crystal clear that burningly jealous and insecure CFC directors wanted the increasingly powerful Mourinho out; which would also give them the opportunity to show that it was they, the board, who were the most important element, not the manager.
And, despite reality turning out to be the opposite of the above, that is what this club now is.
It`s a dysfunctional regime run by arrogant suits without one iota of aptitude or heart when it comes to footballing matters.
I warned about this pattern when they drove Mourinho crazy – not hard with a guy of his neurosis, and with a sick father abroad to boot.
I quickly fell in love with The Don – how could any Chelsea fan not? – and, as Chelsea`s triumph became clearer, I declared it the acid test if a man of such brilliance and achievement could somehow be destroyed by this regime for his very success the same way they destroyed Mourinho.
I confess that I wrote all that to get a rise, my tongue firmly in my cheek.
But right now, nobody is more disappointed, distressed and disgusted that something I so profoundly felt was just circumstantial, is in fact grim reality.
As I write, the CFC board ploy of denying yet another star Chelsea manager the tools to do his job in order to unhinge him is well on its way. And Chelsea ‘staff` are leaking the same old same old **** to their pet media to further derange him with headlines like “Why is Conte with £200 million worth of new players being such a ****?” Answer: Because £185 million of players went out the door you *****!!!
This cesspit of a regime is simply sickening. Never mind the manager, even I`ve had enough.
If they fire The Don, I`ll be right alongside him.
Until people with football in their heart – not jealousy, envy, politics, gossip and spite – come back to run Stamford Bridge.