Poetry, tragedy, mysticism and romance - yes, he's on about football again!

Dad looked down at me after the game.
“Well you must have been really excited. Look at the state of your programme!”
Clutched in my tiny 9 year-old wrist were the tattered remains of my Chelsea match day programme. Even though back in those days it probably only cost threepence ha’penny, it was a precious memento of a great day out, and Dad might have been a bit cross that I’d wrecked it.
But he wasn’t.
Instead he seemed to think that this tatty papery mess was evidence that I had really enjoyed myself. Throughout the game, I’d been so wound up that I’d twisted it and sweated into it and torn it out of exasperation and then raised it above my head in pure jubilation, as Chelsea scored the winning goal.
Dad was right. I had been excited, and for years to come, I’d make sure that my programme never made it through a game intact. As a young lad, I did it to impress my Dad, showing him how much I’d enjoyed myself at the game with him.
But years later, when I rode to Stamford Bridge on my own motorbike, I found myself subtly yet deliberately crumpling my programme during the games.
Dad wasn’t there, and anyway, being a teenager, I felt no desire whatsoever to impress my Dad.
So what was it? Why was I doing it? It couldn’t possibly be because Chelsea had won that very first game when I’d crumpled my programme, could it?
In the Beautiful Game, you never know.
To all those of you who cannot find any beauty in the game, I say look again.
There’s poetry, tragedy and glory in abundance.
Chelsea’s owner, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, is haunted. He is Ahab, and the Champions League is his great white whale. He bought the club solely to win that greatest of European cup competitions, and even though, thanks to his millions, we have won everything else we possibly can, his whale eludes him.
He hired the Special One, Jose Mourinho. Surely if he could win the Champions League with Porto, a lesser European club, he could do the same for Chelsea?
No. He couldn't.
Fired from the Bridge, the helm temporarily passed to Avram Grant, an Israeli known in my house as ‘Eeyore’, who took over the club knowing that nobody but a superstar could replace Jose Mourinho. Grant is many things, but footballing Hollywood he is not.
Under Avram we failed to win the Champions League by one little penalty kick in the final, but Abramovich fired him and hired superstar A-listers in the shape of Brazilian Luiz Felipe Scolari, fired, midseason, and Guus Hiddink, who we really loved, but was only helping out while his missis was down the shops.
Now we have Carlo Ancelotti, who our Ahab has hired because he has won the Champions League twice. Two dead whales.
Carlo is doing a great job, despite the fact that he leads the out-and out glamour club which is Chelsea, standing on the sidelines looking like a bored clerk waiting for his pyjamas to come out of the the dryer.
Chelsea were knocked out of the Champions League last month by Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan. Abramovich must have been spitting pips as he watched the man he sacked kick us out of the European ocean.
Tragic maybe, but hold your breath. Football supplies yet more irony and poetry.
Avram Grant had gone from the Worst Job In The World at post-Mourinho Chelsea to The Other Worst Job In The World, managing Portsmouth, whose manager Harry Redknap had left for the mighty Tottenham Hotspur, taking most of his star players with him.
Portsmouth have gone broke, been relegated to a lower league, and will lose all of their star players next year. But in a flare of footballing solar wind, they managed to reach the semi-finals of the FA Cup, where they faced their old and unfaithful manager Harry and his ex-Spurs team laden with ex-Portsmouth players.
Nobody gave Portsmouth a chance, but they prevailed. Kicked out of the Premiership on the Saturday, they made it the the FA Cup Final on the Sunday, with Avram Grant not only laying waste to his A-lister predecessor, but gaining the chance to meet ... yes, Chelsea and his old boss Ahab in the Cup Final at Wembley.
How deliciously ironic and painful would it be for Abramovich to be knocked out of two major cup competitions in one year by two managers he sacked previously? How wonderful for Avram Grant to beat Chelsea in a cup final, having been fired for making it all the way to and then losing another final with Chelsea?
But ‘ang on a mo, guv’nor. Do I really want Portsmouth to beat Chelsea at Wembley?
I’m well aware that the entire country will be behind Portsmouth, the innocent Cinderellas who have suffered so cruelly at the hands of bankers and boardrooms.
If Chelsea beat Portsmouth, we will be the most unpopular winners of the trophy ever, but I don’t care, because if all goes well, when we lift the FA Cup on May 15th, we will have already won the Premiership League title the week before, and carried away the Double for the first time in our club history.
To today’s generation, the Double doesn’t carry much gravitas, as along with the club’s owner, it is the Champions League they all crave.
But to this London boy, the winning of both the English League title and the English Cup still means a massive amount. The Double would be a wonderful and romantic climax to one of the most exciting and closest seasons for decades.
But somehow I don’t see it happening, and it’s all down to that little boy with his crumpled programme.
You see, I know that the rustling of that paper in my sweaty childish palm was not really influencing my team, in the same way that I know that we didn’t lose the Champions League Final just because it was the night before my Wedding Day.
But equally, I cannot escape the fact that we did lose that Champions League Final the night before my Wedding Day.
Add a dash of absurdity, mysticism and bollocks into the mix, and I find myself strongly wishing that the FA Cup Final was not being played on the day before my 50th birthday, because clearly the universe turns round me and my major life events, and those 22 players in that distant country will feel bewitched by my impending half century.

Unpredictable, astonishing and appalling: Chelsea are back to mirror my life!

With a little dust precariously settled after the departure of Jose Mourinho from Chelsea, this colyoom stumbles disconsolate once again towards the truth that football (the 'English game') is a metaphor for life.
If you do nothing but defeat all your enemies, then your victories will feel increasingly meaningless and shallow. To truly know the value and excitement of winning, you have to know what it is to lose.
If you win all the time you have no hope; there are no dreams left unfulfilled. All you are left with is the dread of loss, whereas if you lose often, your dreams of winning grow all the time.
Before the arrival of the Special One at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea FC offered their fans all that life had to offer.
They would destroy Manchester United at Old Trafford, and three days later lose ignominiously to a team of part-time herring fisherman from a hamlet in Norway whose goalie was blind in one eye.
Regardless of whether managed by Hoddle, Vialli, Gullit, or the original Tinkerman, Claudio Ranieri, Chelsea never fielded the same team week to week, played one day with passion, commitment and flashes of dazzling brilliance, only to offer for the next game a performance damnably lacklustre and dreadful.
Each glamorous manager bought international superstar goalscorers to Stamford Bridge, who, having donned the blue shirt, became instantly unable to find the net ever again (some things never change).
Following Chelsea before Mourinho was excruciating, infuriating, exhilarating and inspiring.
The former because an ethos of inconsistency permeated the entire club.
The latter because life is like that: scattered with rare and beautiful victories, besmirched by ugly shoddy shabby times and most importantly, completely beyond our control.
Then came the Russian billionaire, who hired the Portugeezer, and immediately everything changed.
Suddenly Chelsea were entirely predictable.
Almost impossible to beat, they were Premiership Champions two years in a row, whilst picking up an FA Cup, and two Carling Cups on the way. There were two Champions League semi-finals and a double-header against mighty Barcelona that some consider the most exciting European game ever played.
Mourinho picked the right players. He made daring and impressive tactical substitutions, and kept his players out of the English tabloid papers by gushing forth a constant torrent of apparently mad and egocentric nonsense for the gutter press to feed upon.
Something of a genius, something of a despot, it was no surprise that he failed to get on with the post-Communist fascist who was his boss.
Although I have enjoyed the last three years, I am not inordinately sad to see him go.
All that winning became a strain. It didn't feel quite right, and the football was rarely stimulating to watch.
As football reflects life, so my team should have erratic, flawed, passionate yet talented players who do their best, will not always win at the expense of style, and accept their fate with dignity.
Chelsea have never been a dynastic club like Manchester United, who suffer a joyless search for perfection. The Blues are more like you and me: living on the edge of uncertainty, aware that change is the only constant, relishing the good times, and learning from the bad.
My only deep concern for the club I love rests with Chelsea's Russian billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich.
We all sit and shout at the TV and tell our mates what we would do if we could boss the team, but we realise that in the real world, the Manager knows best.
Blinded by power and wealth, misguided by sycophantic Yes-Men, and drowning in his own vanity, Abramovich decided he knew more about football than Jose Mourinho, the man who won the European Cup with a team from Portugal; the man who did not lose a single home league game throughout his entire tenure at Chelsea.
If Abramovich continues to play 'God' by deciding what he thinks is best for the team on the pitch, Chelsea will crumble and die within a few years.
But now, with Mourinho gone, what will happen?
We might win and we might lose. Once again, Life and Chelsea are back on the same track, and it feels good!
In purely commercial terms, Roman Abramovich has scored a massive own goal by sacking Jose Mourinho, but ironically, in the process, he gave me back the team that mirrors life as I see it: ever unpredictable, often astonishing and sometimes plain appalling, Chelsea came back to me. (The Snapper, however, is still in mourning.)

****

On a slightly more literate note, by now the winner of the Man Booker Prize will be known, and the winning author will be showered with fame and wealth.
Indeed, each writer on this year's Booker Shortlist is guaranteed to sell several thousand copies of their nominated novels.
However, it's worth taking a quick look at the numbers of those books sold before they were nominated on the Shortlist.
While über-scribbler Ian McEwan's novella 'On Chesil Beach' had found its way into a respectable 99,660 homes, Nichola Barker's 'Darkmans' had sold less than 500 copies.
Two of the other shortlisted books had sold less than 900, and quite amazingly, 'Animal's People' by Indra Sinha had made it onto the list despite having sold only 231 copies.
231 copies? Is that all it takes to catch a ride on the Man Booker Prize Express?
Once you've flogged a few to your mates, your family, and the barstaff at the launch; put 20 in a box in the attic for those yet-to-be-born grandchildren who will be oh-so grateful for your foresight, you'll have flogged 250 copies.
So why would anyone want to try and write fiction? Clearly, it's not for the money. Sure, the above shortlisted books will now make their writers rich, but it is, after all, a short list.
Personally, I think we scribblers are just a bunch of nutters who need to write in order to function as vaguely acceptable human entities, and some of us are better at it than others.
But if you only need to flog 200 copies to make the Man Booker Shortlist, there's hope for us all.
So the next time somebody tells you they are writing a novel, hesitate for at least a second before you gush
'Oh wow! You'll be loaded! Remember us simple folk when you're a gazillionaire!'

Double Vision

Caricatures Ireland

How will the capitalist, the communist and the fascist settle their football scores?

No more inflated bladders and onion bags. Soccer all gone upriver for a few blessed months, with neither a World Cup nor a European Championship to fill the lock.
The back pages of Redtops will be filled with speculation on transfers and all the usual managerial sacking Hoo-Haa, but I will be taking a breather.
August will be round again soon enough, when the Community Shield season opener will be between cup winners Chelsea and league winners Manchester United, and we'll all be deja-vuing like there was no tomorrow.
This comes from a Chelsea fan, a happy Chelsea fan whose team, at the time of writing has both cup and manager intact.
I originally became a Chelsea fan simply because they were my Dad's team, and he took me to Stamford Bridge. Blood is thicker than water, and as I stuck with the Blues through thick and thin, relegation and promotion, there grew a deeper bond between myself and the club.
Over the decades I realised we were not the same as other clubs. No matter which idiosyncratic character is at the managerial helm; irrespective of which super-egoed players sporting bizarre haircuts and glowing reputations wore the blue shirt; sometimes despite and sometimes because of who owned the club at any particular time; permanence and consistency as a way of life had no place at Chelsea FC.
We are and always have been the Flash Harry superstars; mere Flash-in-the-pan success merchants; flashy with money and fashion and flashy with cars and birds.
On the pitch, Chelsea always had players who were capable of flashes of brilliance. Nothing that lasted, just a 'good cup side', which is a nice way of describing a team which capitulates to minnows, but might turn on the style against the big teams, on their day, when they could be arsed.
And then came Abramovich, Kenyon and Mourinho, and everything changed.
For the first time in their history, Chelsea were consistently beating the little teams as well as the big teams, home and away, week after week. It might not be pretty, but it's bloody effective, and along the way there are flashes of brilliance just so that you know you're still watching Chelsea.
Sure United and Arsenal are a lot prettier, but all they have to offer is a cantankerous purple-faced Scot and a melancholic delusional Frenchman.
We at Chelsea can offer the full Shakespearean drama, in which the players play only small parts, distant generals out in the field, occasionally appearing in cameos when their contracts are up or another vat of transfer money is to be made
Scene: Forum on stormy day: Enter Kenyon, dressed in white silk toga, the capitalist money-maker, who is also a self-avowed lifelong supporter of Chelsea's major opponents, Manchester United:
"Dollar double cook up some trouble... two giants of their Kingdoms come. All powerful are they within their own realms, and yet, without me, they have nothing (cackle). For all his power the Russian Bear needs my face to talk to our people. He needs my shoulders on which to launder his great wealth. And as for that Portuguese fascist, the pompous piratical pri-"
As Kenyon rambles, Mourinho approaches, somehow looking so good in a simple yet stylish brown tunic with gold and blue armoured trim. Sneaking up on Kenyon, he talks quietly into his ear from behind:
"And me? You say I need you too? Truly if you think that you delude yourself more than I do when I throw away medals into the crowd. I do not need either of you, you fools. I can go today and be welcomed by millions in any Kingdom in the world."
"And so you can my handsome moody and most mysterious Iberian pally boy, but the world today is a vile and unnatural place. The Communist Bear is strong, and even richer today than any capitalist, so for you to stay here you must please the Russian. Now take my advice (cackle cackle) you will never win Mother Russia 's heart by trying to make her look foolish."
"I do not need to make him look foolish. He does it very well by himself."
Enter Abramovich in flowing purple robes, with dancing ladies in entourage.
"Hail Money Manager man and Man Manager man. Hahahahaaar! I forgot your names again, but hahahahaaaar, it does not matter, because I am all powerful and can have you drown in a bath filled with boiling borscht should the whim attract me! Hahahahaaar! Did we win the Champions League yet?"
Chelsea have always been uncomfortably big yet brittle, brash yet belittled too often.
As one after another English Premiership team is bought up like the latest fashion accessory by foreign magnates of extremely dubious pedigree, should I fear for the future of my team?
During the games of the latter half of last season, Mourinho started to sit holding his left arm up against his chest, rather unnervingly resembling Dr. Strangelove and his efforts to restrain his Heil-Hitlering arm.
Kenyon is a slimy Iago slithering sycophantically from leader to leader, while Abramovich has built a fortune on the back of broken peasants, and will quite possibly get his full comeuppance when Putin is finally removed from power.
My beloved Chelsea FC will survive all these dodgy geezers along with their dark and dismal dosh. Diving up and down in fortune and fortunes, greatness will always ebb and flow from Stamford Bridge.
Attracted to the aforementioned flashiness of the club, gifted players and great characters have always entertained Chelsea fans on our road to oblivion and back.
Dazzling talents from Jimmy Greaves to Gianluca Vialli, from Ruud Gullit to Peter Osgood, Charlie Cooke to Gianfranco Zola have graced the Chelsea shirt. Great team players like John Terry, Chopper Harris, John Hollins and Marcel Desailly have stayed the course while others have come and gone.
How will Chelsea's triumvirate of massive male egos finally settle their differences?
How will the capitalist snake, the communist capitalist and the charismatic fascist settle their scores?
Perchance we need to return to great theatrical tragedy, where by the final act the stage is inevitably strewn with bloodied bodies.
Enter John Terry, Frank Lampard, steam rising from their first team strip:
"Gaffer! Gaffer! We won! We bloody won, just like you - oh bloody 'ell Lamps! Looks like we're too late!"
"Yeh, JT! They'll never know now! It's a blue day!"
cadley1@eircom.net