14 Mar 2005 |
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Shortly before and after the Nou Camp game, something was decidedly smelly in the surroundings of Stamford Bridge; but you needn’t sniff too  hard to realize that it was the olfactive assault from the unwashed vultures cawing thirstily for Mourinho’s blood! On the night of the Champions League return leg against Barcelona, the stage was perfectly set for his crash-landing and there was no safety net in sight, even where it seemed all inevitable to everyone but true Chelsea fans. Presiding over this whole show from their Olympus, the uppity class of English hacks in the papers, on radio and on TV were rubbing their hands gleefully at the prospect of carting off the remains of the Portuguese gadfly.And they had been laying the tables for the greatest feast of one-man crow-grubbing ever witnessed on Kings Road, even before the Norwich game, where the perfectly observed wisdom was that Mourinho was very quiet and restrained. At the first press conference after Barcelona, he was said not to be his usual self and I’m sure the vultures sitting around him then would have sworn they could hear the swoosh of blood draining away from his body each time they planted their treacherous kliegs in front of him. Some had even started to negotiate a befitting cemetery. Instead, what happened in 11 minutes of the first 18 minutes of the game defied the expectations of even the most optimistic Chelsea fan. Victor Valdes had picked up the ball from inside his net three times without reply! As we watched our own Irish Wonder race to the sidelines in celebration, we thought we had them well-duffed and out! Then 6 minutes after, Pierluigi Collina awarded Barcelona a questionable penalty, tucked away by Ronaldinho, who then went on 7 minutes before the end of first half to hang every Chelsea fan’s heart on tenterhooks with a beauty of a goal. But Chelsea are no mugs for drama - with exactly 15 minutes to go, Capt John Terry stepped up the plate and rewrote the storyline. To cut a long gist short, to every genuine lover of football, the game at Stamford Bridge qualifies as the game of the season. So, you can imagine how much of a resurrection it was to watch Mourinho sprint across the field to hug his players after the last whistle at Stamford Bridge. At that time, the image that came to my mind was of John Gregory, the former Aston Villa coach, perched on his Sky Sports pundit’s chair, predicting that Barcelona will win at Stamford Bridge, while also confirming that, indeed, the vultures are truly waiting for their piece of prized Mourinho meat. Maybe it was the suspicion that some people were trying to prematurely put an end to my enjoyment of the well-deserved victory of my beloved Chelsea over Barcelona at Stamford Bridge two days before that did it, because when I chanced upon a TV set mid-afternoon on Thursday March 10, 2004 and heard the SkySports talking heads announce that Mourinho has been fined £5000 by the English Football Association, I just couldn’t contain myself. I cracked into growls of disapproving guffaws, pranced around indignantly and shook my head. What! Since when has the FA, the Grand Ayatollahs of ill-repute, found it within their moral breath to tell us, true football fans, their choice of ‘disreputable’ candidate? They are not telling us that Mourinho did not see what he claimed to have seen, which was Sir Alex walking away with and talking to Mr Neale Barry, the referee, at half-time in the first leg of the Carling Cup semi-final at Stamford Bridge, nor that this behaviour, if true, is acceptable within the game. Sure, they fined Mourinho for using the money-churning word “cheat”, but why couldn’t they make allowance for the fact that the chap, English not being his first language, could actually have meant “simulation”, as he tried to explain? Obviously, they must have reckoned that the Chelsea cash-cow wouldn’t moo too disapprovingly at the idea of parting with such paltry sums (including £15,000 for the Blackburn tango), which just about makes everyone happy, though with English hacks still grumbling that this is a slap on the wrist, considering that Arsene Wenger was made to shell out £15, 000 for his own “cheat” jibe. Of course, it matters not to the jaundiced that Wenger actually was referring to Ruud van Nistelrooy, whom he in fact named. Well, my advice to Mourinho is: from now on, address the English press and FA in Portuguese! Now, let’s leave the FA for a moment, but still keep it with the TV. You know, each time the television cameras brought closer the face of Frank Rijkaard, the Barcelona coach these past few acrimonious weeks with Chelsea, I couldn’t help but think of a mannequin. His hair, though stylistically Rastafarian, looked to me like small strings of rubber dangling from a plastic head and his face, pudgy and plain, betrayed the paradox of someone who’d either had too much sleep or non at all. Maybe those huge eyes accentuated the synthetic quality; but whatever it was, a bout of Josénetics has been proved not to be good for the coaching heart, especially the Dutch ones, if one counts the Father Saint of Total Football Himself, the legend, Johan Cruyff and Henk Ten Cate, Rijkaard’s Dutch Assistant. And talking about Henk the Cat, I’m sure some of us still recall that it was this pugnacious fellow that described Chelsea’s outing in the Nou Camp as “pathetic”. Perhaps, it’s time to let him know the truth, since he obviously hasn’t invested in a mirror. And here is the truth: the only pathetic sight we see anywhere around right now is his face! I cannot believe that someone befitting of an Alfred Hitchcock set is sitting right there by Rijkaard’s side, wasting away in Catalonia! They should either pawn him to some horror movie director or wheel him in for plastic surgery. Or, better still, he could go around in masks or apply to be the Barcelona mascot! As for the legend, when I read his reaction in the Spanish press after the Nou Camp game and his lament over Chelsea’s “boring football”, my heart went out to him. This could only have come from a man fighting a losing battle to lay off the bottle, I thought. Okay, he was a Barcelona coach and possibly was just being partisan; but why doesn’t he explain how Chelsea that paid over the odds for a Drogba, Kezman, Tiago, Jarosik, Carvalho, Ferreira to join up with the likes of Lampard, Gallas, Terry, Bridge, Makelele, Parker, Cole, Mutu, Johnson, Gudjohnsen, Forsell, etc are investing in boring football. He may not be regretting anything today, for instance, not winning two World Cups, but if he’s sober, he would choose result above style, because whether he likes it or not, most fans of high-flying ambitious teams will choose result over “sexy football”. All we did was to wait until Stamford Bridge to tell him that attacking football need not be possession. Chelsea’s goals came from four different individuals playing everywhere outfield. Gudjohsen spoke for the strikers, Lampard spoke for midfielders and anyway you choose to look at it, Duff supported both. Terry then had the final word for the defenders. And Chelsea barely had 33 percent of possession! Johan Cruyff, are you sober now? Obviously not, he’s still talking total football backwards! No doubt, the Spanish press worked itself into the mythical realms after the game at the Nou Camp when they declared that Mannequin was his cool, calm and classy self as opposed to the riotous Mourinho whose coronation as the King of the Cold War and locker room peep had them buzzing after the first 90 minutes, which Mourinho soberly declared to be “half-time”. In fact, they almost succeeded in selling this snake oil (what with Mourinho being mercilessly lanced by the British press, the Barcelona players, their on-field and backroom staff and UEFA) until the post-match conference at Stamford Bridge. Then, suddenly, agitated life flickered into the bloated mannequin face – “I always feel bitter in defeat”, he confessed. And, he showed it with a little spot of WWE action near the dugout with his star performer, Ronaldinho as tag-team partner. Then, the din of an Eto’o in the background, though not complete with the monkey chants, yet in a way related. Someone called him a "monkey of shit" – a Chelsea part-time/temporary steward, he claims. The ever-ready Mr William Gaillard, UEFA Director of Communications and Public Affairs, luckily was on hand (as he’s been all along) to explain that though Eto’o looks some “honest and charming” bloke, there’s need for evidence to proceed; after all, it’s one man’s word against another. And true to his demands, by the night of Wednesday, Mr Gaillard and UEFA have concluded, against all permutations, that they are investigating the tunnel incidence. Though, the highly-respected Mr Collina, made no report of this after-the-game show, Willy Gaillard and his fellow prosecutors think they’ve got something to proceed on from the delegate’s report. Now, what new thing Mr Gerhard Kapl, the UEFA Austrian delegate has in his report, we are not told, but by Friday evening, the story is that Scotland Yard has also joined in on the act! For the record, Mr Rijkaard made nothing of the fracas. He said it was the “emotional” fallout of the game. He said he and his team were reacting to an insult from some unnamed person whom the press is reporting to be Andre Villas Boas, a Chelsea scout. The alleged offence of this Boas was that he did an O’Leary – he blew kisses at the opposition after the game! But then, that is one account. Another account says it was Mourinho himself blowing kisses at Barcelona fans. In fact, the English press tried their best to give it a gangland taint. For instance, Sam Wallace, writing in the Daily Independent of Thursday, 10 March, 2005, talks about a shadowy “Orwellian” outfit run by Mourinho within the Chelsea organization known as “Opposition Observation Department”. This outfit, not surprisingly, he says is headed by no other than the 27-year-old Mr Boas. In a frighteningly frankensteinian spin, Wallace tells us that Mr Boas is nicknamed “mini-Mourinho” and does harbour coaching ambitions of his own! Nonetheless, the sight of stewards attempting to calm down the duo of Rijkaard and his World Footballer of the Year was a fitting montage. It couldn’t and can’t be better for any Chelsea fan after listening to Ronaldinho, Eto’o, Puyol, Márquez, Giovanni van Bronckhorst and the whole undisciplined lot run their diarrhoeic mouths from Catalonia to London, frothing through their ears! The most laughable was Eto’o’s vow to make Mourinho pay for not signing him in the summer! Mourinho’s sin was that at a time when virtually every big player and football mercenary on the planet was itching to drink from the Chelsea trough, he opted to sign the relatively untested Didier Drogba ahead of Eto’o, the African Footballer of the Year! Of course, in the end, Eto’o tried to seek excuses by accusing the peerless Mr Collina, claiming the referee denied him a clear-cut penalty. But this is only in his imagination, as the claim has been showed up as baseless by television replays. In fact, El País, one of Spain’s most respected and highest-selling newspapers admits television replays revealed that “the Portuguese defender had athletically swept the ball from Eto’o’s feet”. The fact is Rijkaard’s team is an ill-disciplined and talkative horde which got their just dessert at Stamford Bridge. Any team that is serious and respectful of their opponent wouldn’t set out players and even their club president (Joan Laporta) like some attack dogs after the opposing coach, nor would they spend that amount of space in the international press yapping like troubled puppies. Now, with Real Madrid joining Barcelona on the scrapheap, it’s all quiet on the Spanish front. But not the dogged English press. In The Sunday Times of today, for instance, Hugh McIlvanney who presumptuously dubs himself “The voice of sport” is spending half the back page of the Sports section railing against the whole of Britain for “the largely untroubled response in this country to the behaviour of Carvalho”, by which he means the supposed foul on Victor Valdes, the Barcelona goalkeeper, prior to Terry’s winning goal. He’s using words and terms like blatantly illegal, serious, skulduggery, dirty tricks, shameless fouling, callous, sinister, nefarious, dubious, scandalous cheating, chicanery, etc to describe this very act. But then, you can’t help but wonder where he was when Didier Drogba was undeservedly given his marching orders by Mr Frisk in the game at the Nou Camp! And while Mr McIlvanney was determined to weep more than the bereaved, his fellow columnist, Rob Hughes, on the same pages is unearthing an email from one “Zola Boy” calling for Chelsea fans to give out the address of Anders Frisk, whom he says had originally agreed to an “in depth interview for The Sunday Times, scheduled for this week”. Now, you wouldn’t know whether Mr Hughes is annoyed with those allegedly threatening Mr Frisk for rendering his proposed interview with the latter otiose (since Mr Frisk has suddenly announced his immediate retirement from the game after claiming that some threats have been made against him and his family) or whether he just felt like doing a bit of PR for the Swedish whistler; but he’s riled enough to devote two separate writings in The Sunday Times to these Chelsea “thugs”. And, he didn’t forget to tell us of how the terribly misunderstood Mr Frisk has done his bit for suffering humanity in Sierra-Leone while on a mission with two other UEFA referees. I mean, isn’t it quite revealing to learn that “Frisk took care of two children the International Red Cross had found in a refugee camp and was returning to their father, who had been presumed killed during the civil war”? Not only that, he actually refereed a match between youths of two refugee camps, though Mr Hughes didn’t say if he issued any red card or awarded a penalty in the 92nd minute (two trade mark actions of Mr Frisk). From Hughes’s account, all that remains now is the canonization of Mr Frisk and a mass denunciation of Chelsea and Mourinho for bringing about the loss of this fine soul to the game – something that has already began with the latest news indicating that Volker Roth, the Chairman of UEFA’s referees’ committee, is branding Mourinho “the enemy of football” and lined up behind him are Urs Meier and Kim Nielsen, two top referees as well. David Walsh, another of the paper’s columnists did his best on page 9 to put down Chelsea and Mourinho in an article titled, “SUCCESS AT A PUSH”, in which he claims that “one of the most telling differences between Chelsea this season and last is their ability to fool rivals – and the referee”. Don’t bother reading most other English newspapers, because they’re either saying the same thing as The Sunday Times columnists above or getting orgasmic over the Ashley Cole “tapping” story – a sorry, sorry bunch indeed. Rather than learning from the continental press, which support their own through thick and thin, the British press would rather drag down what they themselves have built. When all is said and done, you wouldn’t be surprised to find that apart from fixture congestion and lack of proper FA support, the British press may well be another reason why the national teams and English clubs aren’t doing well in Europe, in spite of their huge financial and fan base. Mourinho in his characteristically blunt manner has told them this and, of course, they aren’t ready to have the truth shoved in their face. Let’s face it, the purpose of the English FA action is clear - it is to provide some precedence for UEFA to deal with Mourinho since this is seemingly new territory. They are not attacking the problem, but the person! They have chosen precisely the time they’ve chosen to hand out their punishment to Mourinho, not only to provide this precedence for UEFA, but also to put dampeners on our well-deserved celebrations. Their mission is to take as much sugar away from Mourinho and Chelsea fans, but we know that Mourinho, rather than bringing “disrepute” to the game, has actually brought to it huge credibility and panache. He’s a breath of fresh air, blunt, haughty perhaps, but incredibly principled. Mourinho is exposing well hidden issues in this game and he’s taking no prisoners. How many coaches would have witnessed what Mourinho talks about and looked the other way? How many referees have been so influenced? The fact is Mourinho is showing that the establishment can be challenged to live up to its responsibilities. He has single-handedly dragged English football, kicking, punching and screaming, some extra five years ahead, but Big Football is not happy with him and Chelsea because we refuse to be pushed around! Rather, they prefer to be chasing rats! I think UEFA should sit up and consider Chelsea’s petition after Barcelona. It must clarify, through investigation, the nature of the contact between Rijkaard and Frisk. Was he in the referee’s dressing room as Mourinho says? They should not go for the cheap ‘solution’ of a fine, like the FA over the Alex Ferguson-Neale Barry accusation of Mourinho, just so everyone can walk away while leaving the real issue unaddressed. They should determine the truth of the situation before they begin to issue fines. Mourinho is a credible man making credible claims against the establishment, but at the same time a tactician who takes the heat away from his players by taking it on himself. All that has been deployed to kill him, he converts into fuel! While we await more details on the Anders Frisk decision to quit, let us not forget that Mr Frisk has been quite a controversial figure as a referee. This man, who likens footballers to “dogs”, got a bloody head from being hit by a coin in Rome when he sent out Roma defender, Phillip Mexes in a Champions League game against Dynamo Kiev in September. By December, it was our own jolly Claudio Ranieri, as Valencia coach, angling to wrap his hands around Mr Frisk’s neck when he red-carded Miguel Angulo. Earlier in July, Ruud van Nistelrooy bagged a two-match suspension for branding Mr Frisk “a real home whistler” when the Dutch lost to Portugal in the semi-final of the European Championship in Portugal. Ten years ago, in his own country, an enraged fan flattened him with a kung-fu kick and in 2002, Mr Frisk’s antics and desire to be the centre of attention got Malmo’s chairman, Bengt Madsen so mad that he ran down from the VIP box to confront the referee! The purpose of all this is to point out that this is not the first time Mr Frisk has been threatened in the course of doing his job; but why he’s chosen to retire immediately now over this one is an issue that only him can address. I would have thought it more appropriate for him to announce his intentions, but stay on until UEFA completes investigation on Chelsea’s pending petition against him. In any case, one would expect UEFA and the police to get to work on this new angle. However, whatever they do, it should not hinder investigation into what really happened at the Nou Camp. So, while we, the longsuffering Chelsea fans, continue to endure the Spanish Inquisition by the English and European football establishments, I salute the Blue Tide that swept aside Catalonia! We await the return of the true Dutch of Courage, Arjen Robben - even without being there, the stage is now set for him and his friends. Yes, even boring teams do have their stars and they need not even play for the team to get the right results. Listen up, people: WE ARE KINGS OF THE WORLD! WHEN THE CHELSEA LION ROARED, EVERY WHIMPER WE HEARD ON THE KINGS ROAD! Chelsea fans everywhere are LIVING AND LOVING IT! But don’t mention the classy glob that landed right in Mr Rudi Voeller’s cherished perm sometime in Mr Rijkaard’s earlier incarnation as a player – something he found classy enough to do at the biggest stage of them all, the World Cup finals in Italy in 1990. Thus, if the reports are right about Eto’o spitting on some persons in the tunnel at Stamford Bridge, we can sensibly conclude that he’s only playing follow the leader. As for us, Chelsea fans, IN MOURINHO WE TRUST! IN MOURINHO WE TRUST! IN MOURINHO WE TRUST! Comments are welcome at: http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/board/showthread.php?t=3373 |
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