Are Chelsea the laughing stock of football?

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Laughing Gravy

I'm a ****
Jan 8, 2010
1,377
In my bungalow
I use to like Chelsea but now I hate them as much as I hate Manure.

I feel really sorry for AVB. He never stood a chance :nono:
 




Apropos Chelsea footballers and daughters ... the young Miss Bracknell was once chatted up by Joe Cole in a pub. She found the perfect put-down. "What do you do?" "I'm a footballer". "Oh". The end.

:thumbsup:
 


Southwick_Seagull

Well-known member
Oct 8, 2008
2,035
Right man at the wrong time. Going in trying to change the style of football with an ageing, entrenched dressing room is almost an impossible job. Never stood a chance as another poster said.
 


Tom Hark Preston Park

Will Post For Cash
Jul 6, 2003
72,323
Right man at the wrong time. Going in trying to change the style of football with an ageing, entrenched dressing room is almost an impossible job. Never stood a chance as another poster said.

The next manager's going to have exactly the same problem though, because the old guard is still there. They won't go quietly.
 






rouseytastic

Well-known member
Sep 22, 2011
1,212
Haywards Heath
Yes, and always will be until they employ a manager and let HIM manage the club.

At present he is just a mouth piece for the owner
 




ewe2

Well-known member
Mar 14, 2008
2,738
Hailsham area
It seems the owners business experience not extend to the employment of football managers. One would have thought that to be so successful in business employing the right people is a key ingredient !
 




Blackadder

Brighton Bhuna Boy
Jul 6, 2003
16,121
Haywards Heath
Torres is averaging 1.6 goals a manager at Chelsea.
 


Badger

NOT the Honey Badger
NSC Patron
May 8, 2007
13,102
Toronto
I think every season needs its joke club, previous title holders include:

Portsmouth (still in with a shout this season)
Newcastle (sadly the competition is too strong for them this year, a valiant effort with "Sports Direct Arena" but not enough to challenge for the top prize)
Liverpool (A quiet season for them on the joke front, perhaps regrouping for a big push next year)
 


Mellotron

I've asked for soup
Jul 2, 2008
32,468
Brighton
Liverpool (A quiet season for them on the joke front, perhaps regrouping for a big push next year)

Sorry WHAT? Suarez, Dalglish?! Perhaps not a joke club, but certainly the most hated this season.
 




Badger

NOT the Honey Badger
NSC Patron
May 8, 2007
13,102
Toronto
Sorry WHAT? Suarez, Dalglish?! Perhaps not a joke club, but certainly the most hated this season.

That's my thinking, they are clearly favourites for the most hated crown but I don't think they are qualities to push them into joke central.

EDIT: Although I guess they do have joke fans
 




SK1NT

Well-known member
Sep 9, 2003
8,762
Thames Ditton
When my gf worked part time at pizza express in Esher during uni that twat John Terry was asking for her number on a weekly basis.

He then asked another member of staff for her number and got it and he would call her every few days and on one occassion was in a hotel with the England squad on international duty...He was trying to arrange a meet just for a shag... she had to change her number... Hes a proper ****... HATE CHELSEA (this was about 6 years ago)
 




NickBHAFC18

New member
Feb 24, 2012
1,720
Brighton
I have not read all of the previous posts, but I just want to express my opinion.

Abramovich needs to realise that success is not going to come in one season...maybe not even two. He needs to find a manager that can build a new team, bring in some new young players and mould a team around the existing ones, which can take seasons! Look at United and Arsenal, ok Arsenal have not won a trophy in years but they are still competing. Ferguson has built numerous amount of teams over the years, some years not winning any major trophies, or none at all. As soon as he realises this and get it into his pea head of a skull Chelsea could be the force they once were...he cant be that stupid with the empire he has built.

The old players like Lampard, Cole and Terry need to also realise they are not 26 years old any more and in their prime. Look at Giggs and Scholes and Neville towards the end of his career. They dont play every game, they play when their experience and reliability is needed, not sulking and using their senior authority to turn players against the manager.

I cant see Mourinho coming back unless he tells Abramovich is back off, and let him manage the team/players/transfers etc. I feel sorry of AVB, he will be a good manager theres no doubt about that, but Chelsea was not a good move for him especially with an owner who has the attitude of a c***.
 


Don Quixote

Well-known member
Nov 4, 2008
8,362
The new manager needs a big clean out. Get rid of the dead wood, and bring in new hungry players.
 




Mellotron

I've asked for soup
Jul 2, 2008
32,468
Brighton
Abramovich needs to realise that success is not going to come in one season...maybe not even two. He needs to find a manager that can build a new team, bring in some new young players and mould a team around the existing ones, which can take seasons!

So, AVB then.
 




Gordon the Gopher

Active member
Jul 16, 2003
992
Hove
by James Lawton in the Independent......

When you buy a football club as a personal playpen, somewhere to wander in and out of whenever the whim takes you, there is a very good chance a lot of the toys are going to be smashed.

In the the case of Roman Abramovich and what might be described laughably as his stewardship of Chelsea most of the playthings are human, which in the wake of the misconceived adventure starring Andre Villas-Boas has to make you wonder how long the casualty list will become before the oligarch tires of a futile game.

No one wants to see the hand-wringing humiliation suffered by Villas-Boas these last few months, but then sympathy for the latest victim has to be somewhat muted when you also consider the fate of those vastly more experienced football men who went before him without any airy, guileless talk of being involved in some bullet-proof "project" to be completed in its own sweet time.

Someone like Carlo Ancelotti, chopped down by Abramovich's minions in a back corridor of Goodison Park last spring after a career filled with distinction both on and off the field. Or World Cup winner Luiz Felipe Scolari, who was plainly doomed from the moment he issued a public analysis of the competitive integrity of the dressing room which yesterday added Villas-Boas's scalp to its belt.

This isn't to mention, of course, the most fundamental error of all, the undermining of Jose Mourinho once it became clear that his aura outstripped at Stamford Bridge by some distance that of the man who had come along with such a large slice of the mineral wealth of the Russian people.

Nor does it feed into the horror of all those Chelsea fans who believed that their much loved football club had not been usurped for one rich man's pleasure but rescued, at least a little bit, on their behalf.

Abramovich wanted his football club as the latest evidence of his extraordinary success, something to place alongside the super yachts and the masterpieces of art and all the other symbols of extraordinary wealth.

He wanted to bask in the glow of football success, something so close to the heartbeat of so many ordinary people across the world.

He wanted to make his mark and no one can say that he hasn't done that. Unfortunately, it is one that signifies someone who who has a capacity to get it wrong, out of ego, impatience, a failure to understand the basics of what constitutes a winning football club, and – perhaps most fundamentally – a failure to grasp that such an organisation will always depend on the spirit and the commitment and the good faith of all those other human beings involved.

Frank Lampard, John Terry, Ashley Cole, Didier Drogba and all may have their strengths and their weaknesses and their foibles – and certainly it is hard not to believe that their reaction to Villas-Boas and his slender experience in the top flight of football and his total lack of it as a professional player has not been a factor in his downfall – but apart from anything else they have their own fears and uncertainties about the future.

They are not clockwork items you can wind up and then so easily wind down.

This, it seems, largely escaped Villas-Boas at a time of huge upheaval in their careers – and maybe it will never dawn on the businessman who has dealt such mayhem in the lives of some of his most distinguished football employees.

There doesn't seem a whole lot of point in dwelling on the accumulation of often gross miscalculations, only to hammer the central point that if you don't understand something you are going to have as much difficult identifying a problem as solving it.

There is some persistent belief, though, that the fall of Ancelotti's English Man Friday, Ray Wilkins – which so undermined the Italian and the ambience of the club – became inevitable from the point he suggested in the dressing room to the oligarch who owned everything and everyone within shouting distance that there were some aspects of football which could only be understood if it was in your blood.

If you could turn the production of plastic ducks in a Moscow flat into one of the world's most dramatic examples of personal wealth you plainly knew about business. You had scuffled and proved yourself in your line of country. But if you had never kicked a football professionally, if the game had never been at the core of your existence, your feel in this particular arena was perhaps a little less sound.

It is this gap between ambition and knowledge which yawns open whenever Chelsea lurch into fresh crisis and this season it has perhaps never been so profound.

Another durable suggestion is that, when Villas-Boas was plucked from Porto after Ancelotti's crude dismissal, one senior Chelsea player was asked about the value of the new man's scouting dossiers and videos when he worked as Mourinho's protégé. "I couldn't really say," was the response, "I used to throw them straight into the bin."

If such a division of thinking didn't exist before Villas-Boas returned as the new Mourinho, it certainly did in the anguished final strides towards yesterday's firing. The problem seemed clear enough. Villas-Boas hadn't so much lost the dressing room as failed to occupy even a corner of it.

If Abramovich retains much of an appetite at Chelsea, if he really does want to redeem the years of missed opportunity, what does he do? The most persuasive option screams out. It is to own up to his folly, accept back in Mourinho the man whose work has so consistently mocked the Chelsea operation since moving to Internazionale and Real Madrid.

It will cost the oligarch immense amounts of money – but then few men are more equipped to shrug their shoulders and mutter "big deal" – and considerable pride. Also, of course, he would be required to dismantle the playpen after accepting that it has no place in a serious football club.

This is probably not what he ever had in mind but who knows? When you own so many roubles there is maybe a chance that one of them will finally drop.
 




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