sonty

It is kinda funny that Wenger won't get a chance to beat him in the league...

Forget Santa’s imminent arrival, all my grandsons wanted to know was …has Jose gone yet? And no, they didn’t want him gone. And yes, they were worried that if he went their team would be worse off as a result. Trouble is they’d seen the defeats, heard the rumours, been told by classmates it was going to happen and no amount of denial was going to calm their fears. In effect, Jose had had it for some time and for the last few months he’d been ’aving it’ in instalments and by the bucket load. But, like the merest whisper of there being no such thing as a Father Christmas, you just try telling the kids that there are such things as poor form, false positions, fear factors, freak results, fair results [you just don’t see coming] let alone mention ethereal stuff like an incredible run of bad luck, or outside influence driven by the agendas of those who shouldn’t really have any, but do, and all by the selfsame bucket load. They anticipate the end, ignore justification of the means, and anyway, what exactly is an agenda? 
 
Well, nowadays the media sees itself primarily as a shaper of opinion on the game rather than a presenter of it and as a direct result most of the output is agenda driven. Currently, in Chelsea’s case, after casting the club and every representative of it (bar Graeme le Saux) in the role of villain/privileged nouveau riche/glory hunter [insert as applicable to suit incident] the more reasons that could be found for our fall from grace the merrier it was for readerships, listeners and viewers, schooled as they have been in acceptance of the persona created since Roman arrived. Bearable as this situation may be in the good times (who cares when you’re winning) it undermines belief in the bad and [Chippy aside] soon seeps into the psyche of even the most loyal of fans.
 
And so the Powers that Be judged Jose responsible for ‘palpable discord‘, but of far greater [insatiable] interest was why he was responsible. It had to be down to his fallout with Eva, his destabilising arrogance, a third season syndrome, a mole in the camp called Cesc, one definitely not called Cesc, his playing of the same players week after week, not giving youth a chance, a naivety born of not being a loser before in his illustrious career, and finally, his self-destructive, self-inflicted loss of the dressing room. Take your pick, select whichever media narrative suits you sir, because blame culture insists on an outcome and he had to go in order to purge us of the problem. His time had come, he’d had long enough, the agenda had been set, there was no turning back. And even if the unthinkable were to happen and there had been a stay of execution, we can all imagine the stack of reasoning piled even higher in the summer after….
 
Arsene Wenger or Claudio Ranieri are lauded following the greatest Premiership race ever - for that is how Sky will cover the event, hell bent as the media outlet is to portray this season as being worth every penny of a subscription that once covered the Champions League as well. But who wants those extra games when you can have a Premiership competition capable of being won by a Leicester, a Watford, a Spurs, or an Arsenal? And, amazingly, it can! That is the joy of EPL football ala Sky, that is why it’s the best league in the world, that is why a good team like Leicester is only six points clear of a bad team like ManU and why Sky Bet has them at 9/1 to win it, while Ranieri’s lot are temptingly out at 20/1. And perish the thought that betting and Sky, or a mixture of the two, could ever be described as an agenda-based marriage made in heaven, and certainly not on a Premiership playing field as uniquely level as the current one. 
 
Want more reasons? Well, the Premier League simply HAS to be the best because of its sheer eccentricity, a quirkiness that somehow manages to dismiss the decline of last year’s champions as just another marvellous part of a marvellous Sky package. With marvellous being the operative word because, if Wenger were to fall at the final hurdle, nobody down Isleworth way would cheer a second title for Pellegrini - it doesn’t fit the Sky agenda and Guadiola-bound narrative, it only serves to destroy the marvellous myth in one yaba-daba Abu Dhabi fell swoop. That said, a Leicester City or lesser-light Champions League place is an acceptable second best prize for them and, if Everton or Palace sneak into the top four, BT’s sole coverage of the CL would look distinctly devoid of quality and decidedly costly to boot - another Sky win-win situation. 
 
But I‘ve flown off at a tangent, and I bet Jose now wishes he could too, just as he might also wish he had never taken on an ambassadorial role with BT, for all the good it’s done him and for whatever the reason he took it on in the first place. Yet reasons mattered elsewhere, especially to his detractors, albeit his link with Champions League games-providing BT had never been cited as such. Nor could it be, because we topped our group stage and domestic trials and tribulations did not spill over onto foreign fields that remain uneventfully uneven, to the extent that recent competition winners, Real, Barca, Bayern and Chelsea stubbornly refuse to toe the Premiership parity line. If Jose could not fathom this disconnect on home soil [compared to steadfastness abroad] I’m sure there are many others at a loss too. 
 
Sadly, he cannot differentiate now and has had to face the consequences of failure at home. Sadden by the event and finding it extremely difficult to explain my feelings to my grandchildren, let alone put them down here, I thought I would search in vain for an echoing of my views elsewhere. But no, there in the opening paragraphs of his article in The Times this morning, Henry Winter said it all for me. Under the headline ’Slate him all you want, but stars let him down’ and a sub-heading of ’whatever your view may be of Jose Mourinho, his players failed in their emotional duty to the fans and their financial obligation to their employers’ he wrote the following:-  
  
“When Cristiano Ronaldo briefly shrank under the weight of malicious, unfounded front-page headlines at Manchester United, José Mourinho sent him a couple of compassionate, uplifting texts. “We are Portuguese in a foreign country, and I wanted to show him support,” the Chelsea manager confided. Mourinho’s not quite the ogre of public imagination.
 
When the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation sought auction prizes in 2011, Mourinho quietly donated his Ballon d’Or World Coach of the Year trophy, which raised £26,000. He’s since contributed an autographed “Special One” shirt plus signed boots but it was the Ballon d’Or that “really made the whole thing global” in the words of the auction organisers. Mourinho’s not quite the martinet whose favourite view demands a mirror.
 
Amid the maelstrom of his sacking by Chelsea it is worth remembering that Mourinho is the Premier League Manager of the Year and his team, for all their decline accelerated by Leicester City on Monday, are champions. Mourinho is a flawed man and troubled manager who stirs every emotion from anger to admiration but the reality lies, as ever, between the extremes. Mourinho polarises opinion because we live in a “that escalated quickly” social media age when it’s all about the verdict not about the evidence. Nuances get missed in the rush to disparage him. Perspective is passé. The tribal reaction to Mourinho’s dismissal demonstrates English football’s intellectual limitations. Laying all of Chelsea’s travails at Mourinho’s door is spectacularly naive.”
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Great homage to JM by Piers Morgan in the Mail. Worth a read if you're a JM fan.
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-3364653/PIERS-MORGAN-sacking-Jose-Mourinho-worst-decision-football-history-shameful-Chelsea-let-sack-treacherous-prima-donna-stars-playing-like-Christmas-turkeys-conspiring-bring-down.html
 
 
Mez