http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/otherspor...urope-year.html

Now I know it is the Daily Mail but this piece is just disturbingly one sided and pathetic.

I have already complained about this fu7cker, I hope you will spare the time to do the same.

@ [email protected]

Edited May 11, 200916 yr by Bridgeboy

"An honest referee has been cruelly traduced and physically threatened."

Hilarious article..

pathetic piece. ive left my opinion as dave from cumbria, lets see if it gets printed.

Mate, dont get het up about this, its simply one of many Patrick Collins articles destroying Chelsea. I would say he is possesed but its simply poor , biased journalism.

This is the many who, after we beat Barca 4-2 in 2005 wrote a piece supporting the Barca fans who abused and threw bottles at Abramovich when he passed them after the game. Is that the respect he is talking about ?

This is the man who once wrote an article headlined 'why we should all hate chelsea' - and that was pre-Roman!

Seriously, dont lose any sleep over it. The bloke is a joke.

Yes I know, I have seen a few articles written by him over the years and I just cannot understand how he is allowed to.

Well said, and a good memory for the plonker bjd

Add to that the fact that EVERY SINGLE COMMENT I have read contradicts him, whether it is put respectfully or simply "Have you forgotten your pills again, Collins?"

I think he should be grateful for Chelsea. If it wasn't for us he'd have nothing to write about and he'd be unemployed. Basically he's making a living off of us and us alone

Collins has always had it in for us, long before anyone had heard of Abramovich. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd tapped Bates for freebie tickets and been told to f*ck off.

He probably sees himself as some kind of moral crusader but in reality he's just a bitter 3rd rate hack with a grudge.

3rd rate? That's a bit generous isn't it?

This is also the slimeball who once wrote of Liverscum fans:

"You ain't got no history", they sing. And they'd be right.

He is an ignorant c**t of a man with nothing on his writing agenda than to put down those he 'personally' doesn't like and does his best to brainwash all who reads with nonsense bullsh*t!

(I feel better now, carry on)

I'm quite angry after reading his article. I don't live in England and I don't know which other crap he has written over the years about us but what 's really bugging me that they only always mention how our players reacted after the game. No word of the bad performance of the ref and the consequences. I really think there need to be some. A ref who is making major mistakes (as he admitted) during such an important match is just not good enough to ref such a game. And it doesn't matter if it is Chelsea, Man United, Bayern or any other club.

No, it's only Chelsea's bad behaviour and how we should be punished.

No, the other players of other clubs always stay calm when they lose in a way we had to. How should they have reacted? Thank the referee? It was only a human reaction, highly emotional and a reaction of the way the ref treated us this night.

I'm sick of reading all that sh*t about Chelsea and the we should be banned from Europe and that our players have no respect that WE are a disgrace for English football. I'm just sick of it.

See he got very little support from anyone who read this article. Pathetic

He's not alone in this. Here's an excerpt from the Guardian

Drogba will not learn the result of Uefa's deliberations into his post-match outburst for several weeks, and it is to be hoped that the punishment is made to fit the crime. But his club, too, should be sanctioned for the collective misbehaviour of their players. The withdrawal of their invitation to next season's Champions League, taking tens of millions of pounds in revenue along with it, would soon persuade them to find a way of curbing their players' excesses, and others would follow their example. If Chelsea's players and managerial staff are reluctant to abandon the exaggerated sense of grievance instilled and fostered by Jose Mourinho's regime, they will have to be taught a lesson.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/20...hampions-league

With so much support at home who needs UEFA as the enemy. I find it appalling that so very few English media outlets defended us in face of this injustice that happened during the match and so many were only happy to crucify Drogba and other Chelsea players for what happened after wards. Unbelievable.

I imagine the media reaction would have been slightly different were it not Chelsea !

I'm quite happy to use his piece to wipe my ass with

Williams' article in the Guardian has been mostly & rightly pilloried in the comments in response to the article. He's never liked us but up until this article he's always managed with various guises to hide that real dislike and to outwardly project a (small) semblence of objectivity. However, you always knew that at some stage that he just wouldn't be able to help himself and that his latent hatred of Chels would unmask itself for all to see. Any credibility he had is now well and truly gone with his embrace and trumpeting that we should be banned from europe.

What a colossol blunder on his part. He must surely realize after perusing some of the more erudite and balanced responses to his article (most of which are from non-Chels) that he'll never be taken seriously again. In a way, his own ovrebo nightmare has begun.

I imagine the media reaction would have been slightly different were it not Chelsea !

The only player I could see getting something similar would be Ronaldo.

If the dippers or arsenal were involved, there would be a collection taken up to hire a defense team

Seems there are sh*te journos the world over. Surely a journalist has some sort of responsibility to be impartial? This was written by some turd called Craig Foster in the Sydney Morning Herald. Unbelievable.

"WHILE the controversies and ethical breaches of the Chelsea team and players continue to froth following their ignominious exit from the Champions League this week, what must be the most galling for their billionaire owner with a penchant for sinking funds into what has become the ultimate expression of vanity, is that the world has made it clear how much it prefers a final between Manchester United and Barcelona.

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars, the superstar players and superpaid coaches, the disgraceful post-match histrionics from some of the world's highest-paid footballers ensure once again that Chelsea remain the personification of excess over class, hubris over humility.

Blues fans have a favourite song which goes, "We are Chelsea, nobody likes us, and we don't care," and never has the battle cry rung so true as this week, and now owner Roman Abramovich must somehow reconcile his massive investment with the deep revulsion his team has wrought.

Many will be salivating at the prospect of the "dream final", a clash of the two greatest football teams on the planet.

It was almost not to be, but for a marvellous strike from Andrew Iniesta in one of the most dramatic finishes in Champions league history, but we can state one simple fact most emphatically: that over the two-legged tie there was only one team that tried to play football, the other being intent only on spoiling and containing.

Rarely has a team so expensively assembled assumed so readily the role of the second-rate, the stance of the weak, an admission from players and coach repeatedly that there was no chance of a result if Chelsea tried to outplay Barcelona "at their game" - football, one assumes.

And once again Guus Hiddink found the will to attack a bridge too far. This is a man who values the percentage, seeks the small margins, as he did by holding back Australia's substitutes against 10-man Italy in the 2006 World Cup, rather than chase a win late in the game, and in the end Chelsea fell short because they had neither the quality, nor the bravery, to win.

Barcelona were forced to field a team as weak as any this season, with Yaya Toure in central defence and no Thierry Henry, the youngster Sergio Busquets even thrust into battle, yet Hiddink found no reason to press the home advantage, playing Didier Drogba alone up front, and even after Michael Essien put them in front there was no intent to win, only to wait.

Yet the courage of Barcelona to continue to pass the ball around and through the blue wall, to play their game when a billion-dollar team organised by a million-dollar coach has set out only to stop them doing so, is extraordinarily commendable. No other club team on the planet would place so much trust in their technique in the tight.

Then reigning champions, Manchester United brushed Arsenal aside in stunningly impressive fashion and gave us the perfect final, featuring the world's two best club teams."

Further to Paulo's post above, some on here may have vague memories of Foster: prior to retiring as an (alleged) attacking midfielder & becoming the so-called "senior tactical commentator" on The World Game on tv channel SBS here in Australia , he had a couple of rather forgetable years playing for Palace towards the end of the last milennium (3 goals in 2 seasons) after being turfed out of Pompey by Alan Ball after less than a year. Apparently a fair few Palace supporters have him within their worst Palace IXs of all time. As a commentator he has always been an avowed spokesman of football being played as "the beautiful game"; the article above being, for him, the usual unavowed Barca/Beautiful game lovefest & Typical Chelsea Diatribe guff all in one. The article is very typical of his attempts at journalism over the years: short on facts (not one mention of Ovrebo's performance or the penalties turned down, nor Essien's glorious strike or of shutting down Messi), wrong on figures and as vitriolic and poisonous as they come on all things Chelsea/Mourinho ( that latter whom he professes/believes to be the Satan of football but whose image, hairstyle and clothing he has copied religiously for years). All Chels down here despise him as a popinjay.

His wikipedia entry is instructive and imo, an accurate synopsis of Foster.

Unfortunately, he and Les Murray (the host of The World Game on SBS) are, for reasons that have always escaped me, the face of football broadcasting in Australia.

Will we never be set free?!?