Fun Fact courtesy Twitter:
Chelsea have used 3 different managers to move from 38 to 39 points 😮.
Read Barney Ronay's scathing (and brilliant) piece tonight in the Guardian ("Collapse at Arsenal sums up Chelsea’s deathly, pointless celebrity product"), where he writes:
"Chelsea have spent more than any other club in Europe, .....
But it isn’t just this. It is instead the way Chelsea are bad. What is this thing, parading across the stage in the weeds of Chelsea FC, eyes blazing with dead energy, a skinny hand clamped on your wrist, leaning in to tell its tale of stolen youth and wasted days, idle as a painted ship on a painted ocean?
Here the blue shirts moved and even at times seemed to share some vague muscle memory of being a team. But mainly Chelsea had a basic creepiness about them, sport without play or joy or energy, sport as something unheimlich, eerie, undead...
Freud said that the basis of all horror stories is an uncertainty as to whether an entity is dead or alive. And fair play to the boy Sigmund, he pretty much called it."
And -
@Apple fanboy should enjoy this exquisite sentence: " This Chelsea iteration is what football would have looked like in the invite-only Super League, not so much a team as a deathly and pointless celebrity product. Let’s have an all-star game. Let’s hoard all the money to buy all the players. Let’s flex our fangs and wring every last drop of revenue out of this thing right now. Let’s kill and move on..."
Later, in the same piece - Ronay is in flying form tonight, this is superb, scathing sports writing:
" Chelsea’s starting XI was at least interesting and disruptive and weird, which seem to be the qualities the ownership admires most. Here is a Kremlin-era stalwart, here a supermarket-sweep oddity, some casino-chip players, some buy‑one‑get‑one‑frees.....
And through all this the story behind the story was the extraordinary spectacle of Chelsea FC, a footballing death in life. What have you done Todd Boehly (and associates)? How have you drained this thing so mercilessly? This is sport as greed-ridden incoherence, as a game of celebrity stocks and shares. It’s a bad plan enacted badly by people who are bad at enacting plans. It is, at its full extension, the death of all this: anti-sport, un-football."
This week, the football writers in the Guardian have been on fire, with some fine - acerbic, articulate, insightful intelligent and informed - writing.
Superb.
