It would be insane to hold them to the same standards as the rest of the league. It’s like hauling a bloke off the street and pitting him against their sumo wrestler. OK, so the sumo wrestler might essentially be brain-dead, but he’s still a man mountain who has spent the last ten years reaching optimum weight to win contests with minimum effort. He’s a fatty and there’s no shifting him because he’s bedded into the very floor. Manchester City are a different proposition, in that they play football that doesn’t punish the viewer, aren’t run by complete idiots and don’t have a coach who considers the eye gouge a management tool. There’s a subtler evil afoot, and it’s masked by a beautiful exterior. They’re like a glorious Hollywood film funded by a tobacco multinational which then
Chelsea and Manchester City are finally pushing for the title in the same season.
We all knew this time would come. And it might have come sooner had City and Chelsea not been so accommodating. They couldn’t bear to form a duopoly and wreck the league so in the spirit of charity they made obvious mistakes, like donating us £25 million in 2009 for a training dummy or spending many millions on exciting prospects over several years while hiring managers who hate fielding youngsters. Despite doing their best to help the rest they have found themselves in title contention this year.
Like a hero in a high-speed movie chase Arsenal has got company, and they’re a right couple of twits. Do we have the energy and numbers to fend them off?
After a match in which we suffered yet more injuries I find myself wondering if our luck will turn. I’m desperate to know whether our swings will…er…swing back, and whether our roundabouts will…um….spin sufficiently to recompense us.
They say that these things even themselves out, but right now our tablecloth is looking awfully crumpled and we’re entertaining some important guests soon.
No such trouble for the berks tailing us. Their squad lists stretch out like bountiful glens, and at their furthest reaches you might spot unfamiliar names like Jack Rodwell, Demba Ba and Josh McEachran, that might belong to another lifetime and cast light only on a remote nook in our memories. “Didn’t we meet a Jack Rodwell on that barge holiday a couple of years back?”
At times I wonder how, with the dice weighted so heavily in their favour, their supporters can summon any enthusiasm for football. The fervour of city fans I can understand, as they have shared their town with the most insufferably graceless club in the world and have decades of angst to burn off.
But what the hell do Chelsea fans get out of it when their manager wrings life from another match?
I know what it means for neutrals. I’ve seen them play. I’ve beheld the malevolent nothingness of a Chelsea match through sick, gluey eyes. In the absence of visual stimulation the image on the screen transforms, taking the shape of a blue sumo wrestler lolloping into a room and plonking himself onto some helpless victim. He reads from a leaflet about drywall insulation, barely aware that life is draining from the twitching tangle of limbs beneath him.
But when the tragic ordeal reaches its conclusion sumo man springs to life and begins an obscene celebration ritual. He’s suddenly ecstatic, and sings songs about being carefree while the football world mourns. That’s the worrying thing about Chelsea fans. They genuinely love this crap.
Maybe the trouble is they’re too carefree. They take too much joy in the victories rendered run of the mill by their financial girth. They’re the sort of people you want to avoid in the street when you see them—like grown men at a bowling alley punching the air when their ball bounces off the gutter guards a few times and knocks a couple of pins down. Because when your club spends £80m on strikers in three years and still comes up short of goals, that’s a gutterball. When it spends tens of millions hoovering up all the best young players in the world and never playing them, that’s a gutterball. And then when it dishes out £21m for a reject, that’s another one down the drain.
So in one sense, Abramovich is the world’s most expensive gutter guard.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so committed to boring everyone else to death. Now if Mourinho stays there for the rest of his career Chelsea exposure will become a real medical condition. Kids that grow up supporting them will be stunted: “Poor Billy’s got Chelsea”. Schools will need to introduce special programs in an effort to force feed some imagination and vibrancy back into their lives.
And they’ll tell you it’s worth it because it gets results. But you’ll be reminded of the weirdos at AMF hooting after toppling a couple of pins. Forgive me if I don’t congratulate them. They’ve spent so much money than any other team in Europe apart from City that it’s a joke they haven’t achieved more.
It would be insane to hold them to the same standards as the rest of the league. It’s like hauling a bloke off the street and pitting him against their sumo wrestler. OK, so the sumo wrestler might only have one way of fighting, but he’s still a man mountain who has spent the last ten years reaching optimum weight to win contests with minimum effort. He’s a fatty and you’ve got a job shifting him because he’s bedded into the very floor.
Manchester City are a different proposition, in that they play football that doesn’t punish the viewer, aren’t run by complete idiots and don’t have a coach who considers the eye gouge a management tool. There’s a subtler evil afoot, and it’s masked by a beautiful exterior. They’re like a glorious Hollywood film funded by a tobacco multinational which then uses the profits to test new and more addictive cigarettes on…I don’t know—baby mandrills?
With City you also wonder what the point might be. When you throw that kind of wealth at a sport victory must lose its lustre. In the end it’s just a more palatable version of canned hunting, where fearless heroes kill captive big game and then have the gall to pose for photos with their new trophies and call them “beautiful”.
And then there’s Arsenal. We’re no saints. We’re as much to blame as any other for the English football club’s ride from community pillar to destination restaurant. For people in the posh seats I wonder if a trip to the Arsenal is like one of those themed eateries you see in movies where people can watch cowboys brawling in a saloon or knights jousting.
And doesn’t the slick patter that drizzles from the club evoke a faint queasiness? From Gazidis’ glibness to the club’s grating engagement with fans on social media, plotted mechanically from some marketing handbook. And all the while ticket prices climb, to the point where a football match is equivalent to a night at the opera or ballet, which might explain the changing face of our clientele over the last 15 years or so. Perhaps we also have the knobs on our tail to thank for inflating wages and transfer fees, but that’s another story.
There’s plenty to love though:
For starters, beautiful football most of the time, a manager who loves the game and is a great man, and a majestic stadium that we paid for.
This isn’t to justify spending at least £70 on an afternoon of football, but it occurred to me that the years that preceded Mesut Özil’s signing weren’t lost; they were an investment and a journey. We are only where we are now because of them.
And in a crazier, abstracter sense you can trace a direct, if slender, link between the money you thought you threw away in February 2009 when we couldn’t score a single blo
ody league goal all month, and his arrival. I’m not saying the fans own Mesut Özil. No, wait, I am saying that. Let’s go and hold him.
Also, let’s win the league.
EXAMPLE OF AD POSITION
