Chelsea sack Scolari!

Torrente wrote:@bluenine

I think any top coach would have won the league in those years if they were in the situation Mancini was in. Not only was Juve relegated and Milan, Florentina, and Lazio penalized, but Inter managed to snatch Ibrahimovic and Vieira as well as being the only top Italian club worth going to for that season given the mess the other clubs were in. While in the end most clubs ended up getting their point deductions overturned, this was after the season had started, hence making their summer purchases extremely difficult.

And Inter may have broken all sorts of records, but so did Schuster's Real Madrid, and yet you will find few Madrid fans who consider him to be a great coach (even though I think he deserved a lot more credit than given by others for those achievements). Sorry, but I don't see much value in breaking records at a time when every top team in the league is in a big mess. Inter had the chance to prove themselves in the CL against stable opposition, and they fell short every time. That was the real test for me, but Mancini was just unable to outsmart his opposition. It's not that Inter was unfairly eliminated from any of those CLs, despite the injuries/suspensions they may have had.

I also see things more on a relative level. You claim that this was the best Inter side you've ever seen for the past 25 years, but how can you be so sure given the lack of quality from the opposition? Don't you think maybe you failed to see past the fact that Inter's opposition was severely lacking? The following season the opposition wasn't even that much better while Inter kept all their key players, and yet Inter barely managed to win the league in the last day of the league.

I don't have anything against Inter. As far as I'm concerned they deserved to win those leagues since it's not their fault that other teams cheated. But in terms of how great of an achievement it was on Mancini's terms, my opinion differs from yours significantly.

James Lawton: Scolari exit exposes Chelsea as no more than a rich man's indulgence

There is no world-beating organisation at Chelsea. There is just Abramovich's money

Tuesday, 10 February 2009

Remember that shining palace they were building in the sky down the King's Road when the roubles were still coming out of Roman Abramovich's ears and his hireling Peter Kenyon declared that the Premier League had turned into a race involving a "bunch of one"?

If you do, you better hang on to the memory because that is all it is now – a memory made so remote that in football terms you could place it alongside the artefacts of some ancient played-out civilisation.

On the day they sacked Luiz Felipe Scolari, a winner of the World Cup and a man who once had the nerve to face down death threats and effigy-burning by the great Brazilian public who claimed that he was destroying joga bonito – the beautiful game – they also hammered in the last nail in that discredited concept that Chelsea were something more than the beneficiaries of a Russian windfall.

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But then we shouldn't say they. The word is part of the mythology that Chelsea are building a word-beating organisation that one day might outstrip brand leaders like Manchester United and Real Madrid. There is no world-beating organisation at Stamford Bridge. There is just Abramovich's money – at least that dramatically reduced amount which, for the moment at least, he is any longer prepared to pass on – and Abramovich's whims.

Scolari fell victim to one of them yesterday and the bullet came directly from the top.

Abramovich began to lose face in Moscow when his team failed to deliver the triumph for which a host of his friends had been primed with the best champagne and limousines and celebrations which would run as strongly as the nearby Moscow River in the spring.

But Manchester United, of all rivals, won the Champions League – and last weekend Hull City, not even members of England's top flight at the time of the denouement in Moscow, exposed the full extent of Chelsea's decline.

We know it was solely Abramovich who pulled the trigger because at the time he was doing it his chief executive Kenyon was spending holiday time blissfully removed from the maelstrom of frustration that has been building so relentlessly in the owner's office suite.

Last night the titular head of this world-class organisation, which for so long has been ignoring the fundamentals of successfully running a major football club, was flying home, presumably to begin to work on a shortlist of successors for the managerial vacancy which surely has Frank Rijkaard, a Europe Cup-winning practitioner of the beautiful game Abramovich is said to crave, and the ultimately hard-headed Guus Hiddink, as the favourites.

One reality has to be accepted in the first shock of Scolari's ostensibly brutal dismissal. It is that the Big Man should not be given the ultimate blame for the increasingly obvious slippage of Chelsea's old competitive standards on the field. Yes, he has plainly lost the dressing room, but anyone who knows football will tell you that there are only two ways a manager suffers such a critical downturn in his prospects. One is that he displays himself as a fool, someone for whom the highest success is plainly beyond his talent and his strength. The other, the more common and invariably deadly, is that he loses support in the boardroom, or in this case wherever the owner happens to be regretting the dwindling prestige of his plaything.

The truth is that Jose Mourinho, still the idol of so many Chelsea fans, had suffered the same fate as Scolari long before he collected his pay-off.

If Mourinho's nerve had held, or he he had decided to place his superb reputation for winning titles above a guaranteed pay-off, he would have walked out the moment Abramovich first started voicing displeasure at Mournino's functional style of play, and, then certainly, when Avram Grant was brought in as a director of football.

The indignities mounted soon enough, not least the importation of Andrei Shevchenko, a player unwanted and virtually unusable if Mourinho was to persist with his effective strategy of giving Didier Drogba a wide swathe of territory at the front of Chelsea's attack. There the formidable physicality of Drogba achieved maximum advantage in front of a packed and driving midfield. Shevchenko represented the owner's whim – and clutter in arguably the most vital part of Mourinho's quite basic strategy.

You cannot run any successful club, and still a world-beating one, if the command is deflected and the priorities are constantly changing.

What you have to do, all the precedents set by those British clubs who have won on the wider front of Europe insist, is let a strong manager manage – men like Jock Stein, Matt Busby and Brian Clough.

That's how you develop the passion and the trust of a dressing room that Mourinho enjoyed before the infection of doubt – before his slavish lieutenants John Terry and Frank Lampard grasped that he was no longer a man who could deliver the big decisions – and the big contracts – that would shape their futures.

It is so basic it is football ABC. But then, when Kenyon returns from his shattered recreation, will he be able even to broach a return to such a fundamental policy? Recent developments at Stamford Bridge appear to have formed a set pattern, one that had apparently left Big Phil feeling so profoundly diminished.

Those who know him best say that a point of crack-up was always likely when he found out that the command system he ran at his old club Gremio in South America, where he won every available glittering prize, and with Brazil and Portugal, was surely a part of his past.

All those present when Arsenal won at Stamford Bridge, with the help of a fortuitous offside decision, are entitled to believe they saw the first point of the unravelling of one of the great names of world football.

Chelsea subsided into a second-half performance that was an age and an ocean away from the kind of commitment routinely displayed under a Mourinho who still had his hands firmly on the reins. They played with such little conviction that Scolari's face was a picture of both despair and disbelief, and when the humiliation was over he broke his first resolve when he arrived in England. He whined about the failures of referees and later he rambled, embarrassingly, about a conspiracy aimed at bringing down his team.

Such outbursts are the first bells of despair, and players of even the shortest experience do not have to ask for whom they are tolling. They were speaking of the end of any illusion that those early certainties of the Mourinho regime could be reinstalled quickly enough to reassert Chelsea's old strength for the first time in three seasons.

The rest has carried the solemn inevitability of a morality tale. At Chelsea there is a bad rule and a bad moral. It is that a manager, even one as strong-minded and brilliant as Hiddink, can only propose and that Abramovich will dispose.

It has done for four managers now if we count the eccentric Claudio Ranieri and the essentially lame-duck retainer Avram Grant alongside the winners of the Champions League and the World Cup, and surely if unchecked it will account for a fifth and a sixth, indeed just as many as appear before Abramovich bites down hard on the truth that you can make a toy of a football team only with ultimately disastrous consequences.

We scarcely need a penny for the thoughts of Sir Alex Ferguson, or the fast-rising Martin O'Neill, in the wake of Scolari's demise.

They will centre on their good luck in working for clubs who understand how the game has always worked for its most successful participants. They will speculate only on quite how long they would have put up with the indignities, and the limitations, placed on the managers of Abramovich. If you guess that it would be just about the time it takes to clear their desks and take down the pictures, you will not be far wrong.

Scolari is no doubt already being described variously as a failure and a victim but those who care about the club should not fall easily in the trap.

They should see what happened yesterday precisely for what it was. It wasn't the convulsion of a world-class organisation. It was the crushing evidence this is not a serious football club. It is only masquerading as such. It is no more than a rich man's indulgence, and what this has to do with the real world of football is anybody's guess.

monty wrote:Whoever comes in it's clear that a squad overhaul is needed.

Everyone keeps talking about Roman not wanting to spend money, well by sacking Scolari he clearly wants Chelsea to stay at the top of the European game. For that they need to spend money.

With an ageing squad and therefore no cash coming in from sales, Roman is going to have to spend double this summer (than he would of last year) to increase the quality and variety in the squad.

If there had been an extra say £20/30 million made available this summer with a couple of players being sold (Lampard, Drogba) then huge expenditure this summer could have been avoided.

What is clear is the players at the club can't seem to produce the attacking style of football Roman craves, only players like Robinho who are slight but skillfull will seem to do for him.

monty wrote:Whoever comes in it's clear that a squad overhaul is needed.

Everyone keeps talking about Roman not wanting to spend money, well by sacking Scolari he clearly wants Chelsea to stay at the top of the European game. For that they need to spend money.

Axeslammer wrote:

monty wrote:Whoever comes in it's clear that a squad overhaul is needed.

Everyone keeps talking about Roman not wanting to spend money, well by sacking Scolari he clearly wants Chelsea to stay at the top of the European game. For that they need to spend money.

He's paying Scolari 15M to sod off, so I really wouldn't say he doesn't want to spend any more money...

Look at the Chelsea squad : do they really need to invest more ?

Parks lives wrote:

Yes. Average wingers, no midfielders bar Essien that want to move and a striker that looks fairly unhappy to be there. It's got loads of good names and reputations but they really need some fresh faces.

Get rid and replace Ballack, Malouda & Drogba imo.

Khadrim wrote:Interesting argument.

Do you blame the player for not doing the job he is supposed to do. Or do you blame the manager for not making him play to his potential. Any other job and it would be the player sacked for poor performance.

Khadrim wrote:Interesting argument.

Do you blame the player for not doing the job he is supposed to do. Or do you blame the manager for not making him play to his potential. Any other job and it would be the player sacked for poor performance.

Vitesse Glennhem wrote:Ballack's 32. He's is way too inconsistant, of course he shows glimpses of his quality as do all fading superstars, but he's not a player you can build a team around. What other options did Scolari have? Minerio? Belletti?
I'm not saying a lot of the criticism isn't justified, but saying your nan could do better or painting him as a failure is a bit harsh.

Look at the injuries Chelsea have had this season, look at the quality of their fringe players.

They have struggled in games they were expected to win this season, but so have all the big sides.

Vitesse Glennhem wrote:

GianDeano Zola wrote:Zola is going nowhere...Chelsea can fuck off. Zola said yesterday he will not walk out for Chelsea, as no other club would give him this opportunity...and he owes a lot to us.

He is an honest and honourable man...and I believe he won't fuck off to those silly Russian bastards...

if your girlfriend asks you "will you ever cheat on me with your ex?"

you say "of course not!"

it's an entirely different matter when your ex is lying naked in your bed, lubing up her butthole.

The HuddFather wrote:

GianDeano Zola wrote:Zola is going nowhere...Chelsea can fuck off. Zola said yesterday he will not walk out for Chelsea, as no other club would give him this opportunity...and he owes a lot to us.

He is an honest and honourable man...and I believe he won't fuck off to those silly Russian bastards...

Haha, I predicted this post almost word for word

GianDeano Zola wrote:

The HuddFather wrote:

GianDeano Zola wrote:Zola is going nowhere...Chelsea can fuck off. Zola said yesterday he will not walk out for Chelsea, as no other club would give him this opportunity...and he owes a lot to us.

He is an honest and honourable man...and I believe he won't fuck off to those silly Russian bastards...

Haha, I predicted this post almost word for word

Sorry...who are Spurs again?