West Ham attempt to arrest their decline, Chelsea end their bad moment and Arsène Wenger goes postal
When the going gets tough, take a few days off
All managers have different ways of dealing with pressure. With Sheffield United facing a vital fixture at Doncaster this month, for example, the Blades manager Kevin Blackwell sat the players down to watch Ken Loach’s Kes in an attempt to lift the mood of his players. Eschewing gritty northern cinema and falconry, Gianfranco Zola has given his West Ham squad three days off following their defeat to Stoke at Upton Park, and taken himself off to the bolt hole of Sardinia.
West Ham’s co-owner David Sullivan said the break was to allow the players to “freshen up for the Everton game”, though the danger is that they will spend their time stewing over a run of six successive league defeats that has thrust the Hammers into the relegation maelstrom. Rather than clearing their collective heads of the stresses and strains at the bottom of the Premier League, the squad could also find themselves contemplating an uncertain future under a new manager should Zola, as many expect, decide to walk away from Upton Park.
Arsène Wenger shouldn’t swear
Mick McCarthy can eff and blind as much as he likes (and he does – in pretty much every press conference he ever gives). It suits. It makes sense. There’s something cosy and familiar about it, like a much loved pair of slippers or a favourite chair. Hearing the Wolves manager drop in a couple of bollocks or bastards is a reassuring sound, one that reminds us that some things in the world remain constant.
The same cannot be said for Arsène Wenger. The knowledge that the exasperated Arsenal manager answered questions about Birmingham’s tackling at St Andrew’s on Saturday with “Leave me alone with that, for fuck’s sake” jars horribly. Try hearing it in your head – it’s almost impossible. You end up with the computer voice from Microsoft Word, designed to help the visually impaired but much-beloved of 12-year-old boys in school IT lessons for whom hearing a tinny “You r gay” from a machine is the height of comedy.
Wenger is supposed to reside at the urbane end of the football manager spectrum, forays into the realms of spit and sawdust shouldn’t be allowed. It’s disconcerting. It’s unsettling. It’s downright weird. It’s like coming home to those slippers and chair to find they’re actually a pair of Doc Martens and an inflatable Guinness sofa. But let’s not kid ourselves, like some have over the weekend, that it’s a sign of an impending title-race meltdown Wenger’s team. The real sign of that at St Andrew’s was wearing gloves and the No1 shirt.
The sublime is better than the ridiculous
Of Fernando Torres’s two goals for Liverpool yesterday, which is your favourite? That first thunderbolt from the edge of the area, a goal so ridiculously good that at first sight it seemed the Spaniard could not possibly have meant it? Or the second, sublime, ice-in-the-veins finish that made it 3-0?
I’m sure I’m not the only one to prefer the second. Torres himself seems to have a soft spot for it. “I don’t think [the first goal] is the best I’ve scored,” said the Spain striker. “Good yes, but I think I’ve scored better, and I hope there are even better to come. The second goal was nice because the defender was coming across and [Craig] Gordon was too high. I had no chance to score and to wait was the only way.”
Chelsea are well and truly over their ‘bad moment’
It’s 47 years since a top-flight side in England scored a century of league goals in a season. With six games to play Chelsea are now 18 goals short of the mark last reached by Tottenham in 1962-63. Carlo Ancelotti’s side took the breath away against Aston Villa, hammering the seven nails into the coffin of the Villans’ Champions League hopes.
Less than a fortnight has passed since Chelsea looked anything but breathtaking in European defeat to José Mourinho’s Internazionale, a result that, when followed up with a dispiriting draw at Blackburn, suggested that Chelsea’s season was in danger of unravelling. A thumping win at Portsmouth followed but that was not enough for Ancelotti, who, ahead of Saturday’s fixture, said he wanted “to know that our bad moment is finished”. There’s not much doubt about that now.
Attempts to curb fan violence are not working
The scenes at Upton Park when Millwall visited in the Carling Cup earlier this season were some of the ugliest at a top-flight British football ground for a long time. Hundreds of fans were involved in what the police later described as “large-scale trouble”. There were pitch invasions, there were bricks and bottles thrown. A fan was stabbed outside the ground. The result? A £115,000 fine for the Hammers, while Millwall were cleared of three charges. As deterrents go it’s up there with pointing a twig at a charging rhino.
Blackburn’s trip to Burnley yesterday brought 40 arrests inside and outside the ground, while coins were apparently thrown at the referee Mike Dean as well as Blackburn’s David Dunn and Chris Samba. “A major policing operation has been in place throughout the day to prevent any disorder,” said Superintendent Terry Woods of Lancashire police. “Unfortunately we have had to deal with some disorder inside and outside the ground. However, the operation that is in place has enabled us to successfully deal with those pockets of disorder rapidly. I would like to point out that the vast majority of fans have behaved appropriately. Unfortunately, a minority have chosen not to behave in the same way.”
It’s a depressingly familiar situation, as miserable as it is unsurprising. Fan violence is a huge and thorny issue, one deserving of greater analysis than a few paragraphs here. But when the penalties for clubs are so light, there is little to deter those who see football as fair excuse for a punch up.
Sheffield UnitedWest Ham UnitedArsenalArsène WengerLiverpoolFernando TorresChelseaBlackburn RoversBurnleyJohn Ashdownguardian.co.uk
