ynwa wrote:why the fu ck r u lot talking about chelsea they are
They are also a bit ahead of us in the league.
Ciggy wrote:![]()
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What a total utter
. He's just said.
Jose Mourinho: "Next season, we want to be part of the G14. Make it the G15, with Chelsea."
Get some history...
Not on your feckin nelly
greenred wrote:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Special One is let down by the ordinary
'Mourinho is a star. But the weakness of his squad may yet turn out to be the absence of performers whose light shines as brightly as his'
Richard Williams
Wednesday March 8, 2006
The Guardian
After shaking hands with Frank Rijkaard and commiserating with his own weary players, Jose Mourinho blew kisses to the crowd as he disappeared down the tunnel last night, saying farewell to Europe until next autumn. Above him in the VIP box, Roman Abramovich made a show of clapping along with Barcelona's victory hymn while Peter Kenyon did his best to keep time. The Russian did not spend more than half a billion pounds of his fortune on a football team in order to endure elimination at such a relatively early stage of the Champions League, and there will be no shortage of people watching to see if this defeat puts a strain on his relationship with his volatile manager.
Nor might the manner in which Chelsea made their exit have been to Abramovich's taste. Once again their players were shown to be no match for Barcelona's assembly of thinkers and ball-players. The sight of the hulking defender Robert Huth sent on to do an impersonation of a centre-forward in the closing minutes spoke poorly for Mourinho's powers of invention. He has tried it before, and it has yet to work; in the context of this tournament's glittering history, it was an embarrassment.
Statistically, the odds against Chelsea going through last night were 20-1. Of 245 sides to have lost by a score of 2-1 at home in the first leg of a tie since the founding of the European Cup half a century ago, 95% had failed to recover their position in the return leg. The need to score two goals while holding Barcelona's brilliant trio of attackers at bay would have tested the combined ingenuity of Alexander the Great, Carl von Clausewitz and Vo Nguyen Giap, and the Portuguese controversialist proved last night that he was not quite up to the challenge.
His rejigged line-up almost brought dividends in the opening 20 minutes when Didier Drogba spurned two clear chances to give Chelsea the lead, both from headers. Having failed to reach Joe Cole's diagonal cross, he directed Arjen Robben's free-kick straight into the arms of Victor Valdes. Significantly, on neither occasion was he hampered by the proximity of an opponent. Barcelona's habit of attacking far more effectively than they defend was certainly in evidence, offering encouragement to Chelsea's ambitions.
Mourinho must have been chewing lumps out of his clipboard when those two opportunities went begging. Having spent the last few days demonstrating that he would not recognise the moral high ground if you gave him a lift there in a helicopter, he was trying to take the opportunity to re-emphasise his elevated standing among the present generation of coaches. Had Drogba capitalised on either of those openings, the match would have been set ablaze.
The coach had made his first appearance of the evening 40 minutes before the kick-off, standing in lonely majesty while watching his goalkeepers warm up. As he had promised, he was presenting himself as a human sponge for the cat-calls of the Catalans in the vertiginous five-decked grandstands. When Chelsea's players made their appearance, however, the home fans demonstrated that Mourinho had by no means succeeded in exhausting their derision. And as he settled into his seat in the dugout, with the stadium now full and seething with emotion, he would have attracted fewer photographers had he been a movie starlet removing her top on the beach at Cannes.
Yes, Mourinho is certainly a star. But the weakness of his squad may yet turn out to be the absence of performers whose light shines as brightly as his own. The application of rigorous organisation to modest resources can be enough win trophies, as he and Otto Rehagel proved with Porto and Greece respectively two years ago, but the approach has a limited shelf life, not to mention an even more limited appeal to neutrals.
At this level there could hardly be a greater contrast of approaches than the one existing between his side and Rijkaard's, which is another of the reasons their meetings have proved so compelling. Last night the presence of four Brazilian-born players in Barcelona's starting line-up meant that every time a Chelsea pass went astray, that was the last Mourinho's players would see of the ball for a couple of minutes.
Ronaldinho, after a quietly influential performance at Stamford Bridge, was clearly in the mood to turn the return into a more explicit display of his intuitive spontaneity. For a time he seemed to want to turn the match into an exposition of the art of the back-heel, as if out of some deeply felt desire to demolish once and for all the suggestion that coaches might be the ones who really decide matches. Before Lionel Messi succumbed to an injury in the 25th minute, the two of them had been weaving wonderful patterns between the Chelsea defenders
With an hour gone, and his side virtually becalmed, the Chelsea manager made one of his double substitutions. A year ago we would have expected it to produce a miracle. Now we know that Mourinho's gambles sometimes work and sometimes fall flat. Hernán Crespo's inability to force home Cole's brilliant ball to the near post was another example of a strategist failed by those entrusted with the execution of his plans.
A stroke of individual genius was what Chelsea needed then, but there is room for only one genius at Chelsea and he sits on the bench, in an expensive overcoat.
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