Departuregate: Man in hurry to leave Birmingham shocker!

"Urgent meeting with his personal chef to discuss Jose’s polonium and chickpea surprise?"

Bloody hell JD priceless I'm still laughing, and that's even after I sprayed my monitor with coffee

Great post. It's refreshing to come across a quality blog. Keep it up.

For what it's worth, I have a bad feeling about the Blackburn game next Saturday. Hughesy has got himself a decent team there - they will take no prisoners and are a big threat to Chelsea's unbeaten home record.

lovely blog, much better than the endless nonsense on teh facebook boards "kalous is going to dubai in january" was the latest and most amusing. by the way i go to school with messr hicks's son and while i sit writing this in my black lampard jersey i can just imagine the big man(tom hicks) storming out of his tv room with a shotgun ready to kill someone when they lose a game

Great post JD.

I agree with you, Roman is 'taunted' (for a better word) in the press for leaving early. Yes, like any real fan, he's mightily pee'd off that his team is losing.

If anything, he should be given credit for actually being there in the first place, and showing the sort of emotion normal fans do.

Other club's owners just sit there, fake smile for all to see for 90 minutes, week in, week out.

Even if Roman farts, the press gang would write a big story about it... Chelsea cause Roman indigestion! :-)

That is uproariously funny! I can confidently say it’s the best piece I’ve read on the 'Storming-out Roman' saga anywhere. I enjoyed it immensely.

Good one, Jonathan, absolutely good one!

Great article JD,

While reading it an idea popped into my brain (odd i know).

Lets boycott the journo's and not buy any papers with negative roumours about Chelsea and our wonderful owner. Maybe a petition could be started!

K/T/B/F/F/H

Cheers all - I'd like to be able to take the subject matter a bit more seriously, but the amount of column inches that have been devoted to a bloke simply leaving a game early just defies belief and only lends itself to mockery and sarcasm. I'm only sorry that the standard of football coverage in this country has sunk that far.

Some interesting thoughts about the Ballack affair:


LINK

Yeah, there was a similar piece in the Guardian. It's beginning to look like we did cock up with not having the right qualified players, but given that as the case, I don't have a problem with Ballack getting left out. But this does show that we need to start drafting club-trained players (they have to have done three years between 16-21) into the squad, because the requirements go up from three players to four next season.

May have read it wrongly, but the UEFA requirements are a little perverse - I believe that we wanted to include Scott Sinclair but he didn't qualify as we'd sent him out on loan last season.

Yeah, I'm currently discussing some of the repercussions here.

LINK

As far as I can make out, the rules will just encourage poaching at an even younger age where less money ends up going to the smaller club.

What I don't understand is whether this means all the players who are currently out on loan do not qualify for inclusion next season. Again, this would surely stunt the growth of young players by forcing them to stay at clubs when they aren't actually needed.

But, in general, we are now paying the press for the lack of attention given to our youth policy in the pre-Roman days.

Definitely a consequence of Ranieri's relative neglect of youth development.

The rules are definitely arse-about-face, but I think the EU aspect comes in in terms of the inability of a minor to be professionally / full-time contracted; the 'poaching' expression is rather media driven - I can't remember the full picture but as I recall any youth player has a window at the end of a season when he is free to leave (although how he is courted by other clubs seems something of a grey area) and a tribunal sets the compensation if the clubs can't agree on it, but that only covers the expense of his time there.

And yes, this rather buggers you if you produce a Fabregas (even more so if you're a small club) who leaves at 16 and is worth telephone numbers within 5 years.

The rule bending has been going on for years in one form or another and will never change unless UEFA/FIFA stand up to it (which they never will) - google the name 'Kalam Mooniaruck' for a cautionary tale.

Interesting tale.

The comparison I always make is SWP and Sinclair. We were vilified for one and not the other, but ethically and in terms of what's best for football, it's surely unquestionable that what we did with SWP was the best thing for both clubs, whereas what we did with Sinclair was only the best thing for us - we absolutely took advantage of our size and wealth and gave Bristol Rovers close to jack all.

And that's Arsenal many times over. I don't blame them for doing it, but I think the media and UEFA needs to look hard at such behaviour rather than encouraging it as canny or by changing the rules.

Isn't it a little harsh to say Ranieri neglected youth development when during his time even training facilities were very poor?
He brought young english players when he got the chance and brough through some good emglish players too.
Lampard, Terry, J.Cole, Bridge, G. Johnson, even Carlton Cole who looked a half decent striker when he playe for us.

Here is one irritating pointless twat:

LINK



With his beloved team a goal down and the players looking deflated as the clock runs down, if Simon Hattenstone had shot up in the 88th minute at Highbury and stormed out in a huff, no one would have noticed. If he’d dramatically seized the microphone to grandly announce his angry exit because Man City were losing their first game in the brave new Shinawatra dawn, no one would have batted an eyelid. And that is the problem. Mr Hattenstone is a frustrated Man City supporter who thinks his pathway to fame is through madcap criticisms of Chelsea. I don’t think he’s qualified to join the queue yet, because on this evidence, he’d first need to hire a ghost writer to help out. Reading him is the ultimate out-of-reason experience.

Like the poor copycat he is, Hattenstone, in this piece, is trying to intellectualize the senseless sobriquet coined for Roman by his slimy constituency. In one of their most enlightening moments, the press dubbed Abramovich “Red Rom”. From thence the bolshevization of the man took a life of its own. After all, he always has that vacant, cold look in his eyes, moves around with a herd of scary bodyguards, hardly talks to the press, is dangerously quiet, calculating and, most importantly (and this is the clincher), he is from Mother Russia!

So, making a Stalin of Roman is all red-romantic. It’s the proud contribution of the dregs of the fourth estate to the war effort - a supposedly timely warning to the rest of us uninformed lot (ungrateful inheritors of a post-cold War victory against the Red Army) that we need not fall into dreary complacency, believing that this Russian isn’t dangerous while he amasses nuclear points against all other competitions as he compromises our national football security. We can see that he’s pretending to be the poster boy of western capitalism only to smuggle himself into our confidences - following in the dreaded footsteps of a long list of communist spies that once built their nests on these shores. His real red nature is the one we’ve seen at Villa Park. To put it another way, Chelsea is the Russia that glasnost and perestroika couldn’t destroy!

It would have been funny if it isn’t this sad. Hattenstone is paid by the newspaper-buying public, yet he consistently comes up with such putrid prattles in the name of sane commentary. On this one, his editor should have tasked him with sorting out his own confusion first before feeding the public such garbage. Yes, someone should have told him that this attempt to make a literary correlation between “walking”, “walking a couple of strides behind”, “walk out” and “walkout” has fallen flat on its face once again. Walkouts do not happen two minutes before the end of the show. They happen at the beginning of the show or sometime almost after. The idea of a walkout is to supplant the planned action or spectacle. It is to show that you aren’t interested in what is to be offered, having been given an idea of what is to follow. You don’t do walkouts in the 88th minute of a 90 minutes match. In that case, you’re merely walking away or walking out because the match is effectively over. No drama.

Those calling for Roman to sue should save their venom. Simon, even in his stupidity, has not written anything libellous. He has a right to be reminded of Stalin, Hitler or Napoleon the Pig by merely seeing Roman’s frustration at watching his beloved Chelsea lose a match at Villa Park, just as we have the right to declare him bonkers after reading him.


CHEERS!

To define Roman's early departure as "walk out", Hattenstone is insulting the readers' intelligence! What a piece of trash!

Hmm ... perhaps Hattenstone is indulging in some displacement? After all, there is one person among the wave of ultra-wealthy oligarchs/fatcats recently involved with English clubs who -- unlike Abramovich, but like Stalin -- ran a country in a manner that might not have won the wholehearted approval of Amnesty International. And that person is the new "saviour" of ... Manchester City. So, having spent the past three years bleating about how Chelsea epitomise the dodgy money that has "ruined" football, Hattenstone is probably in a precarious psychological position.

To be fair, he's usually quite an amusing writer, and he's certainly not alone among journos in taking every opportunity to sound off against us. My favourite example last year was Richard Williams (also of the Grauniad) sniffily pointing out Chelsea's lack of "class" when, before the Macclesfield FA Cup game, Neil Barnett pointed out that the travelling fans far outnumbered Macclesfield's usual home gate. Shock! Horror! Arrogant Bullying Chelsea Sneer At Poor But Honest Lower Division Club which Represents True Spirit Of Football Personally Destroyed By Mourinho And Abramovich! Hmm ... and what about the Levski Sofia game when Barnett led applause for the visiting fans' dedication to their team? Or the Spurs Cup game when Barnett thanked the visiting fans for their respect on the occasion of Ossie's death? Oh, we wouldn't want to write about that stuff, of course.