Rootless Cosmopolitans

Porto went on general sale. This is atrocious considering how big a game it was. Fair enough Christmas games against Sunderland and West Brom don’t inspire a delirium of excitement, but a must win game against the best side in the group? Our season hanging on it? As if to highlight the severity I feel, Rich jokes in the pub beforehand that it could be the last Champions League game at this incarnation of Stamford Bridge. I take a deep glug of my pint and think about this. It’s not a very funny joke. Lose this and we’ll see plenty more games on general sale, along with those burgundy Europa League hoardings slapped up round our ground, and that doesn’t bear thinking about.

I’ve always loved European games though. They’re some of the earliest I can remember, an envelope full of tickets for the group stages in 1999. I can just remember flashes: Lazio’s yellow away kit, the Galatasaray keeper sent off for handling outside his area, Vialli with the keys to the Ferrari. That year, Arsenal were playing their ties at Wembley, already too big for their boots. They’d crash out in the group stage. Supposed minnows Chelsea would go on to take Barcelona to extra time in the Quarter Finals. 

The buzz against Porto is partly from the crowd of people that are packed in. I’d half expected to be sat next to some Portuguese, having made friends with Ukrainians for the visit of Dynamo. But no, from the gate I spy Barbour jackets and shaven heads on our row. These are proper Chels. Not worn down by the drudgery of watching the team struggle every other Saturday this season either, they watch and cheer and sing with a fresh enthusiasm. So what if they get the words to the Willian song ever so slightly wrong? Bodies tumble forward over the seats as Willian smashes the ball in at the near post, voices cracking as they scream in celebration.

Chelsea won of course. Matic was impervious in midfield, Hazard showed flashes of magic and it was suddenly apparent that the defence was comprised of the same players as last year, rather than imposters from the local pub team. So that’s it. Once again, we’re all going on a European tour. Who’s to say how many more we’ll have though? How many great stories do we have left in us? 

My dad brought me back a clearly bootleg programme from a 2004 game played in Porto, where it doesn’t seem that match day programmes are as much of a tradition. Bizarrely, near enough the exact same programme appeared a few months later in Munich, the opposition’s name changed. The content seemed to have been hastily bludgeoned together by entrepreneurial set of Portuguese/ German brothers with an eye for a quick Euro, but alas, an imperfect command of English. We still laugh about the Chelsea number 19 being named as Sott Parker. However, the undisputed highlight was the club profiles, which declared that Chelsea had “always been a team of rootless cosmopolitans”. I believe they were trying to capture the glamour, the international flavour of Abramovic’s first few years as Chelsea owner, but something was lost in translation. 

It’s not a million miles away though. Chelsea, or at least my Chelsea, epitomises that European glamour. Sexy football, geezers with silly haircuts and great goals in the San Siro. I remember queuing for the tube at Fulham Broadway after one of those 1999 European games when I was young, when the stranger next to me pointed out a low flying plane. “There you go, Frank Leboeuf, flying back to France!” I almost believed him as well. Leboeuf is a film star now, which sort of sums up what I’m trying to say. 

Where’s the fun of being an Arsenal anyway? Trudging your way to fourth every year to play Dortmund every year and go out in the last 16 every year. In order to make the revenue necessary to just about do it the year after. Wouldn’t you rather have a club in turmoil, finish bottom half in the league, and trade it all in for one last heady, glorious day in Milan in May? Anyone who’s remotely sensible has already written off our hopes for the top four this season. So perhaps this is our European swansong, just as 2012 was supposed to be. We are rootless cosmopolitans, and we’re going to Milan.

@JJReid13

Brixton and Paris

It’s Friday night and I’m in a club in Brixton. It’s called Phonox. Big boxy black speakers hang down from the ceiling over the dancefloor, leant in at such an angle that they surround you, reminiscent of bullies on a playground. Except instead of demanding your dinner money, they demand to know why you’re not dancing.

A DJ called Tessela is playing and it’s packed. It’s packed to the point where it’s daunting to fight across the room to the bar or the toilet. Once you’re on the dancefloor, you’re not going anywhere else. We move as one: the crowd a writhing mass of humanity, rocking in time to the 4/4. It’s relentless, the music spitting out of those giant speakers violently, as if grabbing you by the throat and insisting on being listened to. A celebration of life, reaching for lasers, letting out wild screams at the sky in pure joy.

It’s in the smoking area that I check my phone and see that something’s amiss. I come crashing back down to earth so hard that I almost leave an indent on the cement floor. Paris, Football, Concerts. So familiar, and yet it’s all alien, incongruous, spoilt. People out enjoying themselves on a Friday night, but it’s taken a horrific turn. I wonder who else around me knows, who else is thinking the same thing. How easily it could have been a nightclub in London instead of a concert hall in Paris.

Numbers fly back and forth, building each time, refusing to stop. I’m against the outside wall, neck cricked down as I stare into my phone, strangers' elbows still clashing against me. Laughter drifting above the crowd’s heads like the smoke from their fags. They sound distant, like they’re underwater. My friends are inches away from me, but they might as well be the other side of the world. I grit my teeth and seethe. It all irritates me: the right wingers blaming refugees, the left wingers blaming UK foreign policy, the people sending their ‘thoughts and prayers’ as if that makes an iota difference. As if anything does.

A few years ago I was sat in a lecture hall discussing how the media frames instances such as these. I was cold and rational, saying how a few ignorant religious zealots in caves were nothing compared to the Soviet Union with a full set of nukes. How the world is safer now than ever before. Smugly stating that hundreds die every day in the Middle East and we think nothing of it. That seems a long time ago now and rationality seems a long way away. I give myself into the hurt, the hatred on Twitter and Facebook. Stop fucking killing people you cunts.  

I can’t dance anymore. I go home hollow and numb.

The next evening, I go for a walk. It’s a Saturday night, but the streets seem deserted, unusually quiet. I walk and walk. I walk to the top of the hill, to Ruskin Park and look out at the city. It sprawls out and hums in front of me. I take off my woolly hat and let the cold air hit me. Breathing in deep, feeling the cold in my lungs. The London Eye is lit up in a French Tricolore. 

The pangs then hit me hard in the chest and I feel queasy, as if I’m still feeling last night’s effects. I think about the video of President Hollande I had watched before I went out. My French isn’t good enough to have followed the words, but I got “guerre”. It rolled about my head as if echoing. War. If the French define this as an act of war, the world as a whole may be about to change.

I look out at one of the great Western cities, and wonder if it’s changed already.

@JJReid13

Tears

I screw my face up in anger as You’ll Never Walk Alone is brayed around an otherwise silent and rapidly emptying Stamford Bridge. I really hate that song.

The game ends and I stand there dumbly for a moment, as if I’ve missed something, a joke I’ve not got. Zouma, a player who can never be accused of not trying, is on his haunches, head in hands: a dictionary definition of defeat. Beyond him is the Chelsea bench. I can’t see Jose, but if the Liverpool fans are to be believed, he’s not just down the tunnel, he’s out of the stadium and he's taken his £30 million payout.

I’m not entirely sure what happened next. I seem to zone out a little bit. Butterflies dance not just in my stomach but in my chest as well, rising all the way to my throat. I felt my airways tighten and my chin wobble. Oh my word no. I turn away and dash up the steps out of the gate, trying my best to keep my head down and not think about those times when I was a little kid and my mum would tell me “it’s only a game, nothing to cry over”. That always made it worse, anyway. By the time the old man catches up with me, I’m by the turnstiles. He asks me if I’m alright, but he saw everything. 

For clarity, I did not cry on Saturday when Chelsea lost. But I could definitely feel myself close to it. Maybe the last time I felt like this was in 2006 when Chelsea had lost at Old Trafford, again to Liverpool, in a FA Cup Semi Final. Choking back tears, finding my shoes suddenly fascinating as screeching scousers cavorted and taunted us all the way back to the tram. That time, I would have been 14. They’d played Ring of Fire at the final whistle, the Merseysiders all bouncing along to it. A decade later, and I still don’t like Johnny Cash. 

So why did I feel like crying at a football match, in public, as a 24 year old man? This wasn’t just another increasingly regular defeat: it felt fatal. I thought Jose was gone. Gone forever. And forever means forever. No one comes back for a second time. I thought back to when he first came to the club and the excitement of it all. Already a European Cup winning manager despite being a few years younger than my dad, the ego to match that fact. 

I was young and impressionable at the time. For that 04/05 season, my dad and I had season tickets in the family section, Shed End Lower. We’d drive up to games and on the way back, turn the radio up so we could listen to his Jose’s post-match interviews on Five Live or Talk Sport, ears pricked up to catch every word. Ask people to name another manager with charisma of that level, before or since, and most can only muster up Clough.

English football had not seen anything like that for quite some time, and Chelsea certainly hadn’t. In the preceding years, even under Roman Abramovich, it seemed footballing society was happy for Chelsea to win the odd cup, or climb as high as second, just as long as they get back in their box so that one of the ‘big’ clubs can win the league you cocky upstarts. Ranieri was almost too nice, too likeable. Zola, as beloved as he is, could leave Carragher on his backside or score a goal in a cup final, but he’d react with nothing more than a shy, almost embarrassed smile. Jose ripped up the rule book and brought a Machiavellian commitment to winning that matched Abramovich’s ambitions. He demanded to know why we couldn’t have our seat at Europe’s top table, too.

The ‘Us v. Them’ mentality, as much as he is derided for it now, I think is partially why we took him into our hearts at Chelsea the first time round. When UEFA and the established football elite seemed to be doing everything in their power to stop nouveau rich Chelsea spoiling their party, Jose was there, fighting our corner, and more often than not, giving them all bloody noses. Arguably it still is this way, Chelsea against the world, it’s just that the Rest of the World team seem to be winning right now. 

The morning after Liverpool, I check my phone to see the same words repeated over and over again. “I’d rather lose than win for Mourinho”. Twitter and Whatsapp groups speculate on the culprit and the words’ repercussions. I decide to turn over and go back to bed. 

Mourinho’s biggest skill is supposedly his man management. We all remember reports that Chelsea players were in tears upon his exit from the club in 2007. What about in 2010 when, having just won the European cup to complete the first ever Italian treble, TV cameras captured himself and Materazzi saying goodbye? Both brutally sincere, both crying, overcome with emotion. It’s a cliché, but a lot of Mourinho’s players down the years would have died for him. Some of his fans might have, too. What’s changed?

Whether or not the quote is real or not is unimportant. Has the dressing room been lost? It’s most probably split. But then, the club as a whole seems to be split. Are the people tweeting under the hashtag #MourinhoOut still a monolith of Nigerians, Arsenal fans and trolls? Or are we adding to their shrill voices a few dissenters who are all too keen to assure us that they’re Proper Chels. People who claim to have seen us lose 6-0 to Rotherham and are therefore obviously entitled to their opinion?

I don’t make the decision though. We already knew that this is not 2004, and this is not the Mourinho of old. He can’t just steamroller naive 4-4-2 teams with a three man midfield anymore. John Terry is no longer the English Maldini. Perhaps most pointedly, this will be the third season of Jose’s second Chelsea tenure. He’s never managed a club for longer than that. Some will say that that’s what he does- takes on a team, burns out his favourites, wins trophies and leaves. We’ve all heard accusations that the squad has too little rotation, the players are too tired, there’s no trust in the youth. This is uncharted territory for him. I thought that this was the understanding when he came back, that he was going to build a dynasty? Someone needs to give Jose Mourinho a chance to do something different, to let him grow as a manager. How will we all feel if we let him go and he ends up doing this at Man U? After the fall out of Wednesday night against Dynamo, it’s evident that a lot of the fans know this. Hopefully the board takes notice. 

Earlier on the day of the Liverpool game, I’d bought a poppy from two lads in Army uniforms. I’d emptied my pockets of change and tossed it in the bucket, then brought my eyes up to meet theirs. I was taller than both, and their faces were young. To the point where I was taken aback; weird to see supposed authority figures most probably younger than me. I don’t know when you’ll read this and I don’t know the circumstances in which you will. I’m not the one to make the decision, nor do I have all the information available to me. If Jose goes though, the final part of my childhood might go with him.

@JJReid13