this thread is like christmas cake. so rich, and dense, I can only eat it a little at a time. it's too sexy for it's shirt.
between you and the guardian writers roy, you paint a wonderfully accurate picture of chelsea post mourinho. the guardian talks of love, the love that abrahmovitch wanted people to feel for the club.......but for me they have missed the point.
This whole story is about a relatively young man who was, what, 34?, like you roy, when he took over at chelsea. Sure he wanted to win, but mostly, he wanted to be loved.
So, imagine that you are 34, you've got wealth without limit, you buy chelsea, bring in this amazing coach who makes everyone believe, and wins and wins, ....only to find that all those chelsea "fans" love mourinho, ..... and not you. The shy little boy routine that abrahmovitch has going on, the same today as when he first arrived, has always felt to me that his very "reclusiveness" masks a need for the very opposite.....he wanted approval so bad he bought a football team, hoping to be the loved "hero". I cannot see little roman being a very popular child. For, wealthy though he is, he is trapped behind the wall of his own wealth in terms of what I guess is a deep longing to belong. ( the current newcastle owner has a similar dynamic going on I think ). Roman behaves like he wants NO attention, and this doesn't add up AT ALL....I believe he wants the exact opposite ..... it's like that piece of body language that we all do unconsciously when we have a new car that we are proud of.....we suddenly have our hands up around our face, sometimes almost covering our face, and on the outside it looks as though we are hiding, but what the hands are really doing is saying "hey, look at me" ( my face ).....drawing the eyes of watchers TO us, not away.
But owners of clubs are neither admired nor loved, though berlusconi and ACMilan , who I believe abrahmovitch quite deliberately took as his model for chelsea, gets somewhere close. But its still fear/admiration, not the hero worship that is reserved for players and in mourinho's case, sometimes managers. So, I think mourinho had to go because abrahmovitch was jealous of the love and admiration that the chelsea fans gave him, or more precisely, all the time jose was there, he stood permanently blocking everyone else's sun.
In his shoes, with his story, if I was was roman, I'd feel like "Fuck. I spent more money than God ( the one who reputedly lives in the sky, not the anfield one ) on a team of some of the best footballers on the planet, I kept my head down, got out of the way, ...but there is this black hole of a manager who sucks all energy and light towards him and after all of what 'I' did, he gets ALL the credit, ALL the attention.......and whilst he's here, that won't change. I seriously believe that had there been one crumb of intelligence in the chelsea crowd,
they would have figured out that one "Roman Abrahmovitch" chant, three times a season, for one minute at a time, would have evaporated all of his problems with mourinho ....this while the chelsea crowd chanted jose's name more and more regularly. I bet romans stomach tightened in a knot more and more every time he heard it. This is the cult of personality that roy speaks of. But roman couldn't ever acknowledge this to himself or anyone else, and all the yes men around him were never going to say it. This very piece here is the reason why shankly's oft quoted words about owners should be seen (write cheques) but not be heard is so deeply perceptive about the nature of successful ventures.......in a football club, the "owners" need to leave their personalities at the door, their ego's ( their selfish needs for love and approval ) set aside for the greater good. We here at this great club have been taught a painful lesson in this very area, where in a nightmare scenario, we don't just have one owner whose own needs are greater than the needs of the club, we have two, for our sins.
So chelsea's story cannot be anything but a reflection of romans shadow ( shadow being that which remains unconscious and unacknowledged, as roman's need for love and approval remains unackowledged. And of course, what remains repressed in this way, will always tend to find expression in indirect ways....in this case, rationalizing mourinhos dismissal as having to do with results on the pitch or whatever, rather than the un-ownable truth that jose had not only taken away romans toy, but he was also getting all the attention that roman believed should be his.....so roman, basically, took his ball back and said 'I don't like this game, let's start a new one without him' )
And it is also not a surprise, if recent psychological musings are correct, that as a man still in his thirties, he is still very much engaged with acting out some kind of hero myth. This changes, it seems, certainly by your fifties, where conquering and winning ( love too ) ceases to have the same pull, and wider, more generous myths start to get played out, where "I" don't need to be the hero in any story, as twenty and thirty year olds are fated to play out it seems ......
I did want to mention that when roy used the word fascist about mourinho, it had a little truth to it, though I cannot remember where I read it, but jose is fairly well known in portugal for his quite extreme right wing views, something that comes as no surprise seeing how he operates, gifted leader that he is. But, as colin wilson said about hitler and stalin etc. "there is nothing more dangerous than "Right" men," ie, men who believe they are right to the point where everyone else is wrong.
Mind you, he wrote that before the age of forums!!
by the way, hwieniawski, there are two of us for liverpool and juve....though very much in that order!