Slipperduke
The Camden Cad
The English language is in a beautiful state of flux. Words change, they alter, they evolve. The word 'gay', for example, used to be an adjective to mean 'happy' or 'carefree'. Then it became a noun for men who liked colours before it finally settled into today's position as a contemptuous word that radio DJs and people who don't know better use to describe the ridiculous. This has all taken about a hundred years, but on Saturday I saw a word transformed in the space of an hour and a half. On Saturday, I heard a journalist tell Carlo Ancelotti that Chelsea were officially in 'crisis'. I have got to buy a new dictionary.
I'm going to resist the temptation to go 'old school' and define a crisis as being nothing less than a cave-in at the local coal mine. All crises are relative and there's no reason why football can't have them. If Liverpool aren't in the Champions League next season they'll implode and that's a crisis. When teams like Newcastle or Sunderland get relegated they have to lay off dozens of full-time staff and that's a crisis. Being ludicrously rich and sitting three points clear at the top of the Premier League is not, unless I've missed a very important meeting, a crisis.
Granted, things aren't quite right at Chelsea. John Terry, once the bolshy Sergeant-Major of the back-line now looks more like the kind of shell-shocked Private who you suspect isn't going to make it to the end of the movie. Petr Cech is second-guessing anything over head height and I swear I saw Ricardo Carvalho bundled over by little Leighton Baines on Saturday.
But crisis? What crisis? Chelsea are playing their best football of recent years, they're scoring goals so beautifully crafted that they make Arsenal's elegant strikes look like scrappy deflections off buttocks and anyway, we're barely halfway through what is shaping up to be the most interesting season in Premier League history. Chelsea are absolutely fine and anyone who suggests otherwise is gay.
I'm going to resist the temptation to go 'old school' and define a crisis as being nothing less than a cave-in at the local coal mine. All crises are relative and there's no reason why football can't have them. If Liverpool aren't in the Champions League next season they'll implode and that's a crisis. When teams like Newcastle or Sunderland get relegated they have to lay off dozens of full-time staff and that's a crisis. Being ludicrously rich and sitting three points clear at the top of the Premier League is not, unless I've missed a very important meeting, a crisis.
Granted, things aren't quite right at Chelsea. John Terry, once the bolshy Sergeant-Major of the back-line now looks more like the kind of shell-shocked Private who you suspect isn't going to make it to the end of the movie. Petr Cech is second-guessing anything over head height and I swear I saw Ricardo Carvalho bundled over by little Leighton Baines on Saturday.
But crisis? What crisis? Chelsea are playing their best football of recent years, they're scoring goals so beautifully crafted that they make Arsenal's elegant strikes look like scrappy deflections off buttocks and anyway, we're barely halfway through what is shaping up to be the most interesting season in Premier League history. Chelsea are absolutely fine and anyone who suggests otherwise is gay.