A lovely London morning

Good morning! What a fun morning it is! A cheery, hilarious, uproarious, side-splitting, rib-tickling, laugh-a-minute morning! And it’s all because we’re no longer top of the league.

Under normal circumstances this is not something that would be cause for celebration. It’s good being top. Quite obviously it’s better than all other 19 places in the league, but right now the fact that Leicester are top is wonderful. Not because of any tedious ‘It’s a great football story’ nonsense. What a crock.

I mean, it is kind of amazing, and probably great for football, but ultimately I’m not invested in any way in their success, especially if it comes at our expense. What I can get into though is the misery of Chelsea and Jose Mourinho. What’s happening there this season is quite extraordinary. Another defeat and another magnificent post-game interview with the Chelsea manager.

After his incredible self-indulgent 7-minute rant earlier in the season, last night’s was pure joy. He blamed the players, saying he was ‘betrayed’ by them, before claiming that last season’s success was  down to him making them look better than they actually are. He blamed the Leicester city ball-boys, calling them a ‘disgrace’, and all the while it’s more and more apparent that the Chelsea players simply do not want to play for him.

By any standards it’s remarkable stuff, but that this is a situation Mourinho himself appears to have engineered entirely on his own it’s even better. In the very start of this season I remember how agitated and confrontational he seemed before a ball had even been kicked in anger. He was picking fights with anyone and everyone, and as time has gone on the consequences of that have been seen on the pitch and in the Chelsea performances.

Let’s be clear: this is last season’s Champions we’re talking about. Collectively and individually they are capable of much, much better, but when there’s a schism between players and their manager even professional pride isn’t enough to sustain performances. There’s also the ‘wounded lion’ scenario going on, where opponents no longer fear playing a Mourinho side.

That he appears to have been solely responsible for it makes it all the more glorious. His treatment of Doctor Eva Carneiro was appalling; his man-management style is such that he cannot adapt when things go wrong; and if he was the one who made them so good they won the league last season, he’s obviously the one that’s made them so bad they’re just a point above the relegation places.

I don’t think he wants to be Chelsea manager any more. I think the 7-minute rant I mentioned earlier was an attempt to get himself fired, and last night’s interview in which he threw the players under the bus (one that he had parked himself, naturally), before reversing over them in that bus a few times just to make sure, was another one. I suspect he might get his wish. Until then though.

Oh, and if they get relegated, which I doubt but you never know, I’m going to buy their end of season DVD review because it’ll be right up there with Airplane, Blazing Saddles and Hot Shots Part Deux as the greatest comedies of all time.

Meanwhile, the draw was made for the knock-out stages of the Champions League, and as I fully expected we got that little known Spanish side with those hugely overrated forwards. I don’t know what everyone’s worried about. Flat track bullies, rubbish league, can’t do it on a cold February night in London blah blah blah.

Ok, so maybe it’s a pretty difficult task, and maybe they are a bit good. Like best team in Europe good, but hey, this is what the Champions League is all about. If you ask me if I’d rather be playing Barcelona in spring or schlepping half-way across Europe to play in the Europa League, I know which I’d choose, even if the latter might be an easier option on paper.

Thankfully, football doesn’t work like that. It can be weird and surprising. Think back to that night when we went out at Camp Nou having won the first leg with that spine-tingling Arshavin goal. Messi scored twice, but Arsenal were down to 10 men after Robin van Persie had been ludicrously sent-off and still could have gone through had Nicklas Bendtner not had the feet of Mr Tumnus in the final few minutes.

Sent clear through on goal by Jack Wilshere he had the chance to make himself an Arsenal hero, perhaps change the entire trajectory of his career. Instead his first touch let him down, Barcelona cleared, and he ultimately ended up in a place in his life where he thought having sex with a taxi was a good idea. I mean, some cars are genuinely lovely, but come on.

Barcelona are ridiculously strong up front, but they were back then too, and this was an Arsenal squad that contained Silvestre, Squillaci, Djourou, Denilson and Chamakh. If that lot can almost get through against 10 men and an official who found envelopes full of cash in his hotel room after the game, then there’s no reason why this current crop can’t give it a go.

Realistically, it’s going to be hugely difficult. I don’t think anybody’s arguing against that, but would you have said before this season began that last season’s champions would have lost to Man City, Crystal Palace, Everton, Southampton, West Ham, Liverpool, Stoke, Bournemouth, and Leicester before December was out? You would not, but it’s true. Chelsea have lost to Man City, Crystal Palace, Everton, Southampton, West Ham, Liverpool, Stoke, Bournemouth, and Leicester and December is not out. Just thought I should mention that.

It just goes to show that you just never know what might happen. My flights are booked. I’ll see some of you there for an Estrella or two. Whatever happens it’ll be fun.

That’s your lot for this morning, more from me tomorrow when I might just have stopped laughing at Mourinho.

Maybe.

Slow down Mummy!

Slow down mummy, there is no need to rush,

slow down mummy, what is all the  fuss?

slow down mummy, make yourself a cup tea.

slow down mummy, come spend some time with me.

slow down mummy, let's pull boots on for a walk,

let's kick at piles of leaves, and smile and laugh and talk.

slow down mummy, you look ever so tired,

come sit and snuggle under the duvet, and rest with me a while.

slow down mummy, those dirty dishes can wait,

slow down mummy, let's have some fun - bake a cake!

slow down mummy, I know you work a lot,

but sometimes mummy, it's nice when you just stop.

sit with us a minute,

and listen to our day,

spend a cherished moment,

because our childhood won't stay!

Funny the way it is if you think about it...

Funny how the ‘scandal’ that mesmerized us for two weeks died the day Lalit Modi mentioned Sonia Gandhi’s name. Jairam Ramesh abruptly stopped appearing at his daily press conferences looking like a hysterical tabla player. And, as abruptly, news channels seemed to discover that there were other things of greater importance happening in the world. Like major terrorist attacks, like our elected representatives trying to give themselves a massive pay hike, like Indian businessmen meeting the Prime Minister to tell him that the economy remains in bad shape.

The media has not come out of ‘Lalitgate’ well. Senior television journalists disgraced themselves by not following that most fundamental of journalistic principles: check the story out before running with it. And, they disgraced themselves further by showing that when it came to Sonia Gandhi they remembered how much they enjoyed those private invitations to tea in 10 Janpath. India’s former de facto prime minister gave few interviews but communicated regularly with journalists through cozy tea parties. It was a good strategy that worked well then and continues to pay dividends. Those tea parties ensured that nobody made a fuss when the Government of India quietly unblocked Ottavio Quattrocchi’s bank accounts in London in the last days of Dr Manmohan Singh’s first term as prime minister. Was he not wanted in India? Was Bofors bribe money not found in Swiss accounts in his and his wife’s name? Why did nobody ask why a fertilizer salesman was paid money by an armaments company? These are questions that could and should have been asked in the past two weeks. They were not.

No. The media has not come out well. But, nobody has come out worse than the Congress Party. What it saw as its moment of renewal turned so quickly into its moment of disgrace that we can only hope that lessons have been learned and that the monsoon session of Parliament is not wasted on further hysterics. What has become sadly apparent is that the Congress Party has not got used to being out of power. Jairam Ramesh actually said in one of his press conferences that ‘soon we will have our government in Delhi and in Rajasthan.’

Not yet. Not for at least another four years. If those who lead the Congress Party remember this, there is some chance that the Prime Minister will be criticized for the mistakes he is making. Mistakes that could eventually cause India serious harm. Instead of ordering the Prime Minister around as if he were just a ‘chai-wallah’ and telling him which ministers to sack when and when to speak, why does Congress not attack him for his government’s obvious failures?

There are many that are becoming slowly very obvious and of these the most worrying is that the economy continues to be in the doldrums. This can no longer be blamed on ‘legacy issues’ because there are too many mistakes that have been made in the past year both of omission and of commission. For a start you cannot hope for ‘Make in India’ and go after black money at the same time. When tax hounds (often corrupt) are unleashed on investors they usually flee. By making black money such a big issue the signal to the tax department is: go forth and harass. Since the Modi government came to power major international companies have been hounded for taxes of ‘retroactive’ nature. The Finance Minister said to me once that the retroactive tax was among the worst legacies he inherited. So why is it still there?

On his travels abroad the Prime Minister assures investors that India is truly open for business. So why are there no signs that those layers of red tape have started being cut? No sign from the ministers in charge of important economic ministries that they welcome private investment? It is pretty much business as usual. If private investment does not come there will be no jobs and if jobs do not urgently start being created, the despair of the past few years will quickly return. In France, the Prime Minister said in a speech to the Indian community that he hoped to make India into a country that young Indians would not need to run away from in search of employment. So why are things moving so slowly? If there is one single thing that will ensure Modi’s defeat in the next general election it will be his failure to revive the moribund economy he inherited. When the Congress Party’s leaders discover this they will also discover their path back to power. But, perhaps this is useless advice since Rahul Gandhi has made it perfectly clear that he wants to take India back to that ‘gareebi hatao’ time when his grandmother’s socialist policies ensured that nearly every Indian was poor, hungry and illiterate.

Somewhere in the (not too) distant future

I wonder if one day there’ll be some kind of University course about Arsenal’s transfer dealings. Some days I get the feeling I’m missing something so obvious that it would make sense of it all. Maybe only in the future will we see method behind the madness.

How else to explain the summer of 2011 when we knew that Cesc Fabregas was leaving and that Samir Nasri was likely to go too – by the way, how interesting were his recent revelations about meeting Ferguson in Paris and how he and Mancini would talk every day on the phone?

“You hang up!”

“No! You hang up!”

“NO YOU hang up!”

etc

But anyway, back to those heady days when we knew those players were going to leave so instead of finding some midfielders to replace them, we sent Sir Dick of Law to Costa Rica to spend ages signing Joel Campbell who then couldn’t get a work permit and was farmed out on loan every season, and a little farther away each time too (France, then the south of Spain, then Greece). If he hadn’t come back this summer I hear we were going to loan him to Christmas Island Rovers.

Only when the window was about to close did we think, “Er, you know a midfield and some defenders and maybe a striker would be quite good, BUY ANYTHING!”, and two of those signings worked and the other two really, really didn’t, but it was so shambolic and ridiculous that it felt almost impossible for any professional organisation to make a bollix of it that badly.

Now, this January is far removed from that. The team in general is in much better shape, yet we’ve known we needed a central defender since … ooooh … last summer, and certainly when the window closed in August and Laurent Koscielny’s Achilles tendons went on strike.

We had a top-heavy squad, overloaded with forwards (some of whom rarely played) but understocked with defenders, so what do we do? We loan out two forwards, lose another defender to serious injury and send our transfer fixer to Poland to sign a teenage midfielder.

It’s like an elaborate piece of performance art. If Arsene Wenger did his next press conference in mime before sawing off one of his own legs and doing a blood painting of Herbert Chapman on the wall of the training ground I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. It’s no less weird that what’s come before it.

Perhaps we’ve sent Dick to Poland to get him out of the way while we do some real business. I suspect, however, that’s wishful thinking on my part. Even the young Ipswich fella is off the radar this January, at least, and it’s not as if there’s a plethora of top quality centre-halves flooding the market right now. In short, I have no idea what’s going on and trying to figure it out hurts my brain so I’m going to stop.

Meanwhile, having dispatched Lukas Podolski to Inter Milan we’ve now sent a rather forlorn looking Yaya Sanogo to Crystal Palace on loan for the rest of the season. The manager wanted him to stay in the Premier League, which I understand, and how he fares there should really give us better insight into the player and his potential.

I do think there’s something to be read into the fact Arsene Wenger started him in the FA Cup 5th round, the quarter-final against Everton and the semi-final against Wigan, not to mention against Bayern Munich in the Champions League (a game made difficult by the sending off of Szczesny following a Robben dive, but I do recall people being impressed with how he put himself about that night).

Perhaps it was because folks were a bit of tired of Giroud who was struggling for form and his hotel escapades had seen him disciplined by the club, but those were make or break games for Wenger and he put some amount of faith in Sanogo. It’s also worth remembering that when he came on in the cup final for Podolski we looked more dangerous than we had. Some of it might have been the natural momentum of the match, but he worried the Hull defence a lot more than the ineffective German did that day, and it was a change which had a real impact on the game.

This season he’s behind Giroud, Welbeck and Alexis for a centre-forward position and a loan move makes a lot of sense. If he can get regular playing time, and a few goals under his belt, it might be just the kick-start he needs. Although never my favourite player, Alex Song’s loan at Charlton transformed him from ugly duckling to slightly less ugly duckling, so these things can work.

It’s too early to write Sanogo off, that’s for sure, but also too much of a stretch to say he’s going to come back a man transformed, ready to start banging in goals. It’ll be interesting to see how he gets on there, especially as the pressure of a relegation dog-fight kicks in. It’s something of a culture change too, so how he copes will be something to watch.

The next bit of transfer news we get is likely to be confirmation of Benik Afobe’s permanent move to Wolves and there’s some talk we’re offering Chuba Akpom a three year deal which is grand but his current contract runs out in June and there’s no way we haven’t offered him something before now so that suggests a reluctance on the part of the player to commit. And with the players in front of him who can blame him?

Right, time for me to recite the first 1000 words of Paradise Lost backwards while riding a unicycle holding a piglet dressed as an Andy Warhol lookalike.

Till Tomorrow.