Wake up you footy fans!!!

[Otis Westinghouse]

Makes Drogba a more interesting proposition. He'll never keep that up, though, will he? Will he? I'd forgotten how fed I was of seeing Chelsea winning, but I can never get enough of Arsenal losing, so I won't complain. Having said that, I realised within moments of seeing post-Vieira Arse on the pitch that I found it hard to hate them as much. It's like the cancer has been cut out. Juventus are welcome to him and his tirelessly dirty tactics. Good riddance, scumbag.

[Who Shot Sam?]

I'd forgotten how fed I was of seeing Chelsea winning, but I can never get enough of Arsenal losing, so I won't complain.

You can only imagine how fed up Chelsea fans (and fans of every other team in England) were of seeing ManU winning all those years. We have one excellent season and you're tearing your hair out? Pace yourself, man.

[Who Shot Sam?]

My new favorite football club name (inheriting the title from Deportivo Wanka) - Diss Town FC:

http://www.btinternet.com/~john.hutton/dtfc/

Just think of all the fun the supporters could have with that Specials song. "Diss Town, aaaa-aaaahh, is comin' like a ghost town..."

[verbal gymnastics]

And are all the clubs being closed down? If so, you don't have a game!

[so lacklustre]

Well my boys will be happy with that Chelsea performance....


SO LACK: HAVE THAT!! Never mind - I hope you can afford a beer to cry into!!

Don't cry over glorified friendlies. Would cry if my team finished mid-table very year. Also if my team got robbed of the F.A. Cup.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Tell me about it.

[Gillibeanz]

SOLACK: Dont give me that ....if you are a fan EVERY game is important even if it is just a friendly!! Is that sour grapes im smelling from your corner - or just plain old bullshit??

My son was up and out at 8am this morning (for those who dont know him thats a miracle !!) Hes off to the Chelsea trainingg ground to watch. Seems he and his dad and brother cant get season tickets this year as they have sold out.

[so lacklustre]

I honestly don't care, it is unimportant (unless it were against the real scum of London the lillyshites)(also don't care if we lose in the League Cup or whatever it is called now). Your son sounds like a sad git, I bet he wasn't so keen on going to the training ground when chelscum were struggling in midtable and in the old second division. It's funny how a bit of success brings all the blueworms out of the woodwork. I've never had a desire to go to a training ground I'm not that sad (just like I'm not sad enough to wait to wait and see EC after gigs - you know who you are). The two most important games of the season for me are the two league games against your lot, if we win those my season is happy/ Any success after that is a bonus, and wins against the run of play in FA Cup finals are especially gratifying.

[Who Shot Sam?]

The two most important games of the season for me are the two league games against your lot, if we win those my season is happy/ Any success after that is a bonus, and wins against the run of play in FA Cup finals are especially gratifying.

Already preparing yourself for failure, are you?

[Gillibeanz]

SOLACK: My son is far from being a sad git. He is an intelligent polite and popular boy who has been a staunch Chelsea fan since 3 years old - just about old enough to understand a little about football. He has always gone to every home and as many away games as he possibly can all his life, and gone to watch them train when his dad could take time off of work to take him. Of course its only since he got older hes able to take himself off to London (the expensive bus, train and tube fares he pays for out of his pocket money). He would be the same if Chelsea were in the 4th division and hates what he calls 'gloryhogs' (people who support Chelsea just cos they are doing well). Dont call people who you know nothing about nasty names - not everyone has Arse standards!

[selfmademug]

Well, Gilli, I rather think and hope Mr. Lack is joking, as you have long told us about your son being a dedicated and life-long fan. If not, he is rude and, worse, has not been paying attention! As to waiting for Elvis after shows, well, it's widely known that I am a sad git, but I've met others who are not who enjoy the stage-door business. In fact, I know a guy who meets Elvis after shows purely to get things signed by him for other people, as thoughtful gifts. A-hem.

[so lacklustre]

A-hem he's never gotten me anything signed, maybe he saves them all for female board members, ahem. (Not that I want anything signed by him, it's his music I like, not his handwriting).


Nothing personal against your son Gilli, but in my little world anyone who goes to watch any team training is a sad git. I went to most homes and many away games between the ages of 14 and 30 but never felt the urge to watch a training session, just can't see the point. (I did go to a couple of reserve/youth games, but these were cup finals at their level).

Manure were pretty average tonight against a bunch of no-hopers, rvn still don't look back to level of a couple of years back despite scoring a tidy goal. Ronaldo is still diving and ref at halfemplytrafford was still a homey. Still the Glazers seemed to enjoy themselves.

My prediction for the pl:

1st Arsenal
2nd Chelscum
3rd Liverpool
4th Manure
...
20th Totteringham Lillyshites

Can't see why people are tipping the shites to finish 4th ha ha ha ha ha, who exactly are they going to finish above? huh?

[Gillibeanz]

MUGGY: People can call me all the names they like - but where my kids are concerned out come my protective mummy claws!!! I also dont think there is anything sad about wanting to meet stars that you have admired most of your life! Add me to the 'sad git list'

[Who Shot Sam?]

My prediction for the pl:

1st Arsenal
2nd Chelscum
3rd Liverpool
4th Manure
...
20th Totteringham Lillyshites

Fat chance.

1st Chelsea
2nd Arsenehole
3rd Man United
4th Liverpool

And three to go down:

18th Portsmouth
19th West Brom
20th Wigan

[selfmademug]

Well, SLL, one day we will all live up to your standards of what is not pathetic and sad. Until then I'm happy to enjoy my sad git's life.

[Otis Westinghouse]

3-0, can't complain. I wasn't enough of a sad git (or do I mean 'fan'?) to watch it, but we're only in the warm up stages, plenty of Tuesdays and Wednesdays to come in the next 9 months. Nice article by Anthony H. Wilson in the Guardian footie extra on Monday about Man U fans being a bunch of exaggerrating whingers who should embrace the glazers and this new era at the club. Good ol' Tone. Nice to think the man behind the immortal Factory records, the man who said people can call him a pretentious twat all they want, but he's happy to have made the contribution to the planet of being the man who signed the cheque that paid for the labels on Unknown Pleasures etc. etc., is a huge Man U fan. Outrageously so in Celebrity Detox or whatever crap it was when he was off in the Amazon rainforests anxiously awaiting texts about whether the boys had one that day or not.

[Who Shot Sam?]

Nice article by Anthony H. Wilson in the Guardian footie extra on Monday about Man U fans being a bunch of exaggerrating whingers who should embrace the glazers and this new era at the club.

Will have to track that down. I have to agree that ManU fans should just shut up and support their club. I wasn't overjoyed about having Ken Bates as owner at Chelsea, but fans really have no say in who runs the business and if they expect perfection they will invariably end up disappointed. I'm sure the Glazers want to make money, and in order to do that they will need to continue winning. They should at least be given some time to show what they can do - the previous ownership seemed to have run out of ideas.

The only concern I would have if I were a ManU fan is the manner in which the Glazers handled the transition of ownership, never really making clear their plans for the club or showing that they had a passion for football (of the non-American variety). Then there's the matter of giving Rio a big contract - he should have been handed his walking papers.

Really looking forward to this new season. It's been a long summer, with no European Championships or World Cup to take the edge off.

[so lacklustre]

.....and what was the booing of Ferdinand all about? Lack of brain cells in the average manure fan imo ha ha ha. Talking about lack of brain cells, Roy Keane's contract expires next summer and he hasn't signed a new contract yet, will he attract the attention of the boo boys now that Ferdinand has signed? I think not.

[Who Shot Sam?]

I don't know if this will interest any of you many Chelsea haters out there, but there is a terrific article by Graeme LeSaux in today's Independent that is revealing about many things, but mainly drives home to me how close CFC were to doing a Leeds when Roman stepped in:

Chelsea, my Chelsea
The Premiership champions are a club synonymous with money and success. but, only two years ago, life at stamford bridge was very different

By Graeme Le Saux
10 August 2005

After 12 years as a Chelsea player, it took me about two seconds to realise that the club had changed beyond recognition when I returned to Stamford Bridge with Southampton last season.

There were the new changing rooms, transformed from the grotty, unhygienic places I had once known into black slate, five-star masterpieces complete with Molton Brown toiletries. And then out in the tunnel, it was the line-up of new players in blue shirts. I looked at the faces and realised I knew only four of them personally from my time there.

The transformation of Chelsea in the space of two years, from the debt-ridden team that I played my last game for in that crucial Champions' League place win over Liverpool in May 2003 to today's Premiership champions has been incredible. But to understand just how incredible that story is you have to know how bad it was at times before Roman Abramovich took over. The strange characters who became part of the club, the disputes over contracts and the awful, sub-standard training ground. In fact, a lot of it came back to that wretched training ground.

Chelsea had been riddled with contradictions. In Ken Bates. we had a chairman with whom we had great times - including FA Cup and European success - and bad times as well. As a club, Chelsea was synonymous with style, and yet they scarcely embraced their history. They signed some of the most famous names in Europe but made them train in facilities that would have shamed a semi-professional side. When you went into the dingy old changing rooms at Stamford Bridge you felt like there should be a surgical hand-scrub offered on the way out.

I played for Chelsea for six years before joining Blackburn Rovers in 1993, and when I returned to Stamford Bridge in 1997 I was excited about the potential of the club, the players and the manager. Unfortunately, what would hold us back was that little had changed at Harlington, our miserable training headquarters down by Heathrow airport. It was the kind of training ground that could change a sunny mood into a dark one as soon as you drove through the gates. The pitches were dreadful, the changing facilities poor and, worst of all, the grounds didn't even belong to the club. We shared it with a London university and because it wasn't private land, anyone could wander in.

I had just come from Blackburn, where the club had invested in their luxurious new Brockhall training ground. At Harlington there wasn't enough pressure in the pipes to water the main pitch - a rock-hard, pitted surface that was a constant source of injuries. While, in the changing rooms, the showers were so unpredictable that you had to drain off the hot water first to prevent yourself getting a serious scalding.

I will never forget one journey home from Old Trafford on the coach when the senior players began to discuss the deficiencies at Harlington. Gianfranco Zola wondered whether, as players, we should club together and buy some of the new lightweight goals on wheels that could be moved around far more easily than the ancient iron versions that took 10 of us to carry. It seemed like a good idea and I suggested that, while we were at it, maybe we should put a bit more money in and improve the showers as well.

As we raised the stake from £500 each to more than £1,000, Frank Lampard, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Marcel Desailly made other suggestions as the tone became lighter. Like, if we were going to change the showers, why not add a bit more and get a jacuzzi installed? Professional footballers are well paid but it is because of that they sometimes feel they don't have the right to complain about facilities. We began to add a few more items to the list before Eidur Gudjohnsen chipped in. "Let's go the whole way," he said. "Put in £100,000 each and we'll buy Ronaldo!"

At the time it was funny and absurd but no more absurd than when you think that if Chelsea decided now that they wanted Ronaldo there would be little to stop them paying whatever Real Madrid asked.

When Abramovich arrived he didn't just buy new goals and new showers, he bought a brand new training ground in Surrey and a whole new team as well. When I heard Chelsea were leaving Harlington last season I knew that would make as much difference as any new player. Finally they had the facilities to match their status and when you no longer dread your place of work then anything is possible.

I left Chelsea for the first time after six years at the club - I had joined as a trainee from my home in Jersey - and my departure wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. The newly-appointed manager, David Webb, called me into his office and told me I wasn't in his plans. Webb had a bizarre way of going about business and it came as little surprise to me that his subsequent time in charge of Chelsea was brief and inglorious.

Webb obviously had a certain procedure for telling players he didn't want them and it wasn't particularly sensitive. He said that he always divided those he sold into two categories - those who would go on "to do OK" elsewhere and those who he never expected to hear of again. "And," he added, "I don't think we'll be hearing of Graeme Le Saux again."

Webb was relieved of his duties in less than a year. When I returned to the club, signed by Ruud Gullit, I realised that the attitude had changed considerably - much to the credit of Bates and chief executive Colin Hutchinson. They had invested in the team and it continued to be a more professional, ambitious place under Gianluca Vialli and Claudio Ranieri, but we were still held back by the limits on resources. No-one realised, until Abramovich took over, how close Chelsea were to insolvency. Given those circumstances, improving a training ground where the manager's talks were often interrupted by the roar from Concorde taking off must have been a very low priority.

Even during my second spell at Chelsea, the training ground was still frequented by all manner of strange characters who devoted their lives to watching our sessions. There was a lady called Felicity, who would bake every player a cake for his birthday - we were never quite sure if they were safe to eat. She took great pride in her gifts and you can only have imagined her face when John Terry accidentally dropped his. Luca gave her one of his manager's coats and, from then on, she never took it off, even though it was far too big for her.

Then there was Alan, a retired British Airways worker, who would appear on his bike every day and collect any of the balls that found their way into the bushes behind the goals. He just turned up out of the blue once and, this being Chelsea, before long I would bump into him into the tunnel at Stamford Bridge. Later the players found out that he had been put in charge of picking up the Uefa delegates from Heathrow and bringing them to Champions' League matches. I have no idea if he was paid for this service.

One official who is still held in the greatest affection by the players, and continues to serve under Jose Mourinho, was Gary Staker. You will see him at Stamford Bridge around the tunnel, a cheery bloke who started off as a match steward but, because he had Italian parents, ended up as the official translator for the Italian players and, eventually, Ranieri. Now he takes care of all the details around the club's travel and helps out with players' individual needs. Of course, all these people had to be approved by Bates, and at Chelsea in those days you never knew who would become a club official.

I bet no-one works for free at Chelsea these days. And I wonder whether Felicity still makes the journey down to Cobham to the new training ground where the long drive is protected by security guards and the perfectly prepared pitches are hidden by trees. I would imagine that Mourinho has never called her over on a Monday, as his predecessors once did, to plant a kiss on the cheek of the weekend's goalscorer. It was a guaranteed way of embarrassing even the most experienced professional footballer.

When I came to leave Chelsea for a second time in 2003 I am sorry to say that my departure was no happier than it had been six years earlier under Webb. This time the culprit was the-then chief executive Trevor Birch, who has earned himself a reputation as one of the game's better administrators. I have to say that I found his treatment of me, at such a critical stage of my career, deeply disappointing.

Throughout the 2002-2003 season the players were constantly reminded of the financial imperative of qualifying for the Champions' League. Of course, then we weren't to know that it would be our dramatic last-day victory over Liverpool that clinched that fourth place that would play such a major role in convincing Abramovich to save the club. But while we battled for that place during the season, Birch told us that all talk of new contracts would have to be postponed until after we knew our fate.

Players like myself and Franco Zola respected that. Although we were coming to the end of our careers, and wanted to plan for the future, we did not complain and we gave everything to the cause. I had one year left at the club but I knew that I would need an extension or have to look elsewhere if, as proved right, I had two years' football left in me. In the meantime, Birch became increasingly involved in the team's preparation for matches as the stakes for qualifying for the Champions' League became higher.

Maybe because he was a player himself - I'm not sure where - Birch thought it would be a good idea to give us a motivational speech the night before the Liverpool game from an American friend of his who also happened to be a Vietnam veteran. After an hour of stories about night patrols and "seeing your buddies being shot", I wasn't sure whether it was Michael Owen I should be concerning myself with or abseiling out the hotel window and searching Hyde Park for errant members of the Vietcong.

We won that crucial game and I was named man-of-the match, but when I went to see Birch two weeks later the offer he made me for a new contract was derisory. There were threats too about how if I didn't co-operate and go to Southampton as part of the Wayne Bridge deal I would be left to play my last year in the reserves.

Privately, I didn't mind going to Southampton. What I resented was being forced to do so by such unpleasant tactics. When the deal was done, Birch rang me to apologise. It was a phone-call I never bothered taking. Sadly, Franco felt equally poorly-treated and that marred the departure of a player who is arguably the greatest in the club's history.

So ended my time at Chelsea, but although I missed out on a second Premiership title I will say one thing for the Abramovich revolution: there's plenty of reflected glory. When I tell people who have no more than a passing interest in football that I played for Chelsea for 12 years they're a lot more impressed than they would have been two years ago. And at last the club seems to have become interested in its history.

This season, Chelsea will celebrate its centenary year and it will do so as the brave new, power in English football. Great new players, a fabulous manager and a training ground that must make the squad glad to come to work in the morning. There will be lots of celebrations for the centenary next season and already my wife Mariana and I have been invited to dinners. It's great to be able to celebrate the new Chelsea success with my fellow ex-players - even if there is little we recognise about our old club these days.

[mood swung]

I'm a really sad git, I suppose. I like watching kids play! and MLS!

[Who Shot Sam?]

I'm a really sad git, I suppose. I like watching kids play! and MLS!

C'mon moody, join the (non-MLS) fantasy league. Do you get Fox Soccer Channel?

[mood swung]

that's a very tempting offer, Sam, but I'm up to my ears in kids soccer for the next couple of months - no time for FSC, even if I could get the mr. to fall asleep in his recliner long enough to gain control of the the tv remote.

[Who Shot Sam?]

that's a very tempting offer, Sam, but I'm up to my ears in kids soccer for the next couple of months - no time for FSC, even if I could get the mr. to fall asleep in his recliner long enough to gain control of the the tv remote.

I feel your pain - I can't get control of the remote until after everyone's gone to bed, and by that time I'm ready to turn in too!

[Otis Westinghouse]

Good ol' Graeme Le Saux. True Jersey boy, with a name to match (my family were blow-ins). I think my sister taught him at school. He was the source of much comment and mockery for being a Guardian reader.

Isn't Roy Keane planning to retire after this season?

[verbal gymnastics]

He was the source of much comment and mockery for being a Guardian reader.

Well he's articulate and reads the Guardian so he must be gay mustn't he?