Allan Prosser: Only one winner in Chelsea’s Rom-com
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Just imagine. You have hired a bright new writing talent, busting the editorial budget in the process and plunging your already loss-making enterprise further into the red. But, hey, you have to speculate to accumulate, you tell the board.
Even better as a coup de théâtre, this new star originally worked for you as a junior before being bundled prematurely out of the nest to make his name elsewhere. Now he is back trailing clouds of glory. You can claim kudos in the “he’s one of our own” stakes while he talks sunnily about “coming home” and “unfinished business”. Looks like a win-win doesn’t it?
But then you discover that your expensive investment has been on TikTok/Twitter/Wordpress/Reddit/Radio/TV (tick as appropriate) serenading his previous employers and wailing that his talents are being misused by you.
Worse than that, he doesn’t even rate your enterprise that much and, swiping right like someone on Tinder, tells the world that there are at least three competitors that everyone would prefer to work for.
Nor does he inform you that he has said this stuff, which comes into the public domain just 48 hours before one of the most important commercial dates in your calendar. Added to that is the fact that your employee consistently misses his deadlines and targets, seems to have lost the magic touch that tempted you to rehire him and has a poor attendance record. It is likely, is it not, that you won’t be feeling particularly chuffed about your decision to bring him back into the fold?
Granted, working for a newspaper and a football team are not that similar, except in at least two crucial ways. They are both collaborative efforts, and morale makes an important contribution to performance.
The interview, given surreptitiously by Romelu Lukaku to nearly three weeks ago, but broadcast, helpfully, just a couple of days before Chelsea’s most important match of the season with Liverpool, has persuaded a coterie of pundits to bemoan the Belgian being hauled over the coals for expressing “an honest opinion.”
They lament the indignity of Lukaku, the €115m “final piece in the jigsaw” for the West Londoners, being forced to undertake the soccer equivalent of a hostage video, as well as the €350,000 fine of a week’s wages. “We should encourage our soccer stars to speak out,” runs the rhetoric.
Well, to deploy the Del Boy Trotter phrase that Boris Johnson utilised specifically to annoy Emmanuel Macron to great effect: “Donnez-moi un break.”
Timing in life, as in the penalty box, is everything. And the Lukaku interview was just about as clumsy as many of his runs this season.
There are very few enterprises in which it is permissible to publicly full frontal your boss, let alone trail your cloak so visibly at alternative employers.
Small wonder, therefore, that it went down poorly with Thomas Tuchel who has enjoyed a relatively sedate 12 months by Stamford Bridge standards since making the switch from Paris to London.
And if Romelu Lukaku was in any doubt about on which side Chelsea supporters, the management hierarchy, and the senior professionals would come down, then he has now been disabused.
In the febrile modern history of the club there has been a tradition of the interests of players with a sense of entitlement trumping the desires of managers and coaches, indeed some of the best managers and coaches in the contemporary game. The Lukaku episode revived memories of this and provoked one popular podcaster to question whether “Tactics Tom” will be there in the summer. If it comes to a straight race between the man from Bavaria and the striker from Antwerp then Chelsea supporters will plump for the manager who won them their second Champions League rather than the centre forward who missed the crucial Super Cup penalty against Bayern Munich in 2013.
They like Tuchel. They like it that he looks like a cross between a German synth player and Skeletor from Masters of the Universe; that he outwitted Pep Guardiola three times in seven weeks last year; that he has encouraged young players from the academy; that he has a modern tactical approach and that he has a quick wit and sense of humour. They like that he has sent a clear message to an expensive player who has failed to enthral upon his return.
Some 48 years ago there was a very public falling out between a Chelsea manager and two crowd favourites. Peter Osgood and Alan Hudson were transferred but within nine months Dave Sexton, the man who won Chelsea their first FA Cup, and their first European trophy, was sacked.
“The day when Mears backed Sexton against Hudson and Osgood was the beginning of the end, 20 years in the wilderness continually losing to lesser clubs,” said the famous Chelsea benefactor, the late Matthew Harding.
There is no sense that there would be a corresponding schism if Lukaku departed. But if he wishes, as he said, to rebuild bridges with the support then next Wednesday at White Hart Lane would be a good place to start. The comedy club defending by Tottenham in the first leg this week obscured the reality that Big Rom was a marginal figure, and missed a goal. Redemption Road starts in London N17.