Scolari - not coming to the Bridge - Photo Jose Cruz CCA
The Chief Sports Writer at the Sun, Steven Howard, concludes his piece on Carlo Ancelotti’s arrival to Stamford Bridge yesterday with the prescient words:
The Italian, though, has a real job on his hands. And an owner who isn’t quite sure what he wants — apart from personal glorification.
Good luck, Carlo. You’ll need it.
He has a point. There is much work to be done at Chelsea, even if it sounds perverse in the wake of a season in which they finished a strong third in the league, won the FA Cup, and missed out on a place in the Champions League Final in the 183rd minute of their tussle with the newly-proclaimed best side in the world Barcelona. Luck, however, appears to be quite important in predicting who’ll be in charge at the Bridge too.
Take, for example, a column written by Steven Howard (now where have you heard that name before?) for the Sun just one year ago. Entitled “Frankly, is there another option?”, Howard uses the piece to advance the case for Rijkaard to take over after Avram Grant - and in doing so, rather dismisses the credentials of everyone else:
Luiz Felipe Scolari - the Brazilian hardman likes privacy for both himself and his family and he won’t get that at Chelsea.
Remember the way the 59-year-old erupted when doorstepped by a couple of English journalists after being linked with the England job. Wouldn’t last five minutes.
Is Howard’s point that the media intrusion (when he says ’doorstepped by a couple of English journalists’ he must mean when Scolari said “There have been 20 journalists camped outside my house since yesterday. I don’t like this pressure. It may be part of another culture, but it’s not part of mine.”) means he was unlikely to take the job, and that he wouldn’t like it if he did? Well, clearly that wasn’t the reason why Scolari took the job and then it also clearly wasn’t the reason that he’s no longer in it - being fired for ‘poor results’ rather took care of him.
Anyway, Scolari did arrive, proving there was an alternative to Rijkaard, and duly Scolari left. It was then time for a new face, who again had been ruled out by Howard:
Guus Hiddink - another man who would hate the goldfish bowl glare of Stamford Bridge.
Like Scolari, he is supremely qualified for the job but, at 61, he is far more suited to the less demanding rigours of international management where he has been an outstanding success with South Korea, Australia and now Russia.
Abramovich, not the most popular man back home, will be cagey about upsetting the locals by taking Hiddink off their hands as well.
It looked to us like he rather enjoyed it all, and coped quite adequately with the goldfish bowl glare. And it turned out that however cagey Abramovich may have been, it wasn’t cagey enough not to try to work out a deal with the Russian Federation - it’s just that Hiddink appeared to be a man of his word, and came in and left in a blaze of glory.
And now, the man in charge is Ancelotti. And what of that appointment, Steven Howard?
Carlo Ancelotti - staying at AC Milan.
OK, yes he did - just. But given the meetings he organised, the fact that he declares “I confess that at certain points in 2008-09, I watched my DVDs of John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba. I was already the coach of the boys on paper” in his autobiography; it all suggests that staying at Milan was no certainty at all. After all, didn’t he say he was staying at Milan this year too?
So there are the prescient predictions. Just as well nobody will ever dig them up.
