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The one with some Chelsea

7 February 2018

On Monday night Chelsea suffered a 4-1 defeat away to Watford, something which simply must not happen in modern football. Money must prevail. Maybe in the future, all of the unknown/unpredictable elements will be ironed out of the game. The ultimate solution to all the problems that VAR is trying to fix could be decided on paper, or more likely on a screen, and nobody will need to even step on a pitch, let alone walk through a turnstile.

It'll be like in that Rocky Balboa where boxing pundits pore over stats of an old, retired boxer to see how he might fare against the heavyweight champion, Mason The Line Dixon. In that movie, Rocky is lured out of his punch-drunk stupor to be repeatedly punched in the head by the younger man, but the future of football will learn from that and some day nobody will need to brave the elements on a Monday night in February. It’s the natural convergence of the Premier League and the FIFA series for lovers of meta-football. It's fate and the Chelseas will always beat the Watfords by way of having barrowloads more money.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Monday and one stat which was pumped out (while the teams went through the totally unnecessary and soon to be redundant motions of an actual game of football) was that Chelsea were closing in on Town in the red card stakes.


Who knew that today's Match Of The Day was even aware of a club like Grimsby? It's not as if we've done anything in the FA Cup in recent memory, and thereby haven't giving Lineker et al's squadron of analysts a chance to look on Wikipedia for something with which to patronise little Town, so it was a total surprise to see The Beeb's flagship footy outlet acknowledge us. No doubt a statto will be sacked for even mentioning the inconvenient truth of lower league football.

As well as amassing red cards, What else do Town and Chelsea have in common?Like our own Russell Slade, it seems as though manager Antonio Conte is under some pressure following the Watford result. A mere two wins (remember them?) in 2018 has seen Chelsea rooted in fourth place in the top division, but despite plumbing these depths and – disappointingly for their fans – having spent less than runaway leaders Man City, Conte's position is safe for now as his side are still competing in the Champions League and FA Cup. Their yoof side however is out of the Trophy, having lost to our friends down the A15 (other roads are available).

Plucky little Watford have clearly not spent anywhere near enough to be good at the football but Monday's result was enough to see them overhaul plucky little Grimsby in the form table. Before upsetting the bookies and scoring goals, the Hornets were the only side in the top four tiers of English football with worse form over 12 games than the Mariners. Oof. 

Earlier this week, Barnsley manager Paul Heckingbottom thanked his board for their support in bringing in his transfer targets and for giving him a new contract, by walking out to join Dirty Leeds who will probably sack him in May. This means that the Tykes are looking for a new manager and while they are unlikely to find another with a name as suited to the local accent, there is no shortage of candidates being linked with the vacancy, including Lincoln's Danny Cowley and our former manager Paul Hurst, who seems to get linked with pretty much any job in Yorkshire. One name not on the list is Russell Slade. 

Forgive me if I'm wrong but didn't John Fenty tell us that Slades would be in demand at this point in the season? Russ himself told John that; that he'd be shrewd to get rid of Marcus and snap him up before another club did. So why isn't he on the list? It must be the alleged golden handcuffs contract we trapped Russ with which is stopping those big clubs sniffing about.

There's nowt in the news today, not even a player telling us that we're going to try harder to win at the football and so the Telegraph have decided to tug at our heartstrings with the news that Podge rated our 2015-16 team "an unbelievable group of lads, probably the best I've ever played with." Have a read here and then later, if you forgot to cancel your BT Sport subscription, watch Podge's return to Wembley as Newport take on Spurs.