Link here. Good riddance - I don’t have anything against Chelsea per se, but “the Special One” :rolleyes: irritates the crap out of me.
i’d have to agree - i had a lot of respect for him before he arrived (after his achievements at Porto) but he’s annoyed the crap out of me ever since. Most managers whinge, but his mix of whinging, bullying and arrogance was insufferable.
As a Gooner, i’m also more than happy with the current expectation that Avram Grant will replace him. That’s Chelsea’s season completely fucked then!
Now if only Ferguson could resign and be replaced by Roy Keane then my happiness would be complete. 
Expectations are correct.
Fuck me, that website is almost as annoying as Mourinho! 
…until the summer when we can persuade Gus Hiddink to take the job.
As a Manchester City fan I couldn’t agree with you more. Like you said, when he first arrived at Chelsea he was OK but as the years passed he became increasingly arrogant and believed that Chelsea had some sort of God given right to win everything going.
The final straw was not being able to beat Rosenberg who I believe are the weakest team in the Champs league
You know things are bad when you’re missing the scoring ability of Frank Lampard (the man who has the highest shots-to-stands record in the world).
On the other hand our game against Sevilla was frikkin wonderful. We were actually taking shots and everything!
Chelski are fucked - Grant doesn’t have the support of the players, and Guus Hiddink isn’t the tacital genuis he’s made out to be (esp. on the basis of last week’s England game).
Expect to see Lampard (who was Jose’s man) disappear to Real Madrid or Barcalona pretty sharpish.
John Terry and Didier Drogba won’t be far behind.
On the other hand, Sheva will be getting plenty of games from now on.
I agree on Gus, and you’re right - Terry and Lamps will be off in the Summer now. I can see Drogba staying, on the other hand, after being handed a sufficiently large paycheck.
I, as a Liverpool fan, am going to go right out on a limb and say that we’ll miss him. Sure, he was annoying, and sure, at times his pronouncements about his team were quite breathtaking in their wilful delusionment. His encouragement of Chelsea’s despicable attitude towards the referee is unforgivable (and tragically seems to be catching on at other clubs, including Liverpool). But he was pretty fucking funny as well, and at least he has more variation than Wenger’s eternal “I did not see the incident” rubbish. You can’t deny that it was always interesting to see what was going to come out of his mouth next. “I think I am a special one” is Premiership legend, and there’s loads more besides. He made an excellent pantomime villain. The only other Premiership manager’s post-match interviews I ever bother to listen to are Martin Jol’s (because he’s just ace), and it looks like we’ll be losing him too.
All of this is not to say that Chelsea’s current crisis isn’t absolutely hilarious, of course. I’m loving every minute. But did the Premiership just get a bit more boring? In my opinion, yes.
I can see where you’re coming from but, his recent Cantona-esque Egg Box moment aside, for me he’d transcended the “interesting/funny” point and headed into full-on annoying quite some time ago. I also felt his ref-baiting (and criticism) was completely out of order.
He’s a bit like Boris Johnson and Rugby fans - funny the first couple of times, but exponentially annoying after that.
Among Ladbrokes’ current odds on Mourinho’s next permanent job:
Portugal 4/5
Barcelona 5/1
Tottenham 5/1
England 12/1
Man U 20/1
He’s said for a while that he wants to manage the Portuguese national side, although I dunno whether they’d want to change managers during a Euro qualifying campaign. Scolari’s pretty sharp, and they look well on track to qualify in Group A.
I don’t think he’s got the messianic level of support back home that it would take to make Portugal ditch Scolari for him.
To be honest i think he’d be a shit national manager anyway - he’s all purchase and training (not match day tactics). That makes him the anti-national manager.
For a while it looked like Scolari might be taking the England job after all, but I think McLaren’s bought himself a few more months with the wins against Israel and Russia.
Had we lost those games, I reckon Macca would have been out and Scolari may have got the nod. As it is, they’re talking about a £25m payoff for Jose… that’s enough to take a year or so off (cf. Svennis) and wait for the offers to come in.
I have never rated Mourinho, to be honest. His best teams were really when he got there: Duff, Robben, Cole, Gudjonsen, Crespo. THis team is not as good and a lot of it is his fault. I think he gets a pass too much when players like Ballack and Scheva don’t perform, as if he is nblameless. I also think he has harmed the English National Team some by taking promising players and putting them on the bench like Wright-Phillips and Scott Parker. Granted he is not to blame completley when a player goes south and W-P seems to be coming along, but how does a player like Scheva go form Euro footballer of the year to complete shite?
Now that we know this, his egg-box comments just sound like he’d given up caring. Yeah, we’ll miss him, it’s hard not to miss an ego that huge.
The Premiership is not going to be more boring now. Chelsea were a results oriented team, not one that strived to provide enjoyment for their fans. They were happy to sit on a lead. With Liverpool and, as much as it pains me to say, Arsenal playing much more impressive football I think think could be the most exciting season in a long time.
Even if Chelsea bombs, it now looks like we will have at least three other teams fighting for the top spot.
Personally, I hope Chelsea fall apart and we (Man United… or Peterborough, heh) can pick up the pieces. How much for John Terry and Lampard?
I was talking about the peripheral theatre, not the football itself. Like it or not, the soap opera aspect of football is part of the enjoyment, and it’s undeniable that Mourinho added to that. I agree that football-wise, this season is looking like great fun, but that was true before Mourinho’s departure, and isn’t going to become more true because of it. I would’ve been quite happy to have Chelsea continue to play grindingly dull football; after all, you want to test yourself against different styles. And if I started admiring the play of all four top teams, how would I know who to root against? Kung fu movies need the hulking-yet-limited bad guy for the hero to outwit.
Yeah, tell me about it. I’m really annoyed that he’s actually being credited with bravery for the selection decisions forced on him by injury. Glory be! Our midfield functions properly with a genuine foil for Gerrard instead of That Fat Fuck[sup]TM[/sup] lumpenly hoofing it round the penalty box! Criminy! Pace on the wings gives us a dimension in attack beyond lofting the ball at the head of a man with no neck muscles! Who would’ve thought, eh? So why did it take an injury “crisis” to crowbar him away from the tried-and-failed latter-day Svenology of shoehorning the supposed best 11 into some sort of team? (Right, that’s enough rhetorical questions.)
Bravery will be sticking with this sort of selection when the sacred cows get back to fitness. I’m not holding my breath.
Crumbs yeah, Lampard and Rooney on the bench when fit? I don’t think so… although now Heskey is crocked it removes at least one tricky decision.
Owen’s playing well now, but there’s no obvious choice to partner him… Crouch, Rooney and Johnson won’t be winning the high balls that Owen made the most of against Russia.
I think Mourinho’s greatest asset was having the force of personality to get his varied group of mercenaries to actually work together with any degree of coherence. Abramovich isn’t the first chairman to try and buy success, but he is arguably the first to have succeeded.
With regards to England, expect to see Second-Choice Steve’s “bravery” fucking vanish the moment the underperforming big names are back. You have to remember that Team England’s goal isn’t to win trophies - its to sell football shirts, and no one is gonna buy an England shirt with “Heskey” on the back.
Personally if i were him and knew that the media already hated me, then i’d say “fuck it” and drop the whole fucking lot of them in favour of the under 21s (with a few old hands thrown in for experience). Its not like he’s got anything to lose.