Sometimes fans can be fickle
Before Real Madrid’s unbeaten run of 22 games came to an end at the hands of Valencia with a 2-1 defeat, superlatives were being thrown at the Carlo Ancelotti-led side. People who earn money through conjecture and unwarranted hypotheses had been outdoing each other on what made Real Madrid such an invincible force.
Some credited the team’s meteoric rise to the tactical genius of Ancelotti and his deputy Paul Clement while others highlighted the influence of Cristiano Ronaldo as being the force behind the Galacticos’ unassailable attributes. Before this defeat, winning was becoming boringly routine for Madrid.
Barcelona also lost 0-1 on the same day to Real Sociedad through Jordi Arba’s own goal. A defeat whose architect was none other than David Moyes. Yes, the same Moyes who was a villain-in-chief at Man United after leading United to position seven in the league, one of their lowest finishes in decades.
Now conspiracy theorists are telling us that all is not well at Barca with Luis Enrique, who had left Lionel Messi and Neymar on the bench, apparently losing the dressing room as his career hangs by a thread.
It is such games that define the beauty of soccer. It only takes a loss to change fans’ perceptions on a good coach and his team.
We all remember the propositional cosmetics that accompanied stories that depicted Jose Mourinho as the best thing that has ever happened at Chelsea before Tottenham Hotspur proved that the Blues are human after all.
Now after that reality check, some impatient Chelsea fans are saying: “We told you so; Mourinho is a one-dimensional coach who is impervious to change. We told you that the defence marshaled by John Terry executes business in the slowest mode of tropical Africa chameleons.”
We don’t know who to believe, but I think we still have a long way to go before fans start throwing at us songs of all doom and gloom at coaches at this point. If Chelsea flounders in the games against Newcastle today, Swansea next week and Man city a week after, then we will have cause to say how the mighty Chelsea have fallen.
Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal have to overcome Stoke, Man City and Aston Villa in the next three games to show whether the team has the ability to recover when people are already writing obituaries. By the way, it is Southampton that exposed the Gunners in a humiliating fashion that face Man United on Sunday. Let us see whether Louis Van Gaal is that overrated. But the European match of the weekend is the one between Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Coming home, Big Bullets, because of the impending CAFengagements, have been peddling their begging bowl to various would-be sponsors. Nothing wrong with that, but it shows that the team’s CAF ambitions were built on shaky grounds. I thought when Bullets were executing plans to join CAF, they already had an idea about how they would generate money for the competition.
It appears Big Bullets are borrowing a leaf from FAMin preparing for tournaments. Waiting until the last minute to announce that you would need such an amount of money does not sound smart. Wake up Big Bullets and do better next time. As for FAM, why can’t you start preparing for Chan tournaments now?
