Chelsea - a Divine Marriage

Tidigare publicerad på Chelsea Vital.

My life with Chelsea! Has lasted almost all my life as I started loving Chelsea as a kid unfortunately I have little resemble to a kid any more, except a certain childishness I treasure. I see that life as my love story.

Loving a football club is way superior to marriage. You get to celebrate every week and not only on anniversaries. You don`t get on each other`s nerves and there is no jealousy of sharing your love with just about anyone. The jealousy is provided by the poor unfortunate others that can not share your love due to other commitments. And jealous they get when your team (read Chelsea) is doing well. When we were, let`s admit it, lousy, nobody had a problem with us. Now redshirts all over get redder in the face than their shirts when our name is mentioned. And I love it.

It has all the tellings of any great love story, without the blue bedroom parts. But you can always kiss the badge and sometimes, in the stand, the guy next to you. I`ve had to be virtually carried off from matches because I flew up and hugged everyone close to me after a goal. (Bad back). But yes, it does lack one vital part of love - but then look on all the pros instead.

50% of all marriages in the west seem to lead to a divorce. 0% of love between a supporter and his/hers club leads to a divorce. A few, morally very twisted and decrepid people change supportership. Only one club in my eyes is allowed, other than that is if you get to play for another club than the one you grew up loving. But how many of us reach that level.? Honestly must of us can barely kick the ball back onto the pitch if we get our hands on it.

There was the teenage crush that started with oh so rare glimpses of Osgood, Webb, Hollins, Chopper, Cooke, Hudson etc and the hero Bonetti. There was no intent, no pressure. You just had another crush on a red team, when love struck. In those days it was hard to even get to be exposed to an English team. There was no internet, hardly any football mags. No coverage on television. Being outside the UK it was hard work to get the results if the match was not on the football pools. Getting the results often set up a major effort of sleuthing.

Some times you could buy the programmes through the supporters club and get to learn a bit more.

And then on the very occasional Friday you learned that Tipsextra (that started 1969 to broadcast English football from the Midlands TV) was to broadcast Chelsea in black-white. You could hardly sleep with excitement. Every word uttered before the crappy pictures came on was weighed and measured (this was in the ages when journalists actually knew more than the viewers). Chelsea. Not Stoke, Wolves, Leicester, Derby, Notts Forest or any of the usual teams but Chelsea. The magical Chelsea with fillm stars in the posh seats and a legendary mix of stone hard choppers and pub crawling prima donnas. The team you thought wore white socks because that how it looked on tv until you got your first colour picture of Oz and saw that the socks actually were yellow. You went through every sports shop in town trying to find yellow football socks and you wore nothing but sportswear for ever after, even when forced to wear the red of the team you played for you simply wore the yellow beneath

The crush quickly grew into love. The only life long love you got to experience. I did not say it was not a love that did not try you, test you and even abused you. But of the loves of your life, it is the only one still around.

Infatuation turned into passion, and as such sometimes it took some peculiar twists and turns. Not the least to those indifferent people around you that could understand absolutely nothing of it.

Like travelling alone as a teenager to the Bridge. An arena that you had only ever seen from the inside and sure did not resemble any sports arena you ever had come across before. You could not see it from the street and the entrances where hidden in alleyways you only found because that was where the mounted police were. Another thing you never had seen coming from a small town up north in Europé. Your police walked, or rode in cars not way up on horses. Once inside you redcognised the pitches in January, mud with the occasional patch of grass. Nothing like modern football. Still the players could do great things despite having to master not only the ball but the surface. You cannot compare different ages, but what would a modern day Charlie Cooke have been able to do on the pitch of today?

You ended up in the Shed. A place that could either enforce or kill off any love. Not the place for a teenager abroad for the first time. Scary people, oh yes. But you wore the right colours and was hence accepted without questions. You saw some behaviour that your mother sure never meant for you to see, nor words and language to be heard. A rough, tough crowd.

After that it just went uphill. No labour was to hard to satisfy your love. With the deeply ingrained feeling that whatever happened nothing would come between you and Chelsea. You went into the comfortable phase after passion and infatuation. Whatever happened you had Chelsea. Not excitingly as they honestly started to perform in a manner that sometimes made your love seem unrequitted. A few good people turned up like Butch Wilkins, Kerry Dixon, Pat Nevin and others. But the victories were rather few and far apart.

How they underperformed and still your relationship grew. Like the time you came to London. No game at the Bridge but an away game versus QPR. Unchartered areas of London and of course you ended up on the stand opposite Chelsea`s. We lost 5-0, 6-1 or something horryfing like that. To QPR, a team with even less of a trophy history than us. How could those eleven men that got to wear the royal blue of Chelsea betray you like that? Did they not know that you did not get to watch them live enough? Then, the last 15 minutes of the game, from the losers side of the arena came the singing. Louder, brighter and bigger than anything the crosstriped ones could muster in their own home arena. You were so mad as you are a horrible loser, but you walked away with a very straight back.

You are not a singer-lover. Not a spectator-lover, just a lover. For you the club and the football and the results are the important part.

Divorce. Yes, you considered it. Hooligans had taken your wonderful club ransom. People mutilated Chelsea and we got the same kind of reputation as Liverpool after Heysel. They compared your club to Millwall and to this day you can bet that someone or other will bring the problem up. Despite it being a long time ago and Chelsea has beaten this particular kind of lice. The club had been kidnapped by the worst thing in international sport. Hooliganism.

The results reflected the damage the knuckleheads had inflicted.

You could not love fully at that moment. But as with true love there was no way you could abondon the club either. You kept back. Hoping that the good forces would prevail, as they did.

You developed other interests and during the worst estrangement years you only kept track of the scores.

Then came what you named the xenophobic revolution when Chelsea found their players outside England and took all kind of abuse for it, even from its fans. Maybe the period started with Spurs and their Argentinians, but Chelsea took it to the level of today where the Premiership is the best league in the world.

Talk about The Walk of Fame. Gullit, Zola, Vialli, Weah, DiMatteo, Petrescu on and on and on and on.......

The love came back, stronger, better, matured and still with childlike quality and hopes. Like a matured wine that had seen the bad and the good. Pride soured again. The blue shirt came out of the wardrobe. (And got stolen).

Over the last ten years its just got better and better. Winning the premiership 2005. No club that hadn`t been amongst the best for a long time can understand what that meant to us, starved of success and only the odd cup glory as an appetizer. The best team in the land. At least one year before anyone expected it. Of course we won the year we had hoped to as well.

Now your love gave you everything you always wanted but honestly never dared hoped for. Plus the doubtful honour of suddenly being the most hated club in the country just because we now are the best. That has taken some getting used to.

So keep on envyiny us. Because we are the mighty blue. Chelsea, rulers of football.
And all other clubs are our mere minions! Nothing you can say will change what we feel for OUR club. Bring on your worst.

For myself my marriage with Chelsea entered a new phase. I`ve had my Swedish Chelsea page on internet a long time, but being a Site Journo here, at the biggest football community in the world, has made me childishly proud. Thank you.