12 juni 2010

Confused and Bewildered

Även publicerad på Chelsea Vital.

I have already said my thing about one of my favourite players leaving and missing the comments I can only guess how ridiculed I was for that.

I still claim that Michael Ballack did a good job at Chelsea. He did not reach the heights he showed in the German shirt, but he was never bad. To me Michael Ballack was no Drogba, Lamps, JT or so, but he was well equal with some other players, like, for example,Carvalho as Chelsea player to me.

What made me sad was the rumours that Chelsea never really talked to him before they released him. That made me sad because that is not the way I want my beloved Chelsea to act towards players that want to stay. Joe Cole did not want to stay as I see it and I think that in cases like that it is better to release the player despite everything. I will gag at seeing him wear the arse red… I loved Joe Cole, but I sure had no feeling for him wanting to remain a Chelsea player. But then, who really knows but Roman, Buck and the others. I doubt Carlo did.

Still, I am confused and a bit bewildered of the harsh treatment and categorical dismissal Chelsea made towards Ballack, Cole and Belletti. I certainly think the club could have handled the matter much smoother and much more gracefully. The timing and the wording of the press releases did not become us.

However I can understand the reasoning, I guess, the club had. But doing this during the manager`s vacation gives a feeling that something happened behind the curtains and that Carlo Ancelotti was not totally onboard with these decisions: What do you think?

Carlo is used to mercurial and not always logical owners, that is one of the reasons he so soon found his feet at Chelsea, still…. I do wonder….

If that made me bewildered it is nothing to what I felt when the most exciting prospect Chelsea had before the next season suddenly was released and sold away to Turkey! I knew the turks courted Chelsea over Miroslav Stoch. But I simply can not understand why Chelsea sold him now. I can not understand it at all. Can you? Did we get £10m for him? What would we have gotten after the World Cup? He will be a starting player for Slovakia in three games there.

Stoch had a brilliant season at Twente and even if the Eredivisie is not as good as 5 years ago he still had a brilliant season in the Dutch Champions. He was on loan and there is no way I can get into my head that Chelsea had a full evaluation of him. To me this sends the feeling that a loaned away player is already written off as a future Chelsea player!

What will that mean for Mancienne, Cork, and others I still have much faith in? Di Santo and Sinclair, sorry I do not see either of them as future Chelsea players and expect them to leave permanently soon. But Stoch I was very excited about to see in the World Cup for Slovakia and I thought that would mean the world for the player`s future and development for him to ply his trade in the most hyped tournament (and most important in some ways) in the world. I fully expected Stoch to be maybe not a sensation in the WC but next too it. Now he is not even a Chelsea player. He has not shown his stuff to Ancelotti and Wilkins ahead of the new season. Neither did he last year as he was loaned out early. Does Carlo Ancelotti really know what Stoch was and promised to be?

Chelsea right now is a selling club and I do firmly believe Deco too will leave. I expect Di Santo, Sinclair, Hutchinson, maybe Ferreira and Hilario and Carvalho will leave too.

I have no idea who will come in? Srna, Benayoun, not Agüero, Ibrahmovic (please no), Touré (why?), Schweinsteiger, Torres, Gerrard? I am not at all sure what to expect as I can not identify what Chelsea are looking for. We have released two of our most creative players and one great utility player and a extremely competent midfielder that could play two-way and holding. What are Chelsea looking for? Will we live to regret these decisions very soon or?

I did not expect Chelsea to be very active on the transfer market this Summer. Now I feel Chelsea will have to be.

I wonder if this is not the prelude to a real buying frenzy for Chelsea…. We might even outbuy Citeh. Or will we not? I simply do not know, but I have this feeling that we will start buying strongly for the last time. Really spending some serious moolah!

It seems that Roman is preparing to spend big this probably last window for an owner to spend grandly on his club before the UEFA rules prohibit owners from supporting their clubs that way. The new UEFA rules will put an effective stop for owners to spend big on their clubs as all club actions will in future have to be more or less self-sustained (but arena building, which does not seem possible for Chelsea). So maybe Roman will infuse a huge amount of money and buy big a last time in order to build Chelsea extremely strong for the future….

Who knows, but I have that feeling now despite having no idea who Chelsea really are after or what we will pay for any possible player. I simply can not believe Roman would pay £70m for Torres as the tabloids suggest. Not even with this new feeling of big spending coming.

Or maybe Chelsea will do the absolute opposite, like Man U spend very little?

Confused and bewildered, that sure is the feeling right now. Hope things will clear up and I do hope that Carlo Ancelotti really is a part of what is happening at the moment.