AKTUELL LIGAPLACERING
1 Chelsea FC 14 sp 9 v 1 o 4 f 28 - 9 mål 28 poäng

22 nov 2010


A Gloryhunter's Stories

Rättelse: Tipsexttra startade i Sverige först 1969 regelbundet.

Även publicerad på ChelseaVital. Länk till vänster.

English football was suddenly broadcasted in Sweden around 1967. It was a huge thing, we had never gotten club football on televison before, from anywhere. The games were more or less exclusively from the Midlands. Stoke, WBA and Wolves were the teams in almost every game. It was because there was some Midland station allowed to broadcast football that made a deal with Swedish Television.

It was black and white televison. About 24 inches if you were lucky. It was fuzzy pictures. But then it all fitted, as the pitches most of the times were hardly fit for hogs grovelling for roots. You did not need colour tv to see that there was little or no grass there. The time grass was ever present in the pitches was like the very first game of the season. The footballers had whiskers, making them look like Cheshirecats, long hair, extremely tight shorts and shirts with no advertising. Chelsea wore royal blue, not just blue.

It was cotton clothes, leather footballs and a spirit of football still rarely matched. The goalkeepers were braver and threw themselves across the goal better than anyone. The tackles brought tears to the whiner`s eyes and the players stood up afterwards. Diving was still only a continental thing. The goalkeeper`s gloves were thinner than a ladies whites at a the cocktail party. Peter Bonetti (the Cat), was so agile that only gymnasts of 12 years age from Roumania today can ever compete. And still the one-eyed Gordon Banks was better. Slightly. Banks`s turn-around save in the 1970 World Cup is probably the best save in football to this day. Not that it for a second made me like him more than the Cat. But Peter B was a truly English goalkeeper, he made a grave error in his only WC game and got ostracised as so many other English goalkeepers of late. Tradition rules.

My puppy love was George Best. Jackie Charlton, a really ugly mug and his equally sparce haired brother Bobby up front were also early heroes. That red team won the European Cup and we got to see some rare games on tv. Yes I have admitted my deep dark secret, I for a brief time in my life rooted for Man U, before I grew a heart and brain. I played for another red team, far away and on somewhat different level. I was soon to find real love. But infatuation is not love despite for ever liking that troubled soul George Best. Probably still the most gifted British footballer ever.

Love struck me a February afternoon at a muddy place. Well, I was in front of the tv, but the pitch on it sure was muddy enough. A team called Chelsea, I do not know if they ever featured on tv before, played another London team in the FA Cup quarter-final, their name was Watford. A game from outside the Midlands, wow! The Cup that made me a glory hunter as Chelsea won it a couple of months later after a hardfought battle with Dirty Leeds, until Liverpool of today the team I dislike the most. The game ended 5-1 to the darker team in the tv, I knew the colour was blue but honestly, it was black and white tv! I have never ever looked back, never regretted my love (though I came close in the early 80`s due to the hooligans that kidnapped my club) and today it burns stronger than ever. Not that my beloved Chelsea Football Club does everything right, quite often they shoot themselves in the foot like few other teams, like with the treatment of Ray `Butch` Wilkins.

But they are my team. I read that they played in yellow socks, I scoured all the sports shop locally to find yellow football socks to compete in. I was somewhat of a track star, held a load of records in my school, I played goalie then, after becoming "afraid" of the ball I changed to right winger (I should have loved the way full backs play today, that would have suited me). I had the speed, a good eye and was about as technical with the ball as the Nelson statue at Trafalgar Square. Not many step-overs there. But beneath the socks I had to wear, I always wore my Chelsea yellows. (White as today is more in line with club colours, but I admit I miss the yellow socks at times).

Chelsea won the FA Cup in 1970 in what is still today considered as one of the best and most classical FA Cup finals, and it was plural as we had to replay the dirty Leeds at Old Trafford before the bucket was ours. Osgood`s diving header is still among the great moments in my life. We went on to win the Cup Winner`s Cup in another two game match up against the fabled Real Madrid in Athens. Which the reigning Champions promptly followed that up by getting kicked out of the Cup against a Swedish team from a place with like 1,500 people living there, or so. Chelsea of those days in all their inconsistency.

Girls…. Well, they were there. But they could not hold a match against Chelsea. (Still can`t to be honest). Some kind of resented Chelsea during the years come to think of it.

Ossie, The Cat, Webby, Butcher, Hutchinson that invented the long throw in, the worst hairdo Cooke, and all the others came to Sweden the year after. The elegant Hollins. Hudson. They played training games about 110 km from my hometown, against Öster. Of course I was there. I do not remember the game, but I still remember the worst case of nerves I ever had standing for hours outside waiting for Chelsea to come out afterwards.

I had started one of the very first supporter`s club ever outside England. Chelsea Swedish Fan Club. It actually became the official supporters club for all the Nordic countries. Probably a mistake by the Mears family, not realising it was started and run by a pimply, gangly, injury-prone 12-13 year old boy! For a while it was the biggest supporter club outside England. Chelsea were definetely a flavour of the time then, only second to Man United and more than equal in popularity with dirty Leeds, who were a tiny bit more successfull with trophies those years.

There I stood, Summertime 1970-71, trembling but with some kind of determination I rarely find today waiting for my heroes in Växjö, Sweden. Finally they came out barely in time for me to catch the train back home. They entered the coach, hardly paying much attention to the teen. This was times when heroism and idolation was timid compared to today. A few collected autographs, that was as much as there was. And I was shyier than most. I finally got my not too responsive limbs to work and approached my team, Dave Sexton the manager was counting his players in. I approached him and in my very best school English probably tried to explain who I was, and why. He was kind and did not send me away as a mosquito. I fumbled around with the words and the membership, honourary membership cards I had made with the CSFC logo, the same lion`s head you can see today in the banners above, made out individually hand-drawn with ball point pen on cardboard and hours and hours and hours of painstaking work for each and every player. The lettering from transfer sheets that just had come out. No wonder I ended up being a graphic designer too in life. Scared to death, shy and even more scared to death I managed to hand them over to Dave Sexton asking him to give each player his own. Then I fled, as I remember it.

The year after Chelsea came back to Sweden to play my local team, Kalmar FF (the same team I played as a junior for) in another pre-season game. Somehow someone had heard about me and the CSFC so I was invited to the commentator`s booth (not like tv, more like the ones telling people the attendance and who had parked in the wrong place) to talk about my Chelsea at my own homeground that saw its last top flight competive game played just weeks ago (even here a new arena is built). To introduce my blue heroes. Still playing in yellow socks.

I arrived with like 50 pages of information with me. Determined to tell everyone everything about Chelsea Football Club, out of London. After not being able to stop me talking for about 15 minutes the match announcer managed to shut me up. I do not remember much of the game. Just that I was there. Making myself a talkative fool. But I did it for my love of all thngs Chelsea. And still would if ever given the opportunity.

Later the same season Chelsea, as reigning champions, was knocked out of the Cup Winner`s Cup by Åtvidaberg from Sweden, after setting a goal record against Jeunesse from Luxembourg in an earlier round (8-0 and 13-0). Fiasco.

The following years I grew up. I stopped playing football for track and volleyball, and never ever finishing a season as I was more injuryprone than Arjen Robben. But I did manage to travel to London for my first live Chelsea games. But that was the Chelsea of those days, It was either being adored by Raquel Welch (look her up on the internet) or made being fools due to arrogance, and our badge was that darn inconsistency. A team with immense charm playing like gods or a team making you weep the next time round.

I do not quite remember how old I was for the first one, when I, so to say, popped my cherry. Maybe 15 or 16. I had travelled to London with school and was left alone, I slipped off without permission, to pursue my love. That meant leave my friends to make it to Fulham Broadway Underground station and walk the road to Stamford Bridge. It did not look like any stadium in Sweden. Hunched in between houses, with narrow alleyways and strange directions. I ended up between huge horses (we`re not talking ponies here), policemen in world famous impractical helmets and turnstiles designed to remove the gonads from every male entering them, in blue painted cardboard sheds, I guess they were really plywood but they look liked they would crumble from a strong breath of the big bad wolf. It was what I later learned, the infamous Shed End. A bit intimidating to be honest. Just happy I was wearing a kind of nylon scarf that looked like silk I bought outside, blue then, today purple! All the others were similarily accessorised so I felt at home.

Entering the stands, it is was really stands at that time, no seats. I found a place seeing for the very first time my Chelsea`s home pitch. On the other end there was a smaller stand and a grey London January fog. The place filled up and I looked with amazement at those most ugly looking vehicles I ever seen in my life, I later learned are called, Reliant Robins. They were all painted in some drab grey colour meant to initimidate every sense of taste, three wheelers looking as reliable as a Liverpool supporter. All parked to the right of the Shed.

I am an absentminded person, and I can not now remember which team we played nor the score. It was not really important I guess. I do however remember Englishmen dressed in nylon white shirts in the middle of January, and no coats. I come from up cold north and not for a second would I consider dressing like that. My guess was that the bodies were warmed by alcohol instead of clothes. (I still would never consider wearing a white nylon shirt! London might have been the fashion capital then, and Chelsea the epicentre of it, but it sure had not reached the Shed).

I stood in the middle of the Shed when the game started. At the end of the game I stood very much to the right. Self-preservation I think it is called. I started to more than inch right when the spectators next to me started to use their beer bottles as their toilets. I almost ran to the right when they offered the same bottles to their inebriated friends that drank from them. (I still think that was the reason I could not touch beer bottles until my early 20`s.) Not that it mattered to their mates, the yellow liquid still flowed.

I came back to Stamford several times, but found other places around the then rather ugly arena with its big dog track surrounding it. But it was my stadium, my arena my Stamford Bridge and I will have a hard time accepting another place for my team. Heck we have been there since 1905 and in all honesty, had not the Mears bought the Bridge, Chelsea might not ever been founded. The Bridge had already been in use for sports about twenty years before. I was back there last in May after the FA Cup Final. Not the first time since the rebuild, but despite being much more open around, so many things are the same. The same suscipious smelling cooking vans are there. The street is still full of vendors selling badges, scarves and memorabilia as before. Some things never change though, the pub closest had changed name and now looks like catering to more posh people than me. I know Swedish Chelsea fans that have been there many more times than me, life simply is not fair. I have also seen the same self-annointed Chelseaites in Sweden rarely looking at Chelsea games on the tv, only caring about "the supporter experience". They know the songs. I do not, I care not. I am no less a Chelsea nut than anyone, just because I care more about the game than the supporter experience. I can not sing Ten men went to mow, I can barely sing Blue is the colour. Honestly, I can not sing anything as my music techers very up-front told me over and over. That is not, despite what many local fans think, what makes a Chelsea fan.

Then came the 80`s. I was very far away in the colonies studying and working the West Coast. My beloved Chelsea was taken hostage by people that cared nothing about Chelsea but a lot about fighting and behaving like mugs. I do not only hate them, I despise them more than politicians. They almost, but only almost, killed off my love for Chelsea and English football. Those bastard hooligans that culminated at the Heysel Stadium. Whatever colour and club they claimed to kill for, they were all the same. Scum of the earth. And many countries, including my own, still are troubled by such low-life as recent events have proven, mainly around national football today.

The worst time in my footballing loving life and for many years after, I only followed Chelsea at rare moments when sometimes they were shown on tv, not too often as they were a pretty awful team and tv only wants to show the successfull ones. I always read the scores and tables, but I had closed down my CSFC temporarily (It is well alive and kicking since the internet came). Involutarily at first as Ken Bates refused to allow anyone associated with the Mears family to support and stand behind Chelsea when he took over. A little like he also rid himself of former players and everything that was not personally Chelsea-approved by him. Everything had to be run and decided, by this deceptive santa looking egalomaniac and I refused those terms so my CSFC lost its official status. Not that I ever bothered. I rather prefer to stand free and I do not envy official supporter clubs of today.

I do not know it it was life or the strength of the strongest love there is, the love of a football team that made me disregard the Bates character and start loving Chelsea with all I got again. It might been Glenn Hoddle that started the way back as I see it. A brilliant manager but a real cook as a person with ideas that ranged from space cadet to nazi characterisations. Bates was a pioneer in treating his fans as vermin (though kudos for never letting the hooligans have a say), but he also was a pioneer in English football realising that foreign players were not only better at the time but also much cheaper, which opened up the influx of great non-British players arriving at Chelsea. Gullit, Vialli, Lebeouf, Weah, Zola of course, Petrescu, Di Matteo, Poyet, Hasselbaink, and many others. Chelsea started to turn the tide and unlike as the idiots think, it did not happen only beacause of the Abramovich money. It started long before and gave us cup titles like the FA Cup, and the second to last Cup Winners Cup ever played. A game I queued an entire half day to get tickets for and watched in my then home town Stockholm. Zola came on and killed off Stuttgart, I cheered so much that I fell four-five rows down the stand! I barely made it home afterwards. I could not stand erect the rest of the day. But I sure was happy.

From then on we have gone from greatness to greatness. We`ve got the best (not perfect) owner in football, we have had some of the best managers ever in football, José, Guus, Carlo. We have won everything except that thing everyone but us fans claim is the most important. A turf in Moscow saved us from that, and a poor pen by Anelka later. Not to mention the worst referee ever, the cue-balled Tom Henning Øvrebø which I still can not mention without spitting. Hardy fair, but then football is not about fairness. If it was, I, we would win every time. We still make mugs of ourselves, but after the initial hurt, we are still Chelsea Blue. We are still not as loved by some fools, but we are the 4th most loved team in the world, way ahead of the whiners and most others.

Chelsea has given me so much. The titles, the games and somehow mainly the players. The entire 1970`s team, Butch Wilkins, Kerry Dixon, the 90`s guys, Greame Le Saux, Dennis Wise, even the fleeting Vinnie Jones, Lamps, Cech, Drogba, Ashley, Maluda, Alex = everyone today and I have great hope for the future there will be McEachran`s, maybe Kakuta`s and many others when my time is over. And yes the captain`s captain, JT, though he sorely troubled my love with his City-flirt last Summer and some off pitch curricular activities.

I have never kept a log, nor momentos. The only things I have on my walls are autographed shirts, scarves and pictures. I moved way too many times to keep all with me, though I have some things from the very first years, somewhere. I do not remember how many games I have seen live. Way less than some other fans I know from this country and many fewer than I wanted. The strange thing is that I remember some things, but thankfully you also forget. How else could we survive a week when we lose both to Liverpool and our team play so badly that they are out-classed by Sunderland the next Sunday too (they were good, but honestly Chelsea was even worse than poor).

I remember seeing a really big win with friends over Coventry. Not a bad day and we celebrated accordingly. Great day! I once remember being in London and not being able to make it to Stamford Bridge due to work, that was a a strange feeling and trip. I do however remember I saw most of the game at one of my favourite pubs in Soho. It did not end well I think.

Even more strangely is that I can only remember one loss in the times I have seen Chelsea play live! That statistic must be wrong, probably some kind of selective memory. And the game was not even at Stamford Bridge. It was at Loftus Road with the Hoops as home team. QPR kicked the stuffing out of Chelsea (still it hurt less than our losses nowadays….). The game was horrible to watch as I pride myself at being a terrible loser. I was ready to commit very non-supporterlike things to my Chelsea players. 5-0 or 6-0 was the score I think, I refuse to check! Still, the strongest memory of all was that despite being out of place, losing big time the only people that made any noise at the game was the tiny minority Chelsea away-supporters that sang and chanted their hearts out. I was in another section, wisely not wearing my Chelsea to openly (OK, I do have some self-preservation skills, even if some events in life might say otherwise). I have never been prouder of Chelsea supporters than at that particular moment.

And my love, commitment to Chelsea is only growing. Not uncritically. There are things with Chelsea even today I can not approve of, like the treatment of Butch Wilkins. The kremlin like non-information era the club persists in promulgating another. Still, they are only bagatelles. The love is bigger than ever and two of the best days in my life were spent with Chelsea in May at Wembley and Eel Brook Common. I have already written about that for anyone interested in looking at the archives.

It was almost too easy to go from supporting a loving, charming and never successfull team to enjoy every moment of FA Cup wins, Cup Winner Cup wins, League Cup wins, Premier League wins to the pinnacle -The Double. Success came very easy to me and many others, Maybe we deserved it after such a long trek through the desert of non-buckets. Maybe it was our destiny. It does not matter, I just enjoy it and all the new fans that now can discover Chelsea due to it as I once discovered my Chelsea. True Blue. Not every single one might be still with us if the unthinkable happens and Chelsea stop being a top world team, but most will be with us whatever.

We went from a team nobody cared about, but us, to be one of the greatest teams in football in a fairly short period. The envy, even hatred that has awaken among other supporters (mainly among those that support teams we replaced at that pinnacle) is a very strong force. And yes, we burst into it a bit like spoiled kids, arrogant and just thorougly enjoying ourselves not caring about the ousted`s feelings. And as most we are now discovering that with our new position there comes responsibility (though I still will behave like that spoiled brat at times I hope). We can not only enjoy it, we have to sometimes also be an example.

I reserve the right to critise Chelsea, but if you dare to question my commitment and love for Chelsea - I am willing to challenge anyone of you to a duel to life with linesmen sticks. Only idiots and in a better case fools, love without brain. But as some lately have really reminded me, the word supporter is about supporting your team, not shitting at it as some do! There is only one thing I can not stand, which is why I left Vital for a time as certain people were allowed to abuse others. That is not okay, having in my eyes truly stupid opinons are annoying, but okay - even if I find it a challenging thing to stand up to them but personal abuse is not ever okay, nor hooliganism. We recently read a short article a bit inflammatory about a neighbouring team`s supporters to the north, based on facts, that showed the kind of site I wish this will never be. Thankfully it was the northern "guests" that misbehaved most.

True Blue are not just words, my life revolves around blue today. My dog is named Ozzie after the hero, my car is blue. I painted my apartment in blue. And I always wear something Chelsea as that is, despite disappointments, the biggest interest of my life. Which either makes me a pathetic fool (not a bad thing) or a very lucky person. To me, my love for Chelsea has saved me in life. That is how major it is.

CHELSEA FOREVER

PS - I call myself a gloryhunter because I started liking Chelsea last time they were successfull some forty years ago, and mainly in protest to the silly notion that some fools have, that they are better fans than others. This class or caste system some seem to think is important due to their (regional) possibilities or being there when Chelsea was a crappy team, is an affront to me. I have been through good, bad, worse, decent and really good times as a supporter and it have made me no less or better Chelsea.

No supporter, no fan is better than another as long as they stand behind Chelsea. Only people booing players and not supporting Chelsea are poor fans. Or not turning up again after taking a real hit on the chin. (Love is an unconditional thing, not blind.)

Lindy

CSFC

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