A couple of weeks ago, I sent an email (In fact, all-in-all, I sent four emails) to the Football Association with regard to our FA Cup Semi-Final. I was annoyed at the fact that without common sense prevailing, Chelsea had been given Sunday April 15 as the date for our FA Cup Semi-Final against Tottenham Hotspur.

As a background to my original email, which was written prior to our Champions League Quarter-Final first leg game against Benfica, I pointed out that should Chelsea qualify against the Portuguese team, which we did, the club would only get a couple of days to rest and recuperate before playing in a huge match against the possible winners of Milan versus Barcelona in their Quarter Final of the same competition.

I also pointed out in the email that other football federations i.e. Italy, Portugal and Spain looked after their domestic clubs when it came to vital Champions League games. For instance, when Chelsea played Napoli in both legs of the last sixteen of the competition, the Italians were allowed to play their domestic games on a Friday evening and when we played Benfica, they were able to play on the Friday evening before we travelled to Lisbon.

In the email, I alluded to the fact that if the FA wanted English clubs to succeed in Europe they should be more flexible and I asked them to consider Chelsea playing on the Friday evening, rather than the Sunday.

Without me being connected in any way to Chelsea Football Club, apart from a supporter, later in press conferences, all of these points were pretty much backed up by the club in some way or another, which lead me to think that if our FA were going to be flexible, then they would take more notice of the club, than of me.

A few days later after sending my original email, I received a reply:

Dear Mr …

Thank you for contacting The Football Association.

The FA has confirmed the dates for the semi-finals, with Liverpool playing on Saturday and Chelsea on Sunday. All of these dates have been agreed with clubs, who are happy with the format for the weekend of the semi-finals.

The FA believes it is important to respect the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster and is happy with its decision in relation to this weekend.

Kind regards

Alex Burkwood
Customer Relations Officer Customer Relations

Personally, I felt that this didn’t answer the criteria of my original email, it actually made me quite angry and annoyed that as a customer, my original questions had not been answered. Personally, I could have answered that myself, it was total drivel and a load of rubbish. So I replied and asked for the matter to be taken to a higher authority.

I also suggested that I hoped that nobody purchased any merchandise whilst at Wembley and that England do extremely poorly in the European Championships, thus making the FA as little money as possible. (By that point I was very angry!)

For quite a few days I heard nothing, so I wrote again asking if they were ignoring me. Then on April 2, I received my final email from the Football Association, I also got a duplicate from a Tracey Bates too.

Dear Mr …

Thank you for contacting The Football Association.

The FA Cup Semi Final dates have been scheduled to take place on these dates for more than a year and have been fixed and agreed with all stakeholders. The confirmation of kick-off times followed detailed and lengthy discussions, which have involved all the relevant stakeholders, broadcasters and the Metropolitan police. In addition, when considering the scheduling of fixtures, The FA must consider the impact on fairness to all clubs who have equally important fixtures at this congested time of the season.

I realise that the above may not ease your frustrations. However we do appreciate all of the feedback we receive from supporters. This feedback is collated and used to build a picture of public opinion and is subsequently fed back internally within the organisation. Please rest assured your comments will form part of this feedback process.

Thank you again for contacting us.

Kind regards

Gary Stonehouse | Customer Relations
Communications Division

Well, that answer was absolutely bonkers. Take this line for instance – “In addition, when considering the scheduling of fixtures, The FA must consider the impact on fairness to all clubs who have equally important fixtures at this congested time of the season.”

WHAT? What other team in the FA Cup has congested fixtures? Are Liverpool, Everton and Tottenham in the Champions League Semi-Finals masquerading as Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich? What other competitions are they in apart from the FA competitions? (FA Cup and Premier League) had this been another English club and I’m thinking, Manchester United, would the FA have accommodated them?

In my opinion these emails from the Football Association show how blind they are to the reality of football. Our club have players who will be playing at 6pm on Sunday, 7.45pm on Wednesday against Barcelona, 12.45pm on April 21 versus Arsenal and then they travel to Barcelona for a game at 7.45pm on April 24.

What other clubs in the FA Cup have such congested fixtures, yet the Football Association states that they must consider ALL clubs. I also believe that the players could be risking their own health by playing these fixtures crammed together, should it not be the responsibility of the Football Association to make sure that these fixtures are spread out so that players have time to rest and recuperate between fixtures?

In most people’s jobs a key word is flexibility, I see no flexibility whatsoever in this scenario. Flexibility here should have meant that our national federation, the FA, being flexible and helping the only ENGLISH team left in Europe by, in my opinion, saying that they could play this coming Friday evening, or arranging a time much more suitable than at 6pm on Sunday evening.

In 2002 we also had problems with the blinkered Football Association when, as venue of choice, they chose Villa Park for our FA Cup Semi-Final against Fulham. It meant that fans of both London clubs had to travel to the Midlands when a far easier choice of venue would have been in London.

The Football Association are the most laughable organisation in world football, whose aim for their customers and more notably, in this instance, Chelsea Football Club, is to stick their heads in the sand and do sweet FA.

I hope nobody ever doubts my loyalty to the club I have followed since the late 1950s when I was taken as a young boy to watch my team, Chelsea FC, play.

In those days I stood on a grass terrace where the West Stand is now. So when I criticise some aspects of the modern day club do not take that as the sulkiness of a new fan. Nothing could be further from the truth on that score.

There are three components to this season’s debacle and all three should take a proportion of the blame. In no particular order they are The Manager, The Board and The Players.

The Manager

I am a home and an away Season Ticket holder so have seen most games this year from within the stadiums and for anybody who would listen I have been saying that Boas should go since October when I could see a pattern repeating itself from last season when we had a blip and lost confidence and spiralled down and down.

Last season we had an experienced manager who rallied the players, just, and we made a push, albeit too little too late, on the title. This season it was clear to me that the players were not up for this repeat scenario and the manager was not capable of dealing with the overinflated egos in the dressing room.

Give him time to rebuild I hear some fans saying. To which, my answer was he has had two transfer windows already to get rid of the deadwood and install players who understand what he is trying to do and has not done so.

He has consistently identified his own and the players shortcomings because after every game he comes out with the same old excuses why they did not perform and or win. But then he does nothing about it and we see the same old names appearing on the team sheet the next game.

Bosingwa, Malouda, Mikel and Kalou are just four examples of players that are a liability. We were told we were going to play fast attacking football but the players were not either interested or capable and those players should have been unceremoniously dumped in the reserves or out of the club in January.

One other important aspect of the manager’s job he got wrong as well. He could not change a game when it was going wrong and that is vital in today’s football.

Members of the various Chelsea Forums I am on had their own lists of players from last season that should have been replaced before this season started because of their ability and their attitude. Some players, like Mikel, Bosingwa, Malouda and Kalou, were constant on all lists.

As well as those players my own list included Lampard and Terry who I thought were now well into the autumn of their usefulness and their influence in dressing room needed to be removed for the good of the Club. Not for any incoming manager but the Club.

Boas may have been a good manager in Portugal but the English Premiership is completely different and he was not up to the task this early in his career.

Before you all yell I know Lampard and Terry have been good servants to the club in the past but we don’t live in the past, only the scousers do that, but Lampard has been getting slower and slower and now his attitude is bad as well it was time to say thanks and goodbye last summer. We should have sold Terry and all his baggage to City a few seasons ago when the decline was just starting and we could have got good money for him then.

The Players

Some senior players should be ashamed of themselves for their behaviour this season. Whinging and moaning to the media after playing and leaking to the press when they don’t get picked is not what I pay nearly 25% of my pension on following them.

Player power has no place at Chelsea, although when Grant was put in charge after Jose, it may have saved that season. But overall the egos are too big and they make hundreds of thousands per week and perform abysmally. Coming over to clap at the end of another shocking display does not wash any more with this fan.

If Roman laid into the players earlier this week then I will be pleased and I will expect major improvements from all players for the last few months of this season with no running off to their pet hacks on the papers and certainly not to TalkShite radio. If the attitude does not change then I hope Di Matteo drops them and tells them to start looking for a new club come the summer.

The Board

Jesus, where do I start? Like every club and authority in football the suits that run the club have never been, and do not know what it is like to be a fan. Buck may point out his ST credentials but sitting in the posh seats does not constitute being a fan.

Getting rained on, trampled on, hassled by the police, poor food and equally poor beer, dirty cramped trains and endless traffic jams after the game and the ribbing from opposition fans in the workplace next day and paying money for it and not, like Buck, being paid for it. That is what it is like being a football fan.

So when these suits continue to get it wrong time after time it does annoy me. This Board got rid of Jose. Why? We will never know and since then they have made a series of bad decisions trying to find somebody as good as Jose. Grant (ugh), Scolari, Hiddink (should have stayed like we sang to him), Ancelotti and recently Boas.

From a fan’s view they are more interested in the brand, the business, how many fans can we get in Malaysia, where can we send the players next to make more shirt sales. They have been more wrapped up in trying to get the freehold back from the fans than sorting out the season and it slipped from one disaster to another.

That is not good enough. I know Roman has had his problems this year with his court case but he supposedly has professional people there to run the club when he is occupied elsewhere and they have failed again and again. Gourlay offers nothing to this club other than trying to screw the fans for more money.

So what now? The senior players need to be moved on, see the players listed above, younger hungrier players who want to play for the shirt and will put a proper shift in. The Board need to wake up and spend a season on football matters. Find a proper manager, ie eat humble pie and bring Jose back and give him control of all football matters including picking and buying the players he wants and dumping the players he does not.

The real fans will still be there because it is our club. We put the money in, buy the crappy shirts and other merchandise, suffer in all weathers so it is not too much to ask those who run the club and those that play for the club to do their jobs properly.

Everything’s easy with hindsight. I bought my Chelsea Pitch Owners share on the 30th January 1985 on my way to Hillsborough for the quarter final replay of the then Milk Cup.

At that point I’d only ever seen Chelsea win one trophy, the 1970 FA cup … I was only four then and it’s still the earliest memory I have of my life.

So imagine standing on the terraces at Hillsborough at half time that evening … 3-0 down … gutted. The rest of that night is, as they say, history.

Yes Liverpool, history … “3-0 down, 4-3 up, then old Dougie fcked it up.” A hundred pounds was a lot of money for me then but I bought the share as we were fighting a battle to save Stamford Bridge.

It was only really thanks to the property crash in the late eighties that we ended up keeping our home … we we’re that close to ground sharing with Palace. If you’d told me that 25 years later, we would regularly get crowds of over 40,000 I’d have said you were clinically insane.

Remember those days of struggling to get 12,000 and against Cambridge at home if my memory serves me right, less than 7000 in Stamford Bridge ? My point is that a lot happens in 25 years. Will Abravomich still be our owner then ? Probably not.

Having 16,000 fans own the freehold to Stamford Bridge and the name of Chelsea Football Club gives us total protection forever. The offer from Chelsea is insulting. If they don’t build a new ground by 2020 they have complete control over where we play.

I don’t trust Bruce Buck … his last interview on Radio 5 made me cringe … an American stating his life long passion for Chelsea … where was he when we were shit?

Vote no at the AGM … it might seem trivial now but in 25 years time you could look back on it as the decision that saved our club.

OK we have just had match day one and the idiots have already taken over the away section, well what few West Brom brought with them.

Just what do they think is going to happen when they boo the Chelsea England boys? Are the three lads in question going to turn to a lump of quivering jelly and end up playing badly, or are they going to stick two metaphorical fingers up at the twats and play out of their skins?

You would think they would learn from JTs display at Burnley away last season just after the News of the Screws brought out the revelations, that are still to be proved true as yet by the way, and JT just got on with the game and scored.

But no the idiots in the Shed End corner yesterday booed continually, and Ash had another brilliant game, making runs and put in delightful crosses. JT was imperious at the back and Frankie? Well he was just Frankie and ran midfield and scored a wonderful goal from an equally delightful pass from Ash.

So oppo fans everywhere take note booing just isn’t clever and it will not make Chelsea players play badly. It will just make them play better and the Chelsea fans get even more behind the team.

But somehow you just know that morons will still turn up and think it oh so clever to boo Chelsea and equally we Chels fans know that it wont make a blind bit of difference.

Up the Chels and let’s silence the boo boys (& girls).

OK so Ancelotti has won a few titles in Serie A and he has also won the Champions League, as well as losing it after being three up against the Scouse Scum. He came to us in a blaze of publicity. But what has he achieved?

It comes to something when I agree with certain hacks who have said we should have walked the league this year with our squad, and the spirit, left to him by Guus, but somehow he has managed, or mis-managed, the squad to now be in a position where we’re chasing Man United again, with the resurgent Gooners in there as well despite us having won all three games against those teams.

Roman, if you believe the media, wants the Champions League (a subject for another rant) above all else and saw Carlo as the man to bring him that missing trophy but, after going out very early by our own recent standards, that faith has already been proved to be false.

From my own perspective I don’t see him as any kind of saviour I just see him as Ranieri Mk II, and let us not forget he didn’t win anything for four years. Where I sit in the MHU we are already in despair at his lack of nous to select the correct teams for the job, his ability change it early enough when his original selections muck it up, and his apparent lack of motivational skills in dealing with this squad of big names.

Point in case when the cameras panned round to him and Wilkins at Blackburn at the weekend they just sat there looking like they had run out of any ideas and, as it turned out, they had.

I return to where I started, Ancelotti’s successes have come from a league that cannot in any way be compared to the English Premier League. Serie A is soft and slow by comparison and to send teams out with a mentality of not losing will win nothing here. I would contend that he is the wrong man to manage Chelsea to domestic league titles which, no matter what Roman and Ancelotti think, is the number priority every season.

Of course it is all about opinions and you are at liberty to want to subscribe to the theory he should be given a chance to sort the squad out in the summer and build “his” team, but I would just say that he has two windows to do that and has changed nothing.

I do not have the confidence that he can do it. Please prove me wrong Carlo, and bring me the League and Cup double this season.