Off-side

How is the Good/Evil dynamic affected with the match location being at the former forces of Evil?

Tsk. Bath/Biarritz, only important match this avo.

Well, yes, Bath lost, and I suppose as one of Malcom Pearce’s (who, oddly enough, I used to work for. Well, his mistress actually, but he owned the place.) cheerleaders at Bristol you would think Evil lost.

Fortunately the wife supports Liverpool so at least half the family might be happy later on.

Chelsea lose to Liverpool again in a semifinal.

My viewpoint on the game was to take a “glass half-full” approach–rather than seeing it as a club I hate going through, I take joy that a club I hate was bound to lose. I would always prefer seeing Liverpool lose, though.

Well the double is off, shame there is essentially no chance of them missing the title (and even if they did it would only be to place it in the hands of Man Utd which is really not particularly the lesser of two evils either).

Of course all that Chelsea have done in the last couple of years is make explicit what has been known for much longer, the premiership is won by a race to spend the most money more than anything else now.

For an American who gets up most mornings to watch UK football at 7:30 AM, a casual fan who’d like to be less casual, can somebody explain why people seem to hate Chelsea? It goes further back than the current owner of course? I’ve heard somewhere there was a hard right association or something?

(If you’d like, in return, I’ll tell you about the socio-ethnico-politico break down of Yankees vs. Mets fans in New York. Or not.)

11: As a fellow American that gets up at 7:30 AM to watch football, I can tell you that, no, it doesn’t go past the current owner. In fact, it doesn’t go much past the current manager. In 2002-03, Chelsea were occasionaly qualifying for Europe and a welcome (if infrequent) wild card to Man U-Arsenal dominance.

When Mourinho came along, that all changed. Before his Chelsea so much as kicked a ball in anger, he declared that he was “The Special One”, and thus demanded respect. Since, he has instituted a policy of paying well over market value for any footballer that happens to catch his eye(16-20 million pounds for Carvalho who does not make the first team). Chelsea buy players that are vastly important to their clubs (Scott Parker, Shaun Wright-Phillips) just to park them on their bench. And then they win the league playing 85 minutes of “ten men behind the ball” interspersed with five minutes of brilliance.
Add an interminable stream of Mourinho’s high-profile complaints, “questionable” tactics (the pitch v. Barcelona, the Porto v. Celtic UEFA Cup Final, Didier F***ing Drogba), and an owner eager to launder his ill-gotten gains into silverware, and Man U look downright respectable.

I’ve heard somewhere there was a hard right association or something?

That goes back to the hooligan era of the ’70s and ’80s. Every club had its “firm”, but Chelsea’s happened to overlap with a neo-Nazi group called the National Front.