SB Nation Seattle: All Posts by Graham MacAree

Lazar Markovic (apparently) claims he's leaving Partizan

2013-05-18T22:59:40Z

It's not just Andre Shurrle who's talking about moving on today. Chelsea have long been linked to Serbian wonderchild Lazar Markovic -- there are indications that he's already signed with the club, although I'm not sure how much I trust those rumours -- and after Partizan Belgrade beat Red Star the youngster apparently confirmed that he'd be moving on.

I can't find the original report, so let's go with a Serbian forum (i.e. grain of salt ahoy).

Serbian youngster Lazar Markovic will leave Partizan Belgrade,he confirmed after Partizan defeat Red Star in serbian superleague @chelseafc
— AVANGARDA.IN (@AvangardaForum) May 18, 2013

There's no guarantee that he'll end up at Chelsea, of course, but it would make a great deal of sense if he does. The Blues are big fans and we've been linked to him for a while. Chelsea supports should be excited about that. At 19, he was the best player on the pitch in a ferocious local derby that virtually decided the title in Partizan's favourite, and given a couple seasons on loan he could easily end up being a major star.

Plus his name is Lazar. I can always get behind buying people named Lazar.

Who should we be hoping gets the final Champions League spot?

2013-05-18T22:38:29Z

Chelsea are all but mathematically guaranteed to be in the Champions League for next season. That means that the Everton game is mostly stress-free -- we want to win to avoid a) a playoff with Arsenal and b) a potential playoff in August should we end up in fourth, but we're not sweating things like we would be had Frank Lampard not saved our collective bacon at Villa Park.

And, indeed, it'll be a stress-free day for most of the Premier League. The title race was over weeks ago. The relegation battle is over. Chelsea and Manchester City have secured the much-coveted top four trophy. In fact, everything meaningful is decided except the fourth and final Champions League spot, which will be contested between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur.

Who do we want to win? It's an interesting question -- there's a poll at the end of the post, but I'll go ahead and do my best to answer here.

I think it has to be Arsenal. As funny as it would be to see them drop out of the top four (and it would be utterly hilarious), I don't think it would actually hurt them much. They've got plenty of money stashed away, and they could spend it if they chose to. Losing Champions League money for a year would be annoying but not fatal.

A Champions League Arsenal are a known commodity. They're also essentially impotent. Over the last few years, the Gunners have consistently been a good team but have never, never threatened to be great. That could magically turn around, of course, but that strikes me as unlikely.

Spurs, on the other hand, would immediately seek to consolidate their position by spending quite a lot of money. They're a good, if flawed side, and giving them a cash injection would allow them to establish themselves as a force at the top of the table. While Arsenal are a docile giant, we cannot expect the same from Tottenham.

Essentially, I'd rather not replace a toothless pseudo-rival with a team that looks genuinely threatening. As amusing as seeing Arsenal flutter off into oblivion might be... well, better the trophy-less devil you know, at least for me.

Poll

Who would you rather see in next year's Champions League?

Schürrle admits Leverkusen departure likely

2013-05-18T21:29:05Z

Bayer Leverkusen beat Slobodan Rajkovic and HSV Hamburg 1-0 today in the final match of their season. Andre Schürrle went ninety minutes in the win, coming off for Manuel Friedrich in injury time. After the match, he admitted that the game was very likely to be his last with Bayer.

Schürrle basically admitted that was probably his last game for Leverkusen.At least he goes out on a high note.
— Cristian Nyari (@Cnyari) May 18, 2013

Although some are taking this as confirmation that a transfer is done, it isn't. A move is highly likely for Schürrle, and Chelsea are the overwhelming favourites to land him, but while we should expect this to happen don't believe it until he's signed, sealed and delivered. (Or confirms it himself like Eden Hazard.)

Schürrle would slot in as a competent option at striker and attacking midfield, and assuming he's not valued too highly he'd be a very good pickup. Hopefully Chelsea can get it wrapped up soon, but that probably depends on what happens with Kevin de Bruyne and the new manager.

Branislav Ivanovic makes Chelsea some money

2013-05-18T17:26:10Z

How much was Branislav Ivanovic's last-gasp goal against Benfica worth? Well, if you're feeling all emotional, it's difficult to put a price on winning a shiny trophy and restoring some pride. But since it was the Europa League, I can only feel so emotional about winning before getting embarrassed. And after that goes, we're down to counting the cold, hard, cash.

After the semifinal win against FC Basel, football finances blog the Swiss Ramble pointed out that Chelsea's Europa League run had partially made up for their failure to make it out of the group stages. Assuming that the Blues had been vanquished by Benfica, they'd have earned €6.5 million in prize money plus the income from four home games. And now that they've won it, that's up to €9 million.

It gets better, though. Although from footballing perspective the Super Cup strikes me as an enormous waste of time, it's also incredibly lucrative. Thanks to Ivanovic, Chelsea will play the winners of the Champions League final in August, and they'll get at least €2.2 million for the pleasure.

That means that the goal, which took Chelsea from a 50/50 shot at the title to a victory, was worth somewhere in the vicinity of €2,350,000 on top of a shiny trophy. It's not quite the same as a Drogba penalty, but it's not really so bad.

Rafa Benitez, the media and the hazards of confirmation bias

2013-05-17T23:02:02Z

When Rafa Benitez was hired, I was upset. Not just because I don't like Rafa Benitez, which I happily admit to, but because I don't think he's a particularly able football manager. He contrived to steer Liverpool out of the top four for good and his time with Inter Milan was an unmitigated disaster. After making a genuine breakthrough with his implementation of 4-2-3-1 with Valencia, he transferred his success to Liverpool, did well for a time, and then stalled.

The visionary is not a particularly reliable manager, in the long run. They see something others do not and exploit it for a time, but eventually the rest of the world catches on and the advantage evaporates. This is particularly worrying if the visionary becomes too attached to their his own philosophy. In a competitive environment, dogma is death. This trait is what makes Sir Alex Ferguson such a remarkable manager -- his willingness to continually rebuild not just his team but his way of thinking is what allowed him to remain so successful, for so long.

Benitez is dogmatic. His obsession with the 4-2-3-1 served him well when it was a genuinely disruptive shape, and nobody doubts his professionalism or training methods. He's a very clever man, and would be a far more effective manager if he wasn't so stubbornly sticking to ideas that were revolutionary a decade ago.

Coupled with a genuine dislike of the man* -- I don't think much of attacking another teams' fans, nor do I have any fondness for those who seek to duck responsibility whenever anything goes wrong -- it's not difficult to see why I might have been annoyed when he was announced as Roberto di Matteo's replacement back in November.

*For which I'll be told, not doubt, that any analysis I could provide on the subject is utterly biased and therefore without merit.

But not liking Benitez is and was essentially irrelevant. There were targets to hit and obvious problems to be solved. Although Chelsea were in a tailspin -- they were effectively out of the Champions League and had slumped to third place in the Premier League despite a strong start -- there was still much to play for. The road to the League Cup was wide open, the Club World Cup, gimmick though it was, should have been a walkover, and the FA Cup and Europa Leagues had not yet started.

Even in the Premier League, there was hope of something approximating a sustained title challenge. Manchester United were looking much more vulnerable than anyone remembers now that they've coasted to their 20th championship. Their defence was wobbly, their midfield was essentially non-existent, and they were relying on their strikers to win them games. Manchester City, meanwhile, were entirely disinterested, a ~~sad~~ hilarious fact that eventually cost Roberto Mancini his job.

Chelsea won the Europa League, fought pretty bravely in the FA Cup and embarrassed themselves in the League and Club World Cups. Although they're almost certainly qualified for the Champions League places next season, their league campaign was a success only because of the low target set. Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur are nowhere near as talented (or, indeed, as expensive), and the Blues' failure to push City for second in a season which the defending champions consider a catastrophic collapse is an indictment of their overall play.

It wasn't a matter of poor results being coupled with strong performances, either. Chelsea routinely played poorly against inferior opposition, and often collapsed from winning positions. They won their fair share of games, but the broad picture of a side with talented individuals but no real ability to impose control upon a match shines through very clearly. For most of Benitez's reign, despite the presence of some hugely gifted players, Chelsea have been extraordinarily poor.

There are mitigating factors. The team wasn't constructed well, and senior management failed to rectify the most obvious need -- a midfielder who could play effectively in Benitez's system -- in January, trusting instead to a misguided experiment which saw David Luiz find novel ways to be out of position in the most important area of the pitch. The number of games Chelsea were forced to play is unprecedented and took its toll on a tired squad. Roberto di Matteo was the man who oversaw our fall into the Europa League, not Benitez. And yes, the obvious disdain from the supporters cannot have helped either.

There were triumphs too. The most obvious is the Europa League on Wednesday, which saw Chelsea become the first English club to win all three major European trophies thanks to a back post header by Branislav Ivanovic on a routine drawn up by Benitez. The FA Cup quarterfinal against Manchester United was masterful. And coming in third (possibly fourth) place, no matter how limp the performance might have been, allows the club to focus on bigger and better things.

Those factors are important, but they're not the entirety of the story; regardless, any thorough and unbiased evaluation of Benitez's time at the reins will weigh up his successes and his failures rather than focusing on one area or another. Nobody's expecting me to be unbiased here, but I hope that even though my interpretation of the evidence might lean in one direction, my reporting of the evidence remains neutral.

That's the standard we expect from writers and journalists, after all. Sadly, it's not one that's often met.

Those Chelsea fans who, due to some imagined slight, made life so hard for Rafael Benítez have a chance to say sorry when the Europa League-winning manager presides over the last Premier League game of his interim reign. Hats off to Benítez for his "rant" – actually, it was a pretty measured statement of the obvious – against militant Chelsea fans after an FA Cup win at Middlesbrough at the end of February. He had the guts to stand up to them and stick to his guns. A few might even thank the "fat Spanish waiter" for moving David Luiz into a holding central midfield role and beginning the reawakening of Fernando Torres. Will José Mourinho – if he arrives – really do any better? Might the odd Chelsea fan even be a little sad to see Benítez go?

-Louise Taylor, Guardian.

Perhaps I'm cherrypicking here -- that's a quote from the least talented member of the Guardian's staff, after all -- but the above paragraph, awful though it is, is not atypical of the media's response to Benitez's tenure with Chelsea. The story being we're being stold is of a man who succeeded despite long odds, accomplishing great things for woefully ungrateful supporters, who ought now to be begging for forgiveness with their collective tails between their legs.

That's not an indefensible position, given the evidence. If you weigh the value of a top four finish very highly and believe that Chelsea would never have achieved it under di Matteo, then perhaps it's fair to say that we should be heaping praise on Benitez for his accomplishments with the team. It would be an odd line to take, but as long as Benitez's failures are acknowledged, it's not utterly insane.

What would be insane is ignoring evidence that doesn't suit one's argument and misrepresenting the rest to better suit one's point. This is what Taylor has done here -- she's praising Benitez for his successes without even mentioning the failures; the line about the 'reawakening' of a £50 million striker who has yet to score a league goal in 2013 is particularly demented -- and it's exactly what happens when you choose your conclusions before examining the evidence. The I-want-to-sound-clever name for this phenomenon is confirmation bias*.

*It would be remiss of me not to point out that I've been accused by some commenters of confirmation bias over my low opinion of David Luiz's performances in midfield. That may very well be true; either way it's a subtle and insidious effect that must be battled at every turn.

But is there a motive for Taylor and her merry band of incompetents to perform tricks of intellectual dishonesty on this sort of scale? After all, the journalistic corps is ostensibly neutral. Why would they hold an opinion that strong on a subject they shouldn't really care about?

The answer, when given some thought, is pretty clear. Britain's press considers itself a grand arbiter of morality -- see, well, basically everything they produce. Football's no different. Sustained indignation towards anything out of the ordinary (such as smiling, or possessing money, or being foreign) is the signature of the field. And one of the fundamental tenets of the football media's moral code is that supporters should be passive. Uppityness from the little people is inherently evil.

And so, when Chelsea supporters rejected the appointment of Rafa Benitez, they had to be punished. A combination of supposed moral superiority and schadenfreude have combined to fuel pieces like Taylor's, which aren't written to illuminate the situation but to punish those who've acted out. Once that decision to take sides has been made, Taylor and company simply do not possess the analytical ability* to recognise and correct the biases in their position.

*Or they're happy to be intellectually dishonest, which is worse.

The rest of the footballing community is only too happy to join the party. Chelsea supporters are not well liked (nor is there a reason for them to be), and so, unthinking everyone else goes where the media leads. One suspects that they don't mind being led astray so long as they can attack the opposition, but from my perspective the fundamental point of journalist is to inform rather than pursue enjoyable ignorance.

Is there an argument that Rafa Benitez has done a good job of Chelsea manager, one that invalidates the initial stance that he shouldn't have been hired? Probably. But such an argument should be made from the evidence at hand, not a twisted version of said evidence forged into a stick with which to beat dissenters.

Rhetorical tricks may convince the masses, but they're no substitute for thoughtful analysis. We deserve better.

Playoff date and venue set

2013-05-17T16:30:50Z

We've mentioned the possibility of Arsenal and Chelsea entering a playoff for third if results line up the right way this weekend (specifically, Arsenal beat Newcastle by one goal while scoring two more than Chelsea, who must draw at home to Everton), and the Premier League is taking it seriously enough to schedule the match, should it come to pass. When and where would the 70th game of Chelsea's already too-long season be played?

Potential Arsenal-Chelsea 39th game - playoff for 3rd - would be at Villa Park on Sunday May 26. Tickets £20-£30. Kick off time TBC
— Rob Harris (@RobHarris) May 17, 2013

Oh. That's a day after the Blues play Manchester City in New York. While we might scoff at the idea of a post-season tour, pulling out at this stage will probably cost the club significantly, and it's difficult to see a way in which the club can juggle this. Which is their fault for having a stupid post-season tour in the first place, to be honest.

But more importantly, the choice of venue is more clear evidence that the FA doesn't give a [fun] about the fans. Wembley, Stamford Bridge and the Emirates would all be out for obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean that a playoff game between two London teams should be played in Birmingham. It's a level of idiocy that's not just bordering on the monstrously stupid but staging a full-fledged invasion.

Hopefully Chelsea can render this all irrelevant by beating Everton on Sunday. Let this season end. Please.

Jorge Jesus is still cranky and silly

2013-05-15T23:53:05Z

Chelsea have played three matches against Benfica. They have scored five goals, conceded twice and won every encounter. All three of those games have been against Jorge Jesus, and in the aftermath of each he's given us more or less the same ~~quote~~ whine. On Wednesday, Jesus' outfit was beaten because they don't know how to mark from corners, allowing Branislav Ivanovic to punish them. He's how the manager reacted:

My players did not deserve to lose this game and, emotionally, it feels like they have been gunned down. It is not easy to take but we have to recover.

We showed we would have been worthy winners. For most of the 93 minutes we were better than Chelsea. Small details could have given us the victory but we couldn't manage to do it.

-Source: Sky Sports.

I've noticed an interesting trend in football talk, completely at odds with reality. For some reason we like to pretend that all that matters is outplaying the opposition in the midfield (which Benfica did) while neglecting the key business of scoring goals and not conceding them. Finishing is important. Defending is important. Claiming that one deserves to win in a 2-1 loss when the object of the game is to outscore the opposition is rather clearly insane. Chelsea deserved to win, having scored more than Benfica.

If Jesus doesn't understand this, it's no wonder he has such an appalling record on the few occasions in which his team plays someone competent. After three 'undeserved' losses to Chelsea, most would have re-thought their stance. It's a bit of a shame for Benfica that their manager refuses to.

Chelsea win the Europa League: Reaction and player ratings

2013-05-15T20:53:18Z

So that happened. A last-gasp header from Branislav Ivanovic gave Chelsea a win against Benfica -- and our first trophy of the season. The Blues are currently the holders of the Europa League and the Champions League (until the 25th), making them the first English club to hold all three major European trophies. Neato.

Bullet points! (all .gifs via @brocadfael)

The match wasn't great, especially the first half, where Chelsea didn't really bother showing up, allowing Benfica to have all the time on the ball they could possibly have hoped for. It wasn't helped by a referee whose performance can be charitably described as being demented. Happily for the Blues, Benfica were merrily screwing up every chance they got save for their goal -- at one point Oscar Cardozo, presented with an open goal five yards out, shot backwards. Amazing.
Speaking of the goal, I have no idea what Cesar Azpilicueta was doing waving his arms around on the edge of the penalty area. It was still very bad luck that it a) hit him and b) was considered a penalty. Cardozo had earlier been denied a probably onside goal by the linesman, though.
Fernando Torres scored an awesome goal, doing a Drogba impression following Juan Mata's flick by blowing up both of Benfica's centre backs, rounding Artur and slotting into an empty net. It was really neat, and after that he went into confident-Torres mode.
Ivanovic's Drogba impression was better though. Third minute of injury time, corner, and boosh. Perfect header into the back of the net. Can't ask for much more than that.
Fair play to Frank Lampard and Gary Cahill as well -- the former nearly scored with a beauty of a long-range finish 88 minutes in which beat Artur and slammed off the crossbar, and Cahill saved the game with a last-ditch tackle on Cardozo just before full time.
Champions of Europe. Hurray!

Now rate the winners: