Oh no! My team appear to be suffering from abject humiliation, in no small part due to my poor team selection and all is grim. I NEED A DOCTOR!!!! Well, I need someone to blame. What??? There’s no team doctor or physio here within 20 yards?? Shit! I shall just have find a scapegoat elsewhere. Now where’s Antonio Conte? He’ll do.

I had no idea what Morinho said to Conte at the end of the game. The ‘quiet word in his ear’. But you could see it was not a happy quiet word. I don’t even know what language they were speaking. Didn’t look like English, but when Jose speaks English it doesn’t really sound like English either. Could have been Portuguese, his native tongue and the one he’d possibly resort to for some serious swearing and temper-tantrumming. But we found later that it was Italian. Jose is a good linguist and his time at Inter Milan we can now say was not totally wasted. So as the lip-readers of Europe were called out by the press, like sending up the Bat-signal for an emergency, it was the Italians who identified both the language and the content. Jose wasn’t saying just a very long, protracted and angry ‘well done’, nor asking Antonio to share a bottle of vino, as managers are wont to do. Instead he picked, as his scapegoating moment, his someone-to-blame incident as Conte geeing up the crowd to sing and celebrate after Chelsea’s 4th goal. Why not? It was as glorious a victory as any Chelsea win can begrudgingly be. But no, according to the ‘hanging-on-to-sanity-by-a-whisker’ Portugezer, that was rude and inappropriate. You can do that at 1-0, but not 4-0.

It was in fact a great match. Bit one-sided, as the score would suggest. But basically Conte got his game plan spot on and Morinho didn’t. More importantly, Chelsea stuck to the plan and executed it perfectly. Making them look, sadly, like they’re going to be a very hard team to beat this year.

Which I find a bit depressing. Arsenal can’t stop winning, even though they did on Saturday, Liverpool are looking very strong, Chelsea now resurgent, and that’s with poor Willian only just returning after the death of his mother, poor fella. And Manchester City…

The ‘team to beat’. Or; the unbeatable-looking. As they were for their first games this season. Now looking nothing like as happy. 5 in a row without a win. Only the second time that’s happened in Pep Guardiola’s managerial career.

We’re 5th now. I liked being 3rd, preferred second, but we’re (fucking) 5th. With Manchester United below us. Can you write them off? Can’t do that really. Too much talent. Too much money. Even though Zlatan, from looking like the best bit of business this year, has just turned into an old Swede with a funny name.

Early days still (I’ll tell you when to panic) but WE NEED TO WIN GAMES!!!!!

Happy Monday

A xxxx