It is an annoying part of the game that I find frustrating too but it's hard to take these kind of moral crusades seriously when they happen to come directly after the matter at hand has affected us.
If it was the other way round (and let's be honest, it's not like Liverpool have never wasted time), I doubt anyone would be claiming it's an outrage.
Yes they would. As has been said, few would moan about running down time at the end of a game - it's always been done and it makes sense. I don't believe for a minute that most on here would sit back and admire ANY team start wasting time pretty much as soon as the game kicked off.
This, from someone who doesn't feel the need for a bout of self-flagellation after getting all giddy for a week or two, is a sensible piece:
Debate about Jose Mourinho and his methods isn’t seriously affected by Atletico Madrid’s authoritative termination of the Chelsea challenge in this year’s Champions League. The 3-1 defeat at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday did make him a loser in six of the eight semi-finals of the tournament that teams managed by him have contested. But having gone so far so often, and twice finished with mastery of Europe, is an outstanding achievement. Add the winning of league titles in four countries (Portugal, England, Italy and Spain) and questioning his skills or doubting that his policies are frequently effective becomes ludicrous.
That, however, wasn’t remotely the point of recent criticism Mourinho has sneeringly attributed to philosophers of football peddling fantastic theories.
What has been hard to stomach is the insistence of his admirers (most conspicuously himself) that his tactics are never fundamentally negative but always simply the deployment of excellence in defence to establish a platform for productive attacking. Well, the statistics from those eight Champions League semi-finals indicate that construction of the platform has seldom gone smoothly.
In the 16 matches involved, Mourinho teams had an aggregate of 13 goals and in the six Chelsea played under him they scored just twice. While low-scoring encounters are neither unnatural nor unfamiliar at the semi-final stage of the Champions League, with his Chelsea the likelihood of a scarcity of goals, and of what many of us would regard as an unacceptable level of entertaining play, has generally been increased by his attritional intentions. But that’s his business, and it ill behoves outsiders to lecture a man with such a CV about how his European record would be even better if he had brought a more expansive sense of ambition, a more consistent emphasis on penetration, to the efforts of his players.
It is when cheerleaders for Mourinho tell us the dullness often associated with his approach isn’t really dull at all — when they condescendingly acquaint us with how yokelish it is to refuse to be riveted or stirred to applause by the kind of match we saw in the first leg of the Atletico-Chelsea tie — that the ire rises.
Obviously Atletico, as the home team, were hugely culpable in that dreary apology for top-grade football. But, whereas they were transformed in west London by rediscovering the vibrant qualities that have been disturbing the monopoly of Barcelona and Real Madrid in La Liga, Chelsea were perhaps marginally weaker as a consequence of injury and suspensions and were convincingly consigned to ruing the negligibility of their pursuit of an away goal in Spain.
Now Mourinho is concentrating on the two undaunting assignments (Norwich at the Bridge today and a trip to Cardiff on May 11) he must negotiate profitably to keep alive Chelsea’s faint hopes of the Premier League title, the one prize that could still spare him the pain of following a barren final season at Real Madrid with another devoid of a major trophy. However, as he copes with the problems of a club in transition, his upbeat declarations focus on the improvement in Chelsea he is sure of producing next season.
Remembering the remarkable domestic success of his previous spell in his present job, it would be extremely foolish to dismiss his promises. Yet he will recognise the substantial obstacles to replicating the standards of his first tenure, especially the near-impossibility of bringing in a front-line leader with the immense catalytic influence of Didier Drogba, one of the least subduable centre-forwards most of us have ever seen.
The playing style employed by Mourinho when he had Drogba, and Frank Lampard in his prime, was different from the methods he has applied of late. And there is inevitably a more dramatic discrepancy between how he has operated recently and his use of the deadly, monumentally expensive attacking talents of Real Madrid, above all Cristiano Ronaldo, when winning the Spanish league championship with unprecedented totals of goals and points in 2012. So there’s scope for arguing that he adapts his tactics to suit the players at his disposal. But it’s patently disingenuous to deny that running through his extraordinary career is clear and persistent evidence of a predilection for caution rather than adventure and, when the stakes are high, an alacrity in opting for outright negativity.
Again, needless to say, those are attitudes to which he has every right.
What neither he nor the many who fervently admire him (notwithstanding his notorious lurches into reprehensible conduct) should feel entitled to do is brand as football philistines all who find the most glaringly sterile of his teams’ performances excruciating to watch. Trying to tell us only a lack of sophisticated insights prevents us from being entertained by such displays is pseudery. Our responses are due less to ignorance than to comparisons with other managers down through the decades who have demonstrated how exhilarating, and successful, faith in positive football can be.
Back in the 1960s Helenio Herrera was the acknowledged master of stifling defence and his Inter Milan were automatically favourites to thwart Jock Stein’s attempt to pull off the miracle of enabling a group of Celtic players all born in Glasgow or nearby to become the first British team to lift the European Cup. Before the 1967 final in Lisbon, Stein told me: “I mean it when I say we don’t just want to win this cup. We want to win it playing good football, to make neutrals glad we’ve done it. . .”In the jubilant turmoil of the Celtic dressing room after the match, I heard an elderly Portuguese official, ecstatic over the dismantling of Herrera’s creed, say to Jock: “This attacking play, this is the real meaning of football. This is the true game.”
It is, self-evidently, by no means the only legitimate or laudable way of playing. But if thinking it’s the best is childish, fetch me a highchair.
