By Chris Wright
“9/11 was an inside job man! The CIA killed Kurt!”
Strap yourselves in folks, it’s tin-foil hat time at The Bridge again.
Tying in nicely with the paranoid sense of authoritarian collusion which has been percolating away nicely at Chelsea over the past few weeks and months (years?), an article entitled “Penalty Puzzle” has appeared on the club website this afternoon.
Using graphs and charts, the article openly complains about the “abnormally low” number of penalties Chelsea have been awarded in the Premier League so far this season – which is two, in case you were wondering.
As stated, both Man City and Arsenal, the teams second and third in the table and Chelsea’s closest title rivals, have been awarded seven spot-kicks apiece in the same time frame – the joint highest amount in the league.
You see what they’re digging at here?
Eden Hazard is, as the article is quick to point out, the Premier League’s most fouled player
The author (Hi Jose!) then goes onto to list several instances wherein Chelsea have been denied supposed stone-wall penalties, including one from their very first league game of the season against Burnley in August (a game they won 3-1) as if it’s had any bearing on anything.
Usually we’d pay such obvious whining no mind, but it’s so strange to see it coming from an official club source – the main official club source, in fact.
As we said, it’s also a little unsettling just how comfortably it all ties in with Mourinho’s little ‘conspiracy’ complex – more prevalent than ever as we move into the season’s final throes.
Of course we, as well as any right-minded fan, shouldn’t really give any credence to anything that comes out of Jose’s mouth.
It’s all propaganda, carefully engineered to create a very specific dissonance between Chelsea and officials as well as stoking the “Helms Deep” siege mentality that his largely unlovable team thrives on.
He wants to be his players’ one and only line of defence from all the bad things that the world outside is trying to do to them. What a burden to bear.
Here’s a fresh, exciting point of view: Maybe if Mourinho’s poor, hard-done-to side actually focussed on scoring real goals instead of fishing for penalties, these “abnormally low” numbers wouldn’t prove much of a concern for anyone involved.
Just a thought.