It was while watching Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall play so well for Everton against Liverpool at the weekend that it became clear exactly what freedom looks like. Freedom from chaos. Freedom from the chains of sporting uncertainty. Freedom from Chelsea.
Dewsbury-Hall was lucky. He got out after one season. He has a home at Everton now, at a club where there is a structure and a plan and some forward momentum and where the players don’t turn up to work every day wondering if the manager is still there. So a good player is back doing good things.
Others are not so lucky. Cole Palmer, for example. He said at the weekend that he plans to stick around at Chelsea but why? Had he stayed at Manchester City, the chances are there would be no Rayan Cherki. Pep Guardiola could have built a new team round Palmer. At Chelsea, it won’t be long before they are pulling one of English football’s brightest young talents out from under the rubble.
Chelsea buries talent, you see. It hides it behind disorganisation and bluster. It doesn’t allow it to flourish. It doesn’t build pathways or create platforms. It just throws money at talent and hopes that’s enough. In the end everybody just chokes on the green.
And now it’s Liam Rosenior’s turn. Now freedom is his, too. It will hurt for a while and, like all sacked managers, he will look back on the things he did and said and the mistakes he made. It’s not a short list. But at least he is free to recover and start again.
Rosenior’s final act was played out at the Amex Stadium in Brighton, at the home of a club that knows what it is doing. There is something neat about that.
Chelsea are now on their worst run since 1912 after another dismal defeat against Brighton
Liam Rosenior’s reputation has torpedoed since joining Chelsea, who have lost five in a row
The Blues have a habit of burying talent and English superstar Cole Palmer is a prime example
Chelsea have tried to take a bit of what Brighton have over the years by throwing money at them. Their manager, Graham Potter. Their players. Their staff. But it hasn’t worked. It takes more than transfer fees and compensation figures to build a football club. Who knew?
Rosenior said after Chelsea’s surrender in Sussex that his players had failed him and that he was angry. He said he noticed a lack of desire and motivation. It seems he’d had enough of protecting them and so railed against them instead. The last act of a desperate man. We have seen that one play out before.
But deep down Rosenior, a bright man, knows that the players are not really to blame for this. They are merely the product of their environment and a Chelsea culture that promises such old fashioned values such as security and growth to absolutely nobody.
The last international break allowed us a glimpse of how the Chelsea dressing room was feeling and none of it was good. Rosenior probably sensed at that point that it was over.
Marc Cucurella, a European Championship-winning defender, bemoaned Chelsea’s transfer strategy – and that’s a word currently doing some heavy lifting – while Enzo Fernandes, a World Cup-winning midfielder, said that he may wish to leave the club before long.
Chelsea’s hierarchy, steered by Todd Boehly, has created a culture and project destined to fail
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall is a fine example of a player who left Chelsea and has flourished
In football, a fish doesn’t so much rot from the head but from the heart – its dressing room – and it now seems that a group of players lured to the club on the back of promises that are rarely fulfilled are simply looking for a way out.
And it’s so very sad, all of it. Because it’s not just a great English sporting institution that’s being ruined and made to look stupid but people too.
That phone call that changed the direction and flavour of Rosenior’s life came when he was doing rather well managing Strasbourg, one of Chelsea’s feeder clubs, back in January.
The 43-year-old had a good reputation back then. He had been an excellent coach for Wayne Rooney at Derby and had then made progress as a manager at Hull before being unjustly sacked. In France, he was developing and growing and learning. He could have been ready to manage a big club like Chelsea one day.
But Chelsea sacked Enzo Maresca after he got fed up of them and started to push back and had no succession plan to fall back on. So the call went into Strasbourg about two years early and the course of Chelsea’s short-term future was once more programmed towards failure.
Those who knew Rosenior as a player say he looks and sounds different now. They say is not recognisable as the young man they knew. And – while that criticism is known to have upset him – we all laugh along. But the truth is that it’s been desperately painful to watch.
That’s Chelsea at work. That’s Chelsea ruining good people, whether they mean to or not. Rosenior may come to relish his freedom from the madness and the chances are he will recover. As for Chelsea, who really knows?
