Chelsea lost again. In fact, when I first began writing this in my notebook they were coming off a hapless loss to Brighton & Hove (have they ever swept us in a season before?) while surrendering around 70% of possession. It was a pathetic, disorganized display by a side of millionaires led by an interim coach who is over his head, club legend Frank Lampard. What can you say? Diego Maradona is one of the best soccer players in the history of the game, maybe top three, and he wasn’t near as good a coach for Argentina as he was a player.
My dear Chelsea F.C. are in twelfth place in the Premier League, and on their third manager of the season. Since I wrote this all in my notebook, they proceeded to get washed out of the UCL by Real Madrid, in a much less graceful and honorable fashion than last year, giving Frank Lampard his fourth straight loss – he had 4 wins in 28 games between Everton and Chelsea this season (the amount of games played has gone up but the wins have stayed the same); maybe hiring him back was a stupid idea by an American owner that doesn’t know what he’s doing and should have just kept Graham Potter in charge if he wasn’t going to sign Luis Enrique once Enrique made it known he was interested in the job. Who’s to say?
Lampard was fired from being the head man at Chelsea during the 2020-2021 season. The manager who replaced him, Thomas Tuchel, went on to win the UEFA Champions League with Chelsea. They started to slip late in the 2021-2022 season, a harsh one full of disappointed where they still qualified for the Champions League, then Tuchel was fired early into this season as Chelsea slipped to sixth in the Premier League. He was replaced by Graham Potter, who’d built things up at Brighton & Hove Albion. After some early success, the team fell into a rut of consistent inconsistency, and Potter was sacked as they fell to tenth place. Lampard was installed as a caretaker.
Funnily enough, my other team, playing in an inferior league by most analyses, Bayern Munich, fired Julian Nagelsmann who, while more successful over a longer period than Potter, never quite gained full control of the locker room, commanding respect, and had slipped out of first place (they’re back there now). FC Bayern gave the job to Tuchel and have been a bit inconsistent, losing in the quarter-final of the DFB-Pokal (the German equivalent to England’s FA Cup or the US Open Cup) and lost to Manchester City 4-1 on aggregate in the Champions League Quarterfinals. Tuchel has some ship-righting to do. They’re only one point clear of Borussia Dortmund in the league table, after beating Dortmund 4-2 in Tuchel’s first match. Five games to go after beating Hertha Berlin last weekend, and only Leipzig is also in competition to play in Europe. It would be good to see five wins to close out.
Nagelsmann was rumored as a top choice for Chelsea. Now it’s looking like Mauricio Pochettino is rumored to takeover. The Argentine former manager of Chelsea rival Tottenham Hotspur will be walking into an over-crowded locker room that needs some culling and is undoubtedly full of malcontents. Spanish manager Luis Enrique (recently resigned from the Spanish national team after losing to Morocco in the round of 16 of the World Cup) allegedly brought Boehly a set of plans for the team, which I found inspiring, but Boehly didn’t ask my opinion.
Since writing most of the above (this has been a three week process as I rethink everything I write) Chelsea have proceeded to drop two more games to Brentford, Chelsea, and formerly league-leading archrival Arsenal. We’ve got Bournemouth on Saturday, Nottingham Forest on May 13th, and if we don’t win one or both we have a legitimate chance of being relegated, which hasn’t happened since the late 1980s.
Todd Boehly – Chelsea chairman who’s spent ungoldly sums on players at every level of the outfield but still somehow not in possession of a proper striker – has a big stake in another team I follow. The Los Angeles Dodgers are off to what seems to me an inauspicious start (19-13) but they’ve won their last six and are in first place in the NL West after an unremarkable early playoff exit last fall. Or, perhaps, remarkable because the huge payroll has bought three World Series chances over a half decade but just one victory.
For a sport I care more about than baseball but similarly mostly on watch in the playoffs, the Golden State Warriors were up 61-55 against the Sacramento Kings when I started writing this (they lost that game 126-123, lost the next one 114-106, and then won 114-97, and ended up winning three of the next four including a twenty-point final that was the most-watched round one game of the playoffs since the late 1990s). The loss to the Lakers on Tuesday in game one of round two, well I’d have liked it to be a win but it was a great game. The team just feels too thin. Draymond is great in flashes, but the flashes weren’t there Tuesday, so in a height and position matchup Kevin Looney is basically expected to take Anthony Davis and sometimes LeBron James all by his lonesome. Meanwhile, Jordan Poole doesn’t seem consistent enough to be the number three scoring option, though he had a good game Tuesday. We’ll see what happens tonight. I’m hoping for a great series, with the Warriors pulling through in six or seven.
My favorite sport to watch, in a head to head battle with association football over which it used to have a big lead, is American football. Easier not to comment on the Raiders’ weird offseason than anything. I basically agree with the hosts of The Athletic’s Raiders podcast that the draft was good but we should have taken a cornerback earlier and they’re probably just building for next year.
As free agency goes, picking up Patriots castoffs is one way to build a team, I guess. Jimmy Garropolo – who I will always remember for throwing an interception with his eyes closed in the Super Bowl – will step in for Derek Carr, who was cut one year after he signed a three-year $100million+ extension. The Raiders also traded away one of the best tight-ends in the NFL for a third-round pick to the Giants. So, that’s cool, I guess. They franchise-tagged Joshua Jacobs, the first round pick running back whose fifth-year option on his rookie contract they opted not to trigger, who then proceeded to lead the NFL in rushing yards and total yards from scrimmage.
What I’m looking forward to watching more of are the Eagles and the Ravens, who have both locked-up their franchise quarterbacks with record setting deals, and the Saints who have my favorite quarterback (Raiders legend Derek Carr) as well as former USC, Eagles, and Raiders wide receiver Nelson Agholor (who had the best year of his career with DC in Oakland).
I had written this long thing about how the Baltimore Ravens needed to run Lamar Jackson his money, arguing about monopsonies and collusion from a perspective largely informed by a few ESPN podcasts, Bomani Jones’s HBO show, and The Athletic. But I don’t have to do that anymore, because the man has been paid.
I could go on about how Poole isn’t consistent enough to be the Warriors’ third option on offense and he isn’t great on defense, so we need Wiggins to step up on both sides of the court and Draymond to bring back some DPOY flashes or for DiVincenzo to come on like he did for the Villanova Wildcats in the 2018 NCAA tournament, but Kevon Looney is sick and limited and the game is starting in like two minutes. So go Dubs, we’ll see what happens.
There we have it. Sports!