Sack Them All!

The big news of the week, for me, anyway, was the firing of Jose Mourinho by the top brass at Chelsea Football Club. With the Blues floundering at the southern end of the Premier League table something had to give, and someone had to take the fall. Such is the way of big league football. From what I’ve seen since August, there are a number of Chelsea players who deserve to be banished to purgatory, but I also recognize that Mourinho bears some responsibility for the club’s abysmal form; Jose hasn’t had the swagger or conviction he displayed in years past. Instead he frequently displayed petulance and annoyance, and his post-match comments to the media often sounded self-pitying. 

Whether or not a cabal of Chelsea players actively tried to undermine Mourinho is a question many long time fans are asking on social media. I don’t know how to answer this question. Was the drop off in form on the part of Eden Hazard, Diego Costa, Cesc Fabregas and Nemanja Matic deliberate? Did they mail their performances in to strike back at Jose? Fans will never know the answer, only those players know what they did or didn’t do, and why, and it’s unlikely they will talk publicly. Diego Costa may exit the scene come the January transfer window, and I think Eden Hazard’s tour at Chelsea might also be drawing to an end.  

While Chelsea Football Club was going through this upheaval, the world continued to spin. The nitwit parade that is the campaign for the GOP presidential nomination rolled on, with bombastic Donald Trump and creepy Ted Cruz competing to prove which of them is keener to rain ordnance on Muslims. The would-be leaders of this country still don’t understand that we cannot bomb our way to peace with that relatively small segment of the Muslim world that commits acts of terrorism. The rhetoric that spews from the campaign trail like sludge from a busted sewer pipe is scary; none of the GOP aspirants is qualified to occupy the White House, but on the other hand, I don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from Hillary Clinton. Once again, the choice before the voters is the uninspiring lesser of all evils. Which candidate will be the least dishonest and detestable and demonic and detrimental to this country and the rest of the world?

The bar for the highest office in the kingdom is set so low that a witless blowhard like Donald Trump is taken seriously; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush should be laughed off the stage, but they too are treated like real candidates rather than the lightweight hacks that they really are.

What a sad state of affairs. If only politics were more like football! The American public could sack the Congress and the Senate for poor performance, a losing record and general, all-around cupidity.