Tommy Martin: Where would Chelsea be if everyone swept the sheds?
MIND GAME: Mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka during a New Zealand All Blacks Training Session. Picture: Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
Chelsea’s recent comings and goings – but mainly comings – have been all the talk of the football world.
Since taking over in the aftermath of the dramatic departure Roman Abramovich, the club’s American owners have swaggered around the football marketplace buying up everything in sight, behaving like, I don’t know, the owners of Chelsea football club or something.
Mind you, by spending more in January than all the clubs in La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga combined, Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital make even Abramovich in his heyday look like a thrifty Scots widow who hangs tea bags out on the line to dry.
Quite what the American hedge fund whizzes are up to with their massive fees, complex amortisation arrangements and mostly fresh-faced transfer targets has been the subject of much debate. Most analysts have concluded that either the Yanks are far-seeing shrewdies who have spotted inefficiencies in the market or that they have all the investment nous of a man returning from the grocery shop with the entire contents of the Aldi middle aisle.
In the midst of all that transfer shock and awe, it scarcely attracted much notice that Chelsea had also recruited a man called Gilbert Enoka in a short-term consultancy role. Enoka previously worked as leadership manager for the All Blacks, implementing their famous ‘no dickheads’ policy, which is seen as a cornerstone of the team culture that helped New Zealand win the 2011 and 2015 Rugby World Cups.
It doesn’t say much for the personal qualities of the bunch of new players loitering around the building that the people at Chelsea suddenly felt the need for a professional dickhead eliminator. Still, we await with interest the first images of multi-millionaire Blues stars earnestly sweeping out Premier League dressing rooms in the manner made famous by the All Blacks.
But while an emphasis on creating a winning culture with intrinsic values of humility and decency is to be applauded, one wonders whether the Chelsea owners really understand the club, whether they get the grand traditions of the Stamford Bridge outfit. After all, where would Chelsea be without dickheads?
Take this quote from Enoka, explaining his definition of a sporting ‘dickhead’. "People putting themselves ahead of the team, people who think they're entitled to things or expect the rules to be different for them, people operating deceitfully in the dark, or being unnecessarily loud about their work."
Seriously, Jose Mourinho can hear you, man.
It’s not just the greatest Chelsea manager of the modern era who might feel his ears burning with news of this new approach. The presence of dickheads has been a cornerstone of Chelsea’s success for well over two decades now, none more prominent than the club’s legendary former captain, John Terry.
Whatever his undoubted qualities as a centre-half and dressing room leader, Terry’s off-field rap sheet does make for a rather compelling character study. Whether it’s the unseemly business with Wayne Bridge, being found guilty by the English FA of racially abusing Anton Ferdinand in October 2011, selling private tours of the Chelsea training ground for cash, his full-kit antics after the 2012 Champions League final, or, most recently, hawking naff monkey NFTs on Twitter, Terry has been an enduring example of a very specific Chelsea type. Captain, Leader, Legend, Bit of a Dickhead.
Indeed, it might be said that in captaining Chelsea during their glory years, Terry was only drawing on the club’s long established dickhead traditions, including the virulently racist Chelsea Headhunters hooligan group, controversial former chairman Ken Bates (who tried to erect an electric fence around the Stamford Bridge pitch) and famous fans like Gordon Ramsey, Tim Lovejoy and Jeremy Clarkson.
To be fair, there is more to Chelsea’s status as a regular challenger for top honours than just being a bunch of dickheads. In fact, the skilful integration of non-dickheads into successive Blues squads has long been key to bringing trophies to Stamford Bridge, since the days when lovable Gianfranco Zola was captained by not-so-lovable Dennis Wise.
So it was that a team that could have Terry as its charmless figurehead could also accommodate our own noted non-dickhead, Damien Duff. Later, N’Golo Kanté, by all accounts the most wonderful human being ever to snuff out an opposition counterattack, could share a dressing room with Diego Costa, whom you would dread to imagine what he might do if you handed him a broom and asked him to sweep the sheds.
Nonetheless, a good, strong dickhead ethos has come to be seen as the sine qua non of great Chelsea teams. Thus, as Graham Potter struggles to impose his vision and integrate the plethora of fresh faces, seasoned observers have wondered whether he has enough of the qualities that brought Mourinho, Antonio Conte and Thomas Tuchel silverware at the club. Sure, Potter has a master’s degree in emotional intelligence, but could he not be a bit more of a dickhead?
Ultimately, if successfully implemented, the new ‘no-dickheads’ policy might be seen as the final break with the Abramovich era. Let’s face it, you don’t get to where the former Chelsea owner got to in life, with his seemingly endless billions in Siberian mineral wealth, his strategic position in the orbit of Vladimir Putin and his ruthless disregard for underperforming managers, without having a strong strain of the dickhead about you.
Some rival fans might even see the recruitment of Gilbert Enoka as another example of arriviste American owners misunderstanding long-held English football traditions. After all, they might say, if you get rid of the dickheads from Chelsea, who would be left?
