Chelsea: jealous Mourinho says FA love money even more then Arsenal
Jose Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, has been fined £50,000 and threatened with a stadium ban for criticising referees. Yep, just 50 grand. Jose Mourinho is a profitable business for the FA. They must hope he stays in the job and keeps talking and talking. His offence was to say referees are “afraid” to award penalties to his team, following a 3-1 home defeat by Southampton. The FA’s fine system is pretty opaque, but we can reveal that if Mourinho calls the referee a “scaredy-cat” the FA can order new silk carpets for their Zanzibar beach office.
At a press conference to launch his new book, Mourinho invited the media “to get deep” into the workings of the FA disciplinary department.
“You should get deep.You should go. You should be honest. You shouldn’t be afraid to write, you won’t be punished. Every word I say is a risk. I am happy I don’t have an electronic tag. I think it’s not far from that. I also think that £50,000 in the world where we live today is an absolute disgrace. An absolute disgrace. And I also think that the possibility of getting a stadium ban is also something absolutely astonishing. But more difficult for me to understand is when I compare different people with different behaviours or with similar behaviours, with different words or with similar words.”
He means Arsene Wenger, of course, the Arsenal manger who seems to occupy a place deep below Mourinho’s skin. Wenger called Mike Dean “weak and naive” when the weak and confused referee made a complete hash of this season’s Chelsea v Arsenal match, sending off the wrong player and letting the right player who should have seen red stay on the pitch. No fine for Wenger. “The difference is £50,000 and one-match stadium ban,” says Mourinho.
“The word ‘afraid’ is a punishment, and a hard punishment. But to say the referee was ‘weak and naive’, referring to one of the top referees in this country and in Europe, we can do. Weak and naive, you can use. And in this country, a word [afraid] is more important than aggression. So now we know. We can push people in the technical area, no problem.”
That’s a reference to when Mourinho and Wenger had a tiff at pitch-side.
We can only wonder what would happen should the FA offer its legal services to hairdressers, tabloid columnists or religionists. As Craig Brown notes:
One of the cattiest memoirs of recent years was the preeningly titled Know The Truth by George Carey, the spud-faced former Archbishop of Canterbury…
Carey took sideways digs at no fewer than three of his fellow Bishops, among them the Bishop of Peterborough (‘popular with the media . . . but he worried me by his tendency to pour doubt on all diocesan efforts to raise funds or enthusiasm’), the Bishop of Durham (‘his concerns were not always grounded in real life’) and the Bishop of Sheffield (‘another whose eloquence was often unintentionally destructive’).
Nor did he withdraw his claws from those of other denominations. At one point, he described a meeting between the Queen, to whom Carey is, of course, always unctuous, and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who had, he noted, a ‘menacing beard’. The Queen, he wrote, ‘patiently endured the Patriarch’s rather lengthy answers’. Miaow!
If the FA ran the Church of England disciplinary committees, a bankrupted Carey would be living off donations.
Posted: 16th, October 2015 | In: Chelsea, Key Posts, Reviews, Sports Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
