Perhaps the most extraordinary thing to have happened this week was this ghastly video released by Chelsea Football Club. It seems that this particular Academy Award winning piece of celluloid was in response to the outrageous suggestion that by keeping a half dozen thugs behind the ball at all times, exercising extreme caution, waiting for the opposition to make mistakes rather than attempting to win the game means that perhaps Chelsea are a touch on the boring side of listening to a Sol Campbell political speech.
The video is shocking in the extreme. Perchance the the most surprising piece of evidence to emerge since their invention in 2003, you might say Which is really saying something for a club which harbours racist thugs, shoots junior employees and so on. In the video, quite extraordinarily, their club captain, Mr. John Terry, can be found sitting at the same table as not one, not two, but three black people.
To add further intrigue to this remarkable film, when they finally reach their apparent aim, that is, to head a football into a wastepaper basket, Mr. Terry seemingly embraces his colleagues. Truly, this is a redemption on the scale of Boaz in the Book of Ruth.
As a postscript, why should it be such an achievement for some of the finest exponents of football to head a football into a wastepaper basket? You would think, by their hilariously joyous reaction, that one of them had successfully added the numbers five and six together, or put the triangular toy through the triangular hole. But heading a football competently? Is that not like a bricklayer celebrating a straight line of bricks?
We stay with Stamford Bridge’s finest this week as John Terry has been further treating us to his views on the style of ‘play’ employed by his club. Chelsea have been a class act, he says. And surely this pint-glass urinating, disabled space parking, 9-11 mocking bouncer-hitting colleague-cuckolding son of a drug dealer and a shoplifter would know all there is to know about being a class act.
To more lighthearted news now. It may have reached readers’ eyeballs this week that young Maitland-Niles, of the Shropshire Maitland-Niles, has had had something of a toe-staring moment with his mother, dear old Binky Maitland-Niles, also known as Baroness Shrewsbury. As those of you who read the society pages of The Telegraph, and indeed Tatler will know, Maitland-Niles’ mater has always been something of a firebrand.
The youngest of the famous Maitland-Niles sisters, infamous for their pre-wartime dalliance with Mr. Hitler, Binky had affairs with a Churchill, a Cunard, several Dukes and a Hungarian prince. She was quite the toast of London, and not a Berkeley Square cocktail party was complete without her. She was a champion fencer, show-jumper and rifle shot. So it should have been no surprise when her Bentley rolled up at the training ground and threatened to withdraw the young chap from a match.
The lovely old crow had quite the contretemps with both Dick Law and her son’s agent. Reminds me of the time we were at the Duke of Westminster’s 40th and she saw the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire across the room and went flying for her like a fighting cock. Had to be pulled off and chained up in the cold store for a couple of hours to cool off.
The constabulary were called and she was slung in the back of the Maria but released later. No doubt the small mammals and birdlife on her estate are quaking at the prospect of a vengeful Duchess on the warpath this weekend.
I wonder if Mr. Windsor has sounded her out about the possibility of a defensive midfield role? Would have loved to have seen her inflict superficial injuries, and a few serious ones, on Mr. Fabregas last weekend, especially after his scurrilous ‘Judas Jump’ in the penalty box. And when he raises the Premier League trophy, imagine an asterisk tattooed on his forehead and those of his colleagues.
For the only reason they triumph is someone else’s money.
