Present Perfect Tense Article

GILES SMITH’S MIDWEEK VIEW

Before he heads off to where the sun shines brightly and where the sea is blue, it is time for columnist Giles Smith's final take on the week just gone and, indeed, on the season as a whole…

So, somehow the season managed to end with a bang AND a whimper. Typically people warn you to expect one or the other. But we got both. That's the kind of season it's been, I suppose.

The whimper came in the form of the team's performance at Everton, which couldn't have said 'We're all going on a summer holiday' more clearly if it had featured Cliff Richard in the holding role, with a back four comprising Hank Marvin, Una Stubbs, Ron Moody and a double decker bus.

The bang was the firing of Carlo Ancelotti that almost immediately followed it. Something you didn't necessarily need to have been Mystic Meg to see coming, but which nevertheless delivered a stark jolt and a lasting pang of sadness when it happened.

That Ancelotti is a man of thorough decency and rare humanity it goes without saying. Show me someone who doesn't like Carlo Ancelotti, the person, and I'll show you someone I don't like. The club was ennobled and lent class by association with him, which hasn't always been the case.

Moreover, his autobiography is, by a streak, the best book ever written by a football manager. It's funny on every page. If you haven't read it, you should do so now, as a mark of respect.

He was brilliant enough to deliver the Double in his first season, inserting himself permanently into Chelsea's history. And if he had found a way to manage that absurd power-outage that afflicted the squad in the middle of this season - the 'moment' which lasted two months - we would still be champions and he would still be our manager.

It's been pointed out, of course, that we finished as runners-up, even so. By extension, people have dwelt on the supposed brutality of sacking a man for coming second in the Premier League - nominally the toughest league in Europe - and it's easy to see how, looked at from a distance, the move could seem a little impatient. Presumptuous, even.

But, of course, the truth is we all know what a peculiar and under-powered season this has been pretty much right across the board. The only sides who came out with anything like credit were Blackpool, who went down, and Wolves, who nearly joined them. Emblematically, for the first time, the football writers' player of the season (Scott Parker) came from a side who were eventually relegated (West Ham), and the players' player of the season (Gareth Bale) spent most of the season injured. Look no further than those details for evidence of how this year failed to spark.

It was a dull, sluggish term, characterised, in the main, by unexceptional performances by teams from whom one would have expected far better. Not quite as unexceptional, generally, as our performance at Everton, it's true - but not that far off.

Accordingly, you have to make adjustments and allowances. This year, under the terms of even the most generous analysis, first place was pretty much fourth place, by normal standards. (United's points total this season wouldn't even have got them into second place in our championship year of 2004/05, nor would it have been enough to achieve third place the year after, when we won it again.)

Second place felt, this time, like about seventh. There was, accordingly, less satisfaction to be found in it and less credit to be drawn from it than there might usually have been. Even Liverpool under Kenny Dalglish, for heaven's sake, somehow managed to finish sixth (roughly 18th, in real terms).

Meanwhile, failure in the Champions League was widely said to have 'sealed Ancelotti's fate', but I somehow doubt it. The Champions League is (eventually) a knock-out competition and nobody can categorically expect to win those. As those of us who travelled to Moscow know only too intimately, anything can happen in cup football and frequently does. And if the capriciousness of the draw hands you the misfortune to meet Manchester United in the quarter-finals, it can hardly be turned into a judgement against you if it goes narrowly wrong on the back of an un-given penalty in the first leg.

Failure to win the league, though, from a 15-point position of strength at one stage, with Chelsea's kind of resources to hand, and in this of all years, the puniest Premier League of all time, with all likely rivals going nearly nuts in the effort to shoot themselves in the foot, again and again… well, this probably can be accounted the kind of motivational shortfall on which a man, however patently and shiningly decent, can lose his job.

And so the club now turns its attention to the tough and critical task of finding Mr Ancelotti's replacement, a topic on which I have nothing particular to add to what everyone else is saying, besides letting you know that I have immediately appointed myself acting chairman and treasurer of the Anyone But Harry Association.

I'll publish any relevant minutes from this ad hoc society's meetings in this space at the beginning of next season, by which time, hopefully, the association will have long since been dissolved, all of us will be feeling entirely refreshed, a new regime will be in place, and the 'eager anticipation' meter will once again be pointing at the place on the dial marked 'almost unbearable'.