As no other team in their right mind will pay his wages (or even half of them), our friend Bogey has come out with his semi-annual statement on his website that he intends to stay at Chelsea and fight for a first team place. Of course he goes on with his sob story of how he feels wronged and that given the chance he could return to the for he showed at Barca in his prime. Sorry Winston but you are living in the past. BAWA asked who signed the expensive boot boy, and no one is sure whether it was Hutch's idea or Bates forced him to. Whichever is the truth, the signing forced a split between Vialli and management that could not be healed. I am happy to say that the time has finally come when clubs are realizing that long-term contracts can also have bad implications as well as good ones. A 4-year deal that pays someone 35k+ to train with the reserves is a cancer that eats a hole in the team's account books and morale. Do you think we would be having the recent issues with Dalla Bona, Gallas and Gudjohnsen if they didn't see fat Winston collecting double their wages every week? I think the problem would be lessened at least. There is only one solution based on the following factors: 1. Winston will never leave if he is to be paid less than his current salary. 2. Even if all our CB's were injured, Claudio would still not pick him to play. He would prefer to play Kitamirike, Di Cesare, Petit or Stanic bakc there instead. 3. We cannot release him or we will bne on the hook to pay the last 2 years salary. The ONLY solution is to send him off for free to another team and offer to pay part of his wages. I would suggest we offer up to half of them. At leats that way we will only be throwing away 17.5k per week instead of 35k per week. The longer we wait, the more money it costs us. This should have been done last season but maybe Hutch blocked the idea. Birch needs to get off his ass and get this accomplished.
The Bogarde situation confuses me, at first I had thought completely ignoring his existence was a tactic intended to frustrate him into leaving the club, but not giving him the opportunity to play seems to have only made him more undesirable to any potential suitors. Plus there are other well paid players who are hardly regulars and we have no qualms about playing them, Stanic comes to mind. Think something that hasn't come out must have happened, a clash with Ranieri perhaps?
Possibly I think the final straw was when management had a deal worked out with a Dutch team early last season and Bogarde nixed it. Since then he's been linked with Celtic and Anderlecht but I think both teams balked at paying all of his wages, even if there was no transfer fee. Here's one small report from Soccernet that isn't a rumour of Chelsea's demise. Amazing how they can make a positive thing like blooding the youth seem like a negative. All those years of being put down for buying overaged foreign players and as soon as we decide not to buy any and play products of our youth system, the hyenas attack us for doing exactly what they said we should have done in the past. http://www.soccernet.com/england/news/2002/073 1/20020731cfcranieri.html I wish there was another influential pro-Chelsea person in the media besides Mellor.