The Official Thread of Chelsea FC

[Jonah]

Chelsea really are a horrible club,rotten to the core.
Fans,players and owners are all the same at that club.

[Norf Tyrone]

Sweet geezus boys. Park your anti- Chelsea agenda, and that of the media and deal with what happened.

1. Ramires mistakenly heard Clattenburg call Mikel an abusive name, rumoured to be 'monkey'.
2. Ramires tells Mikel what he heard post the game. Remember Mikel has just lost an important game, and with the major fuel of a racist allegation heads to confront Clattenburg.
3. Chelsea's Ron Gourley is summoned to the scene, however the damage is done, and the allegation is already doing the rounds in media circles.
4. Within minutes Chelsea's PR dept are fending off stories from the media.
5. Chelsea are forced to issue a statement re what happened, and the allegation. Failure to act quickly would've seen Chelsea accused of a cover up.
6. Chelsea, and this is important, follow the FA's guidelines and report the incident to the FA's observer at the game. They followed the FA's own guidelines.
7. Chelsea seek independant legal advice on the Monday who state that they should and are obliged to follow through on the accusation.
8. Chelsea comply with all the FA's requests re the case, and the case is dropped.

Chelsea probably should've added to their statement that 'we apologise to Mark Clattenburg for any offence caused etc etc'. However the onus on this is probably with Ramires or possibly Mikel. In addition Mikel should'nt have charged into the ref's room. However ask yourself if you'd just lost a game, and someone had said that the ref had called you 'a Paddy' something or another. How would you have reacted?

Chelsea as a Club did nothing wrong in this instance. They were damned if they did, and damned if they didn't.

What could Chelsea have done differently?
Why should Chelsea compensate Clattenburg for following FA rules!?
Did United compensate the Chelsea groundsman for accusing him of the same offence?
Was Mike Phelan asked to apoligise to the Chelsea groundsman?
Should Torres sue Clattenburg who accused him of being a cheat?

[laoislad]

Good man Norf   
Do ever take these off!

[Norf Tyrone]

Good man Norf   
Do ever take these off!

Only when Rafa's boss.

[ONeill]

You have to ask though - Is John Terry behind this all? Did he start the rumour?

[ziggy90]

Sweet geezus boys. Park your anti- Chelsea agenda, and that of the media and deal with what happened.

1. Ramires mistakenly heard Clattenburg call Mikel an abusive name, rumoured to be 'monkey'.
2. Ramires tells Mikel what he heard post the game. Remember Mikel has just lost an important game, and with the major fuel of a racist allegation heads to confront Clattenburg.
3. Chelsea's Ron Gourley is summoned to the scene, however the damage is done, and the allegation is already doing the rounds in media circles.
4. Within minutes Chelsea's PR dept are fending off stories from the media.
5. Chelsea are forced to issue a statement re what happened, and the allegation. Failure to act quickly would've seen Chelsea accused of a cover up.
6. Chelsea, and this is important, follow the FA's guidelines and report the incident to the FA's observer at the game. They followed the FA's own guidelines.
7. Chelsea seek independant legal advice on the Monday who state that they should and are obliged to follow through on the accusation.
8. Chelsea comply with all the FA's requests re the case, and the case is dropped.

Chelsea probably should've added to their statement that 'we apologise to Mark Clattenburg for any offence caused etc etc'. However the onus on this is probably with Ramires or possibly Mikel. In addition Mikel should'nt have charged into the ref's room. However ask yourself if you'd just lost a game, and someone had said that the ref had called you 'a Paddy' something or another. How would you have reacted?

Chelsea as a Club did nothing wrong in this instance. They were damned if they did, and damned if they didn't.

What could Chelsea have done differently?
Why should Chelsea compensate Clattenburg for following FA rules!?
Did United compensate the Chelsea groundsman for accusing him of the same offence?
Was Mike Phelan asked to apoligise to the Chelsea groundsman?
Should Torres sue Clattenburg who accused him of being a cheat?

Or you could say as Roy Keane is supposedly to have retorted to Paul Ince when he supposedly said this to him. "Could be worse".

[Lecale2]

Has this anything to do with Roberto di Matteo being sacked?

[Captain Obvious]

Clattenburg unlikely to ref another Chelsea game and the blues will be happy with that outcome.

[Norf Tyrone]

Clattenburg unlikely to ref another Chelsea game and the blues will be happy with that outcome.

Do you think this was some conspiracy that Mikel and Ramires dreamed up to stop Clattenburg reffing another Chelsea game?

Again, bar Mikel losing his temper post game, no one can reason what Chelsea, in the circumstances, couldv'e done differently.

[EC Unique]

Clattenburg unlikely to ref another Chelsea game and the blues will be happy with that outcome.

Do you think this was some conspiracy that Mikel and Ramires dreamed up to stop Clattenburg reffing another Chelsea game?

Again, bar Mikel losing his temper post game, no one can reason what Chelsea, in the circumstances, couldv'e done differently.

True Norf, Chelsea's hand was sort of forced on it but they should of bad the decency to mention Clattenberg in today's statement. He has been dragged through the muck on this a seems he did nothing wrong.

[Norf Tyrone]

Clattenburg unlikely to ref another Chelsea game and the blues will be happy with that outcome.

Do you think this was some conspiracy that Mikel and Ramires dreamed up to stop Clattenburg reffing another Chelsea game?

Again, bar Mikel losing his temper post game, no one can reason what Chelsea, in the circumstances, couldv'e done differently.

True Norf, Chelsea's hand was sort of forced on it but they should of bad the decency to mention Clattenberg in today's statement. He has been dragged through the muck on this a seems he did nothing wrong.

I agree with that.

[under the bar]

Chelsea FC = pig
Todays statement = grunt

[Norf Tyrone]

Did the Manc pigs ever apologise to Sam Bethnell?

[Estimator]

From The Guardian

Chelsea say case is closed but keep their counsel on Mark ClattenburgIt is wrong to demonise Chelsea but club should at least acknowledge the impact on traumatised referee

Daniel Taylor The Guardian, Thursday 22 November 2012
Mark Clattenburg has suffered a lot since he was accused of racially abusing Chelsea's Mikel John Obi.
To put it into context, the player making the allegation speaks barely a word of English. Ramires, brought up in Barra do Piraí, understands the basics – hello, goodbye and so on – and has come to know all the usual football phrases, but little more. Journalists interviewing him use a translator even for the more basic questions. David Luiz performs the role for Ramires in the Chelsea dressing room, where the Brazilian is regarded as a fairly straightforward, decent guy.

His accusation was that Mark Clattenburg said: "Shut up you monkey," to Mikel John Obi, and he has stuck by it even when it became apparent nobody within earshot heard anything of the sort. Nobody, it turns out, can even pinpoint a moment when Ramires might have misheard something. There was no "shut up Mikel", or anything similar.

All that can be said with great certainty is that Clattenburg has suffered the consequences. Goodness knows what it has been like for him over the past three and a half weeks and, at the very least, Chelsea might have offered a few sympathetic words in the statement they put out 40 minutes or so before getting on with the business of Rafael Benítez's entrance.

Nothing too fancy, just some form of recognition about the human suffering that has been endured.

Clattenburg's statement described it as "the most stressful time of my professional life", using the emotive language that is rarely found in releases from Premier League HQ. "To know you were innocent of something but that there was the opportunity for it to wreck your career was truly frightening," he added. Chelsea's contained a few lines explaining their position, finishing with a sentence about their commitment to working with referees, but not a single word about the man they had accused of racially abusing their player.

"The club accepts the case is now concluded," it says. Which is a lot different to accepting he didn't do it.

He did not, of course, and the verdict should be of little surprise to anyone who has followed this case closely. Few people believed it at the time and, as more details have emerged, it became increasingly clear the evidence was thin, to say the least. The FA's investigators took 11 witness statements and nobody corroborated Ramires's story. They studied previously unseen television footage of the relevant match, Chelsea's 3-2 defeat against Manchester United, and it showed nothing. Clattenburg had key witnesses in the two linesmen and fourth official who were linked to him by microphone. If this were a police matter and the Crown Prosecution Service had allowed it to get to court, we would be talking about a flagrant misuse of taxpayers' money.

Yet it is wrong, too, to demonise Chelsea. They will be braced for a good kicking. It has become their default position more times than they will care to remember and, yes, it is clear they have made mistakes. But football is so quick to look for guilty parties it rarely stops to consider that maybe it is not quite that straightforward, as messy and unsatisfactory as it all is. What, after all, were Chelsea supposed to do if one of their players was adamant he had heard a team-mate being racially abused?

Ramires was so convinced it persuaded an incensed Mikel to go looking for Clattenburg, storming into the referee's room in the bowels of Stamford Bridge and causing the scene that has left the Nigerian facing his own FA misconduct charge.

Two lines jump out in the FA's statement. The first is that "the player and club were correct in reporting the matter". The second states Ramires made the allegation "in good faith", pointing out "it is entirely possible for a witness to be genuinely mistaken and convincing in his belief".

Clattenburg, unfortunately for him, has had to live through the consequences but the alternative, from Chelsea's perspective, was to keep it internal. Hush it up, in other words. What, then, if it had come out?

Chelsea, remember, have a culture of leaks. Just imagine, on the back of the John Terry affair, if it had got out that they had tried to suppress another racism story. It would have been a scandal.

This is not to say that Chelsea's conduct is not deserving of scrutiny when, to cite one example, someone in a position of power ordered that the story should be briefed. Clattenburg touches upon this in his statement, pointing out "the ramifications of allegations of this nature" being made public before the formal process. He has spent a large part of the past month behind closed curtains at home, with television crews camped on the lawn. His doorbell has been pressed first thing in the morning and last thing at night. The same for his relatives, too.

He will not sue because it would mean having to give up his career, or at least put it on hold, when there is still every chance he will be officiating at the World Cup in 2014, but Alan Leighton of the referees' union Prospect is adamant that Clattenburg deserves some form of compensation.

Clattenburg has, for starters, lost thousands of pounds in match fees. But this is about more than those blank weekends. "Compensation for the stress," Leighton says. "Compensation for walking down the street and knowing people are thinking: 'Aah, there goes the racist referee.' His reputation has been trashed." It is no surprise that Chelsea have already indicated they will turn down the request and will quickly move on.

Clattenburg wants to do the same now, but there will be conditions attached. His bosses will keep him off Chelsea games for the immediate future. He can probably live with that but it also means that, if Chelsea reach a Wembley final this season, his chances of refereeing it are somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. "I hope no referee has to go through this in the future," he says

[deiseach]

Accusing Norf Tyrone of being one-eyed when it comes to Chelsea is playing the man, not the ball. His fundamental question - what were Chelsea meant to do when one of their players came to them saying he believed he had been racially abused by the ref? - is a valid one. Heck, they can't even hang Ramires out to dry over this because even the FA are saying he made his accusation in good faith!