This story cracked me up this morning. Arsenal’s draw with Southampton on Tuesday was lessened in its severity by Chelsea’s draw last night with West Ham (a shame Manchester City won again, but you can’t have everything).
Jose Mourinho was obviously beside himself with anger, and is quoted:
This is not the best league in the world, this is football from the 19th Century… The only [other] thing I could bring was a Black and Decker [tool] to destroy the wall.
So, apart from walking right into Eric Cantona territory with that Black and Decker thing, he labelled West Ham as playing “football from the 19th century”. Apparently, when he collared Sam Allardyce about it in the tunnel after the game, Sam was laughing.
It’s a bit rich coming from someone who waited until he’d played Manchester Utd twice before selling one of his best players to them (and before Arsenal had played them twice), when he could easily have got rid of the surplus a week or two before. Those are tactics straight out of the High Seas era of the 1700s.
Big Sam was not in any way gloating over the incident when he said on camera:
He can’t take it, can he? He can’t take it because we’ve outwitted him – he just can’t cope… He can tell me all he wants, I don’t care…. I love to see Chelsea players moaning at the referee, trying to intimidate him, Jose jumping up and down saying we play rubbish football… It’s brilliant when you get a result against him. Hard luck, Jose.
Touché.