Long shopping list not a guarantee for performance

Hope springs eternal, or so it does in the case of 34-year-old Chelsea manager Andre Villas Boas, it would appear.

Hot on the heels of a news item asserting that poor Fernando Torres, a £50-million (Dh284 million) fiasco at Stamford Bridge — somewhat consoled perhaps by his colossal salary — was available for a knock-down £20 million. Boas denied it. Torres, he declares, is not available at any price. For which you might cynically substitute unsaleable at any price.

Even if £20 million is so much less than Chelsea paid Liverpool for Torres, it still seems an enormous amount for a player who has been shooting blanks ever since he came to London.

When the ever voluble, volatile and contentious Villas Boas tells us that finding the net is always important for a striker, who would dare to disagree with him? When he insists, however, that "this is a talent that is never in doubt'" he is on less safe ground. It has alas been deeply in doubt ever since he came from Anfield. Though Liverpool themselves are reportedly paying ludicrous amounts of money on Torres' uneasy successor, Andy Carroll, even if he came for a ‘mere' £35 million. Hardly, so far, a bargain.

You do wonder if Chelsea's billionaire oligarch owner Roman Abramovich, for whom sums such as £50 million are chicken feed, has been looking over Villas Boas' shoulder. Though certainly the young Portuguese's position has been strengthened by the vital if somewhat fortuitous victory over Manchester City. Had that penalty been given as it should have been against Jose Bosingwa, for his foul in the box on David Silva, that could well have been 2-0 to City and surely curtains for a Chelsea team which till that point had been playing abysmally.

In parentheses, has there in recent memory been such a period of mistaken refereeing decisions? Week on week managers fume, and not in the image of Manchester United's Sir Alex Ferguson, who complains so often that it seems largely a tactic for exerting pressure on referees at large.

You do wonder though how Mike Riley came to be made the top referee, given the vicissitudes of his active career. Notably and even notoriously, the match at Old Trafford which not long since robbed Arsenal of the chance to go their 50th league game unbeaten, a plethora of decisions including a vital and dubious Manchester United penalty going against them.

Excessive criticism

It was, one recalls, a game in which Phil Neville, the United right-back, was allowed free reign to maltreat the young Arsenal Spanish left winger Jose Antonio Reyes without let or hindrance. Now Neville's brother Gary as a television commentator has incensed Villas Boas with his somewhat excessive criticism of Chelsea's Brazilian defender David Luiz. Yet wouldn't it have been better and more dignified to ignore what Neville said? And wouldn't it equally be better not to respond so vehemently to press criticism?

Villas Boas, in the course of the Man City game, sensibly and belatedly pulled back his team from a risky high line formation. It's said he wants to buy the players to pursue his favoured tactics. But tactics should purely be adapted to the players at hand.

The author is a football expert based in England