Has Kepa Arrizabalaga changed football?
When Maurizio Sarri tried and failed to take Kepa Arrizabalaga off the field at Wembley on Sunday, many were outraged at Kepa’s refusal to obey the instruction from his manager.
With Willy Caballero waiting to come on and do what he had previously done for Manchester City in a final, Kepa held his ground, refusing the manager’s command and adding a few more layers of misery onto Sarri’s situation.
Some people felt sorry for him but why? Sarri was not a mascot, as Dion Fanning insists on today’s Football Spin.
His job is to manager and make decisions and if he is not capable of executing a decision like this then he has no business being a manager, especially at a club like Chelsea where scenting weakness is one of the core values.
If anything, he should have kept walking when he headed for the tunnel as Kepa was refusing his instructions. Sarri’s race is run and there might have been something more noble in hearing that he had got out early, beaten the traffic and was on a tube home or to the airport, instead of watching whatever agonies and humiliations Sarri has to go through before, surely, he is fired.
Is this the start of a new revolution in football? Will Kepa’s defiance be seen as another significant moment in the development of the game or is it just another sign of how bad things are at Chelsea?
Certainly, it should mean the end of Sarri, according to Fanning, who says that there is no defence for a manager who has failed at something so fundamental to his job.
Luckily, Chelsea have the ideal candidate if they don’t want people taking shit. Have events conspired to make John Terry the ideal candidate for the job as they search for some authority?
Reuben Pinder of JOE.co.uk agreed that Terry’s stock is rising simply because of Chelsea’s circumstances which mean they can’t rebuild as Sarri wants them to rebuild.
While some people have sympathy for Sarri, there wasn’t much knocking around The Football Spin studio.
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