24 May 1, 2022The Sunday TimesSport
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[email protected]. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail [email protected]David
Walsh
Sir Jim Ratcliffe may
have been daft to leave
his £4.25 billion Chelsea
bid so late but it would
still be in the
club’s interests
to consider it.
This is a man who,
once committed,
tends to deliver
T
here was a moment during
the second half of the
Manchester United v
Chelsea game at Old
Trafford on Thursday
evening that had me
nodding in admiration.
Looking to play the ball
across goal midway through the
second half, Chelsea’s Reece James
raced towards the byline, United’s
Nemanja Matic shadowed him and
blocked the attempted cross before
both players then tumbled towards
the hoarding that separates the pitch
from the stand.
As they did, Matic stood on James’s
lower back. Not violently but
annoyingly. More irritating for James
was Matic grabbing his shirt and
holding on to it as they both rose to
their feet. James is 22, Matic is 33 and
you might have expected the younger
man to lose his composure and lash
out. It would have been
understandable. But James easily
resisted the temptation, instead
pushing Matic away while casting a
disdainful look in his direction.
It brought to mind something that
Nigel James said about his son’s
formative years. When Reece was at
the Chelsea academy, he trained
Monday to Friday, played a game on
Saturday, and Sunday was the
designated rest day. Except that Nigel
didn’t see it like that. At 7am on
Sundays, he and Reece got in the car,
drove from their home in Redbridge
to Bromley and went for a run.
Nigel James is a football coach and
he understood that Chelsea’s coaches
wouldn’t have been pleased about
that early-morning run. The boy didneed his rest but Nigel decided that
his mental strength had to be
nurtured. You could scour the world
of football for another 22-year-old
with the mentality of James and not
find one.
There is no wonder that Real
Madrid are interested in one day
taking him to the Bernabéu but that is
not likely to happen. The England
right back’s contract with Chelsea
runs to 2025 and because his present
salary doesn’t come close to his
market value, the club are keen to
quickly enhance and extend the deal.
He was nurtured by Chelsea and it
would be good to see him remain
there for years to come.
Which, of course, may be
somewhat dependent on Chelsea’s
new owners and what kind of club
we’re going to see in the post-Roman
Abramovich era. According to the
latest reports, the consortium led by
the American billionaire Todd
Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles
Dodgers baseball team, has been told
by the Raine Group, the New York
bank handling the sale, that it is the
preferred bidder.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the founder and
owner of the petro-chemical giant
Ineos, submitted a late bid that
committed to meet Abramovich’s
£2.5 billion asking price as well as
investing £1.75 billion in the club,
which would cover the cost of a new
stadium. Ratcliffe was born near
Manchester and in a Premier League
where British-owned clubs are a
minority, it would be good if his
application were seriously
considered. What is an extra week
when deciding which offer to accept?changed his mind? From the Raine
Group comes a sense that the offer
may have come too late.
That would be disappointing.
If Ratcliffe’s backing of Ben
Ainslie’s America’s Cup team and
Ineos Cycling has proved anything it
is that once he commits, he delivers
on the promises.
Under the Sky banner, the cost of
the cycling team had risen to
£40 million per year. As soon as
Ratcliffe got on board, the annual
budget went up to £50 million.
Ineos Grenadiers, as they are now
known, remain the best-funded team
in pro cycling. As for Ainslie, Ratcliffe
made him a financial offer that
encouraged him to sever ties with
previous backers and sponsors and
be answerable to just one person,
Ratcliffe. The Ratcliffe-Ainslie
partnership has had one shot at the
America’s Cup which didn’t go well
but there hasn’t been any public
expression of disappointment and
Ratcliffe has maintained his
considerable support.
It has been the same story with
Ineos Grenadiers. Two disappointing
efforts at the Tour de France have not
seen any fall-off in funding. On the
contrary, over the past year the team
have invested heavily in a roster of
extremely talented young riders who
are destined to win lots of races.
From this new generation, the team
are likely to produce the young rider
who will challenge Tadej Pogacar’s
eminence in the Tour de France.
My hope is that there is a way for
Ratcliffe’s offer to be seriously
considered. That would be in
Chelsea’s interests.Leicester v
Leinster can
bring back
Champions
Cup’s sparkle
There is a view that rugby’s
Champions Cup doesn’t have quite
the sparkle it once had. That may be
true and it is undeniable that Covid-
19 disruptions took their toll on the
primary club competition in
European rugby. And yet when
considering what next weekend’s
quarter-finals offer, it would be
difficult for any fan not to get
excited by Munster’s game against
the holders Toulouse at the Aviva
Stadium, Leicester Tigers’ match
against the favourites Leinster at
Welford Road and Sale’s
opportunity to knock out Racing 92
in Paris.
The Leicester v Leinster tie is the
one that stands out. Under Steve
Borthwick’s thoughtful and
meticulous team-building, Tigers
have returned to that place where
for so long they seemed to belong:
among the very best teams in the
country. The are a club again on the
rise and with a strong, combative
pack very much in the mould of the
Leicester team that won this
tournament in 2001 and 2002.
That side also won four
Premierships and though no one
yet envisages the current side
scaling those heights, they are going
to be serious challengers for some
time to come. They are certainly
good enough to ask serious
questions of Leinster and give us a
quarter-final to remember. From
the moment Leinster realised that
they would probably be going to
Welford Road, they’ve been
thinking about nothing else. They
know how tough it will be.
There is, too, the prospect of an
intriguing replay of the battle
fought between Ellis Genge and
Tadhg Furlong at Twickenham on
the occasion of England v Ireland in
the Six Nations in March. Genge
won that, out-scrummaging
Furlong and having a storming
game in the loose. Furlong felt
referee Mathieu Raynal made some
bad decisions related to scrum
infringements but that isn’t much
consolation to a prop who has been
part of a beaten scrum.
The Irish tight head will not want
a similar experience and he will be
relieved that Andrew Porter is now
fit again and holding up the other
side of Leinster’s scrum. The thing
about the Tigers, though, is that
they will not be bothered in the
slightest by who plays in the Irish
front row. At Welford Road they feel
entitled to dominate their rivals.
For Leinster the challenge is to
withstand the home team’s fervour
and physicality and still be able to
play their own expansive attacking
game.
That is easy to write down, not
so easy to achieve on Leicester’s
home patch. This should be a
compelling match.Ratcliffe’s bid was submitted well
after the deadline for would-be
buyers to signal their intentions and,
admittedly, this is a strange part of
this story. If nothing else, it shows
that even the most successful
businessmen can be as daft as the rest
of us. Four years ago, I had the
opportunity to ask Ratcliffe about
Chelsea. At the time it was reported
that he was interested in buying the
club, and this was a point when
Abramovich was considering selling.
Ratcliffe even visited the Chelsea
training ground but in the end, hedecided against making an offer. He
explained how he’d been prepared to
meet the £3 billion asking price but
baulked at the extra £1 billion it would
cost to build a new stadium, which he
considered to be an imperative. Four
billion was too much, he said.
Clearly, the hankering to own a top
European football club never left
him. What intrigues is the unknown.
How could a man who seriously
considered buying Chelsea four years
ago decide two months ago that he
wasn’t interesting in submitting an
offer and then, long after the
deadline had passed, change his
mind and put in a bid after all? WhatTwo disappointing
efforts for Ineos
Grenadiers at the
Tour de France have
not seen any fall-off
in fundingRatcliffe, who
has a stake in
the Mercedes
F1 team, gets
doused in
champagne
by Lewis
Hamilton after
their
constructors’
title win
last yearJAMES MOY/ALAMY*