Adeus Jose

Jose and Roman during happier times

I got a shock yesterday during Marketing class yesterday.

Jose Mourinho was sacked!

It came really as a big surprise to me although the writings had been on the wall for some time already.

Despite his arrogance and ego, this man is a winner.

He managed to instill the winning mentality into the Chelsea team during his tenure and 2 League titles, 2 League cups and 1 FA Cup aren't too bad for a club of Chelsea's stature.

However Roman isn't easily satisfied. The billionaire wants a Champions' League title for all the hundreds of millions he splurged on Chelsea. If Chelsea had won the CL, he will probably continue to tolerate the boring football or Jose's mistreatment of his good friend Andriy.

Towards the end of his time at Chelsea, Jose received little support from his boss. Roman insisted Sheva to be played and refused Jose spare change to buy Ben Haim. Many of the Chelsea duds are forced on to him: Boulahrouz immediately came to the mind.

It is really quite perplexing to see how winning teams disintegrate. It was the same type of politics that drove Rafa to quit Valencia after leading them to 2 La Liga titles. Likewise similar things are unfolding at Spurs despite Martin Jol's impressive record of 2 consecutive 5th place finishes.

Teams like Man Utd or Arsenal don't face this kind of problem because the manager is the sole power of authority. Troubles often begin when more people try to undermine the manager's work.

Just as Prof Menkhoff puts it, a lot of things are actually common sense but not common practices. Jose must be bitter being a victim of such politics.

English football loses a colourful character and I will miss his delightful post-match interviews.

Although I hate his arrogance, I will not mind him coming back to spice up EPL again.

Adeus Jose~

An Update Finally

I realized that I haven't been blogging for quite some time. It wasn't because that nothing happened and it was more of a case of me being lazy. Anyway I will do an update for myself.

I've attended 2 Thai lessons at the CC already. I can say that I know a little bit more Thai as compared to before attending the classes. School so far is still manageable; I still manage to find the time to make a trip across the causeway yesterday. LOL....

Before writing about the JB trip, I must bring up something amazing which happened last Sunday. I had a primary school gathering.

Yes...

That's right...

PRIMARY SCHOOL GATHERING!!!

Shaun (yeah the MRF one) is in the same marketing class as me now and he was the one who informed me about the gathering. The turnout was good; one-sixth or 7 of the Holy Innocents' Primary 6A1 '97 turned up. There were classmates whom I haven't seen for TEN freaking years.

It was kind of awkward at first because most of us hadn't seen one another for like so long already. However the ice was broken when they all started to talk about the things that happened in primary school. (I wasn't really involved because I can't recall most of the things that they were talking about.) Their memories were truly amazing; Cheryl could even remember the register numbers!!!

Anyway it seemed that everybody present that day are all doing quite well; the girls are either graduating or working already and the guys aren't doing not too bad either. One of my old classmates Terry is an A*Star Graduate Scholar; she will be studying for her PhD at Imperial College soon.

6A1 '97 - 10 years after...
From left: Yimin, Terry, Cheryl, Me, Shaun, Reynard and Yihong

It was great catching up with them and hopefully the next gathering won't be 10 years from now.

Wednesday was my free day but instead of catching up with my work, I chose to spend it across the Causeway with the Tebrau brothers and Lewis.

Under the influence of the rest, I got an Astroboy shirt at 39rm which I felt was quite value-for-money. I also got to find out the cost of making contact lens there so perhaps I will make a new pair next trip there.

We caught a movie as usual. Initially we thought the ticket should be 6rm but yesterday was the public holiday's eve. (Today is public holiday because the Muslims begin fasting.) I prefer Rouge Assassin but the rest wanted to watch Evan Almighty.

The movie did live up to the reviews: it wasn't nearly as good as the 1st instalment and Bruce Almighty was not too good to start with. Many of the jokes fall flat but there was this conversation which God brought up:

"Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient?"

"If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous?'

"If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?"

It was indeed a point to ponder.

As usual we ended up with eating 4 meals: Lunch at Secret Recipe (So-so... ate the Brownie Ice-cream again), satay at Komtar (kambing very tender... bagus...), one teppanyaki set shared among 4 people at Food Junction (not very nice; eating for the thrill of eating) and last but not least seafood dinner at Tebrau again.

This time round we didn't order a lot: Veg + crayfish + stingray + frogs' legs. The total cost inclusive of rice and drinks was 109rm which was pretty reasonable. We managed to reach Woodlands checkpoint by 9.15pm and I got home at 10.20pm very much knackered out.

So we managed to do it again: yet another safe trip to the dangerous cowboy town of JB.

Smooth

Things are happening fast and furious in school despite being only the 2nd week of the term. Well I won't want to go deeper in that because it will only get more depressing.

Anyway I was chatting to one of the girls from my FTB group on MSN last night. Let's just call her A. Out of the blue she asked me whether I know this senior facilitator. In order to protect his identity he will be just be known as W.

Alright let's go back to the story. The setting was the Freshmen Bash at MOS. W approached A with the question "Are you from SMU?" A replied "Yeah." and chatted a while with W and then continued whatever she was doing.

Moments later, another guy (presumably W's friend) tapped A on her shoulder and asked her whether his friend (W) could be friends with her. A replied (without much thinking as usual) no and then continued whatever she was doing.

A had a shock the following day when she past by W's poster (shit... this clue is damn obvious). Kinda freaky... She also started to feel guilty for being such an unfriendly and bad person and even promised to apologize to W if she ever runs into him.

Well I didn't doubt the story but somehow I had a deep suspicion that W either couldn't see properly under the dark lights in MOS or was already drunk by then. LOL...

This brings me to another senior facilitator who would only be codenamed X. X is those kind of guys who can buaya very well. (Yeah and I think he easily beats Kok Wai.)

I saw his exploits first hand and could only gasped in awe. Perhaps W could pick up a thing or two from X the ultimate smooth operator.