Blue is the colour, thuggery is the game

On Sunday afternoon at Elland Road, in a moment of distilled, two-footed, studs-raised malevolence apparently designed to break an opponent's leg, a cultured young Channel Islander crystallised a question bubbling away like unstable acid in a test tube for a while: has Chelsea become the nastiest football club in England?

That the question was posed by Graeme Le Saux, the England wing back better known for his love of theatre and The Guardian than his ability to whip in crosses from the left, seems as instructive as the fact that it happened against Leeds United, Chelsea's one serious rival for that unlovely accolade. It is Leeds whose supporters annually come to White Hart Lane, Tottenham Hotspurs' ground, to chant: "Spurs are on their way to Belsen/ Hitler's gonna gas them again."

Yet, on current form, the boys from Stamford Bridge would give Leeds quite a run for their money. Since the season began in August, four Chelsea players have been sent off (Le Saux's failure to make it five is testament only to the incompetence of the referee), while events off the pitch have been more disturbing still. Whatever one thinks about the decision of six players, including club vice captain Le Saux, to avoid flying to Tel Aviv last week (for myself, I think they exercised a legitimate right not to travel in fear), the hotel incident on 12 September, atrocities in which four players showed drunken disrespect to US tourists, will not quickly be forgotten.

It gives no pleasure at all to dwell on this, because my emotional links with Chelsea go back further than those for my own team, Spurs, and the fondness persists. My first football memory is from the legendary FA Cup Final replay of 1970, which was also the genesis of the feud with Leeds brought to life on Sunday by Mr Le Saux. My late Great Uncle Bertie was a close friend of Chelsea's mannerly manager Dave Sexton. Bertrum had a lucky bowler hat in which he never once saw them lose and promised it to the team should they beat Leeds in the replay. Bertie had a dodgy heart, so my father was deputed to escort him to Old Trafford that May night, when the bowler hat and David Webb's shoulder conspired to vanquish Leeds. The two of them travelled back to London on the train with Charlie Cooke, Alan Hudson, Peter Osgood and the rest of that marvellous side, and I remember being woken at 2am with the thrilling news.

For some reason, Bertie never did give them the titfer, and the jinx that generally attends a broken vow duly ensued. After winning the 1971 European Cup Winners Cup, there followed 26 barren years, most of which the team spent in the doldrums, once coming within 20 minutes of relegation to the old Division Three, while the dated image of boozy, dilettante King's Road raffishness yielded to an overpowering aura of skinheaded racism and neckbulging brutishness.

Going to Stamford Bridge in the Seventies and Eighties - by which time current chairman Ken Bates had brought his special brand of pugnacity to the club, once and briefly, until the law intervened, he took on the thugs with an electrified fence - became a nervy business, as it remained in the early 1990s, when I used to go often with my Chelsea-supporting cousin. Once, in the East Stand, I gently asked the man in front of us to sit down so we could see. He turned round and clocked me with several fewer chins then than now. "It's Robin Williams," he squealed to his mates. "It's f****** nanou, nanou, the c***" - a memorably hilarious piece of doggerel he followed by making plans to sort me out at half time. We slipped away.