Is Jose Mourinho a hypnotist or something? How else to explain Wayne Bridge and Shaun Wright-Phillips being perfectly happy to waste the best years of their career in Chelsea's (surprisingly poor) Reserves?

Little Shaun scored his first competitive Chelsea goal against Levski Sofia, reminding the rest of the Premiership just how good he is.

But despite the attentions of newly minted West Ham and soon to be newly minted Liverpool, SWP has declared his intention to stay at Chelsea. Why bother? SWP has played 52 games for Chelsea, 35 of those as a sub. That's 17 starts in a season and a half, not a lot considering the number of games Chelsea play and it's not going to get better as Mourinho shifts to a winger-less team. Although SWP is happy with his performance against Sofia, he was only on the field for 21 measly minutes. It's career suicide to stay, and it's robbing England of a good little right winger.

And if SWP is committing career suicide, then Wayne Bridge is doing some sort of ritual sacrifice. He happily signed his (footy) life away by putting pen to paper on a new four year contract AFTER Ashley Cole joined from Arsenal, and with the full knowledge that Cole would be first choice. Bridge should be playing regularly somewhere else and challenging Cole for an England spot, not accepting a role as his domestic backup.

It's an old topic now, players wasting their careers by going to Chelsea, but you can make the argument that most new signings head to Stamford Bridge imagining that they'll break into the first eleven and become a legend. But Wright-Phillips and Bridge were among the original Roman babies and have been at the club long enough to realise it's just not going to happen for them at the London club, so it's high time these two showed some ambition and move on. Yes they can win medals at Chelsea - they already have - but how valuable is a winners medal if you barely played? And when you have a handful of medals you didn't help win, is there really any value to adding a few more? With club's like Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and even West Ham and Tottenham all rumored to come knocking for one or both of these lads it's not like they'd be suddenly banished to the far corners of the Earth.

Of course, being paid absolute shedloads probably helps, SWP and Bridge are pretty much telling everyone that when their football career is over - they'd rather have nice things than nice memories.

Originally published on CaughtOffside.