Mike Hewitt/Getty ImagesTerry and Cole are at the center of the latest controversies at Stamford Bridge, but Blues supporters should still be able to question the authorities and due process.

With the John Terry case and the latest unnecessary contribution from Ashley Cole, it has been quite a trying time for Chelsea Football Club and their fans.

Journalists, rival supporters and the anti-football brigade have been queuing up to sling barbs. The backlash has been so very predictable as well as incredibly frustrating for supporters who, in my opinion, are being portrayed as apologists for racism and loutish behaviour, as if we committed the offences personally. It has to be conceded that a small minority of our supporters have not covered themselves in glory in their defence of the club, but most of us are rational, decent human beings who are attempting to cut through the hyperbole and present a different perspective to the criminal and FA investigations, along with the subsequent fallout. I count myself as one of those: somebody who abhors racism yet who is able to sort the wheat from the chaff by actually reading the judgments rather than just the tabloid headlines.

This defensive stance is not a newly adopted attitude for Chelsea fans. Such has been the club's liking for negative headlines, we've had to employ it for almost the entirety of my time supporting them. When my dad first started taking me to Stamford Bridge in the early 1980s, the club was plagued by a sizeable hooligan element with far-right leanings -- though please don't let the fact that those were my formative years following Chelsea make you think that I share even 1 percent of their political views. Along with the likes of Leeds United, West Ham and Millwall, Chelsea had the most notorious "firms," and mentions of the club at that time were more regularly associated with crowd violence rather than achievements on the pitch. Back then, Stamford Bridge was a place of dread for many, and light years away from the shiny, well-appointed arena we see in 2012.

The most prominent culprit for upsetting the authorities, fans and just about anyone who crossed his path throughout the 1980s and 1990s was chairman Ken Bates. After facing severe criticism for the behaviour of the club's unruly fans, he infamously installed electrically charged barbed wire atop the perimeter fencing at Stamford Bridge, appalling everyone. Whether it was merely a PR exercise to show how impotent football clubs were when it came to controlling their fans or a genuine attempt to compound the mistreatment of paying customers by treating them like actual animals has never been discovered. But Bates achieved universal condemnation.

Bates also used his programme notes to verbally assault anybody who had upset him. It was always compelling reading, and I suspect it could have provided the inspiration for former Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan's riveting if controversial column in The Observer newspaper. Bates' favourite targets were troublesome journalists, and he would expose their transgressions in the programme before banning them from entering Stamford Bridge. He didn't seem to care that these actions guaranteed negative coverage in the press and provided Chelsea fans with yet another image problem.

The lowest point in Chelsea's recent off-field history came in 1999, when Ruud Gullit's 41-year-old assistant manager Graham Rix was given a 12-month jail term for having sex with an underage girl. As if that weren't bad enough, upon being released after serving half of his sentence, Rix was allowed by Bates to return to his post, to the horror of pretty much everyone. That whole episode was a blight on the club that no supporter has even attempted to excuse.

Since then, the scandal pages have seen Mark Bosnich fail a drug test due to cocaine use and Adrian Mutu follow the same path a few years later. What was strange about the latter case was that Chelsea fired him instantly, risking the loss of a hugely valuable asset (the Romanian signed for the club in a deal worth around £16m in 2003) yet still received a reprimand from the PFA for not supporting their troubled star.

My point is that Chelsea have always attracted criticism, whether it is the obsession with the origins of Roman Abramovich's wealth (something that seems to have made football journalists develop a flawless knowledge of Russia's domestic economic policy since the fall of communism), the conduct of their fans or the extracurricular activities of their players. The club -- in my lifetime at least -- has always been one of those that people love to hate.

We fans have to be thick-skinned but also honest. We can't defend the indefensible (such as Rix), but we can question the authorities and due process. It is important to remain as objective as possible when these ugly issues rear their head, but it would help if there were more balanced coverage of these matters -- see Paul Hayward's criticism of the FA's investigation into the Terry case in The Telegraph -- rather than just the usual tub-thumping journalism for which this country has become reviled.

Follow Phil Lythell on Twitter @PhilLythell

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