If Chelsea turn it on now, the players will look like cheats
GIVE SUNDERLAND A HIDING AND THEY RISK LOOKING LIKE CHEATS
So what happens if the third goal goes in against Sunderland on Saturday? Will Stamford Bridge rise to acclaim their freshly revived heroes, or will the reaction be one of anger instead?
Are Chelsea’s fans ready for this team — Jose Mourinho’s team — to hit form again without him? And what will it say about them if they do?
Will it show that a manager who shaped one of the most emphatic title wins in any era had forgotten how to win football matches and a new man — mystifyingly unemployed and therefore available for immediate employment on an interim basis — was needed to guide his players through?
or will it suggest that Mourinho’s players did, in some way, betray him? That they were always better than their league position suggested and knew, with Chelsea’s history of managerial dismissals, that if they just turned it in and waited it out, Roman Abramovich would blink first.
Certainly, there are plenty ready to support that theory. And they may well be clearing their throats to voice it, too. For Chelsea’s players, this is Catch-22. If they fail to improve, the ship could sink with all hands, and more than a few reputations. If the season flips from here, they look like cheats.
Maybe they are cheats. It is possible for a group to become demotivated after achieving its goal, but 16th after 16 matches? Chelsea’s collapse is, in terms of points per game, the worst of any champions in history. Manchester City won the league in 1936-37 and were somehow relegated while still being Division one top scorers the following season — but even by those standards Chelsea’s demise is exceptional. City’s at least sounds a lively campaign. Chelsea’s has just been dreadful.
Third season syndrome, Mourinho’s critics will call it. It never lasts, he never beds in, never builds beyond the short-term. Happened at Real Madrid, at Chelsea and Inter Milan, too. He bristles at the accusation but there is still no evidence to the contrary. Maybe Mourinho’s way simply cannot work over a decade or more; maybe it is too explosive, too confrontational. His teams burst into life, suck all the oxygen from the room, then flicker and die.
Who could maintain the relentless energy that is required to win like Mourinho — all that conflict, all that intensity? Yet burn out, with these players, would see Chelsea slip to where Manchester United or Tottenham Hotspur are now, to the fringes of the elite, to sixth place where they finished under Roberto Di Matteo. But 16th? Sixteenth? Either Mourinho is right, and last season he performed one of the greatest feats in the history of football management, or the players have been underperforming, wantonly.
PlAInlY, there was no way back for Mourinho after Monday night. It was not so much the result that did for him, but what was said after the game.
The moment Mourinho speculated that his management elevated the players to unsustainable levels of excellence last season, he was as good as gone. losing the dressing room is an old football cliche, but after leicester it is fair to say Mourinho had less of a future in man management than Captain Bligh the day The Bounty set sail from Tahiti.
Yet if Chelsea’s players feel wronged right now, join the club. Mourinho’s outburst was only the end of several months of frustration at form that was not so much poor as inexplicable. With the exception of Willian and the goal- keepers, it is hard to exempt any Chelsea player from blame. In the cases of Eden Hazard, Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas — so influential last season — the lowering of standards almost feels mutinous.
How can a player as belligerent as Costa be suffering a crisis of confidence in front of goal? How can a mind as quick as Fabregas’s slow the game and need so many touches to create? Where is Footballer of the Year Hazard, the man Mourinho compared to Cristiano Ronaldo? And what will be the reaction if, miraculously, these talents reappear now Chelsea’s most successful manager has been shown the door?
Even as Chelsea closed in on norwich, Sunderland and Aston Villa this season, the fans have never stopped singing Mourinho’s name. Carlo Ancelotti aside, whoever takes over, whether interim or permanent in the summer, will need three league titles to match the Special one. However he was perceived in the boardroom or among the playing staff, the fans were Mourinho’s constituency. Many would have gladly seen the team shipped out in January, if it meant keeping Mourinho and starting anew.
Impractical, impossible, and the players knew it. A manager is easier to replace than 10 individuals, and clashes with key personnel proved the beginning of the end for luiz Felipe Scolari and Andre Villas-Boas. Yet those managers did not enjoy Mourinho’s popularity. Chelsea loyalists know who their best manager was and they’ve just sacked him. Again.
Already last night, Mourinho was being linked with Manchester United. not short-term, maybe, but in the summer if louis van Gaal does not deliver in his second year. The idea of Mourinho returning to Stamford Bridge at the helm of a Premier league rival will fill the locals with fear.
Mourinho went to training with his hair shorn yesterday, a sign he was readying for battle, and is believed to have been planning major changes for the Sunderland match. He never got the chance to act. It is doubtful it would have made much difference anyway. The league
Already last night Mourinho was being linked with Man Utd
form has been calamitous but, ironically, it may have been the luck of the draw that finally did for Mourinho. He steered Chelsea into the Champions League last 16 as group winners — but then pulled the most difficult opponents out of the hat, French champions and runaway league leaders Paris Saint- Germain. Having eliminated Chelsea last season, perhaps Abramovich feared a repeat.
This is not to absolve Mourinho of responsibility. His handling of the removal of Dr Eva Carneiro was appalling, a private, professional matter brought into the public domain and allowed to escalate and assume destructive importance. Mourinho would not back down, could not apologise, and the employment tribunal hearing is not the half of it. It may have been the day Hazard was lost, too. Certainly the player whose injury cost the doctor her job has not been the same since.
Equally damaging has been the form of those Mourinho has rejected — Romelu Lukaku and Kevin De Bruyne in particular have thrived elsewhere — calling his judgment into question.
Yet the transfer market is not an exact science and every manager makes mistakes. Starting the season as manager of the champions, with enormous credit, Mourinho could have ridden the blows had his fractured relationship with the players not been so apparent. They got him the sack, no doubt of that. All that remains to be seen is the extent of the collateral damage.