How Conte has ripped up the Mourinho plan
Portuguese will see his Chelsea side transformed in three key areas for visit to United tomorrow
video analysis of which Conte is a helpless devotee. Sessions routinely last more than an hour, which originally met with some resistance from the squad. But once the results started rolling in, they could see the benefits for themselves. “He prepares us precisely about every opposing side, so we go into each game with the correct plan,” said Willian.
This is a clean break from the Mourinho era. Mourinho is brilliant at organising a defence, but his approach to attacking play is pretty basic.
In fact, at most of his clubs, it consists largely of signing or inheriting an established worldclass striker and letting them get on with it.
“Mourinho put in a system, but we didn’t work lots,” Hazard said recently. “We know what to do, because we play football, but maybe the automatisms were a little bit different.” Alonso and N’Golo Kanté have obviously played their part. But Conte has also tapped into a vast talent pool that Mourinho largely ignored: the battery of satellite loan players, many of whom had despaired of ever playing for Chelsea. “He never spoke to me,” Moses said of Mourinho. “I think we chatted a couple of times on the phone. But that was it.”
After years of treading water, the likes of Moses and Nathaniel Chalobah have been reintegrated back into the squad. And even a relatively innocuous move like recalling Nathan Ake from Bournemouth sends a message to each of the 37 Chelsea players currently on loan: the path to the first team is open. “When you arrive at a new team,” Conte said yesterday, “you must love this team: love the shirt, love the players, love the fans.” In an age when players and managers trot from club to club with impunity, Conte demands total commitment. In return, he offers exactly the same. He hardly ever criticises his players in public, and even when he does saves his choicest barbs for his most valuable players. There is very little chance of Conte freezing out a star player like Juan Mata, as Mourinho did during his last spell at Chelsea, or publicly condemning players like Luke Shaw and Anthony Martial, as he has done at Manchester United. Conte is not incapable of mind games. And he is certainly not ignorant of what is being said and written about his team. Pirlo tells another story: at Juventus, Conte used to tape negative newspaper articles to the dressing room door, with the most offensive passages highlighted in red. “We have only one method of proving him wrong,” Conte announced. “Winning.” Yet while you suspect that Mourinho makes his feuds personal, for Conte they are strictly business. “It’s normal for there to be conflict during a game,” he said yesterday. “But only a sporting conflict. I prefer to be focused on my team, and the game.” But then, when you have an 18-point gap over your rival in the league table, you can say pretty much anything you want.