Graham Potter, time and Chelsea’s 25 years of hair-trigger tendencies

As we can see at clubs like Everton and Southampton and Watford and QPR, sacking your manager every 10 to 15 minutes proves counter-productive when it comes to building a successful football team. Yet somehow it seems to work for Chelsea. During the last 25 years, they’ve booted, in short order, the likes of Big Cup winner Roberto Di Matteo, Big Cup winner Rafa Benítez, World Cup winner Luiz Felipe Scolari, FA Cup winner Ruud Gullit, Big Cup and Premier League winner José Mourinho, Premier League and Serie A winner Antonio Conte, Big Cup winner Thomas Tuchel … and Frank Lampard. And with barely a second’s thought either! But look at all that silverware.

So there’s no denying their hairtrigger tendencies are effective. That goes approximately 100% of the way to explaining why Graham Potter is under so much pressure at the moment in his new role as Former Brighton Boss (he’s not been totally accepted as Chelsea Manager yet). Potter has only been in the job for a few months, yet is attracting criticism as a result of his team having won just two of their last 13 games, his failure to performatively rant and rave like an unreasonable toolbag at VAR’s failure to award Chelsea a penalty last weekend, and his apparent inability to meld together £583m worth of fresh-from-the-box talent so they immediately play like Brazil at the 1970 World Cup. Oi Graham! Get your gameface on quicksmart, will you, there’s a good lad.

The more reasonable members of the Chelsea support – for example, those who go to the match, swerve social media abominations, and/or are over the age of six – will be minded to give Potter time in order to implement the ideas which see Brighton currently sitting four points and four places above them in the Premier League table. (Roberto De Zerbi can’t keep getting all of the credit for what’s happening there, he just can’t.) However, Big Cup defeat in Dortmund on Wednesday certainly wouldn’t help Potter’s cause, or put a stop to all the