STAMFORD BRIDGE SHOWDOWN
Chelsea faithful have fallen out of love with Mourinho and joining United was last straw
This time, when Jose Mourinho returns to stamford Bridge, it will be different. The bond is broken and the aura is gone. When he came back with inter Milan, Chelsea fans were still singing his name with feeling and his grey coat hung in the museum like a designer garment of wonder. senior players like Frank Lampard were in regular contact.
All of which helped as inter claimed victory, but if Manchester United leave with three points tomorrow it will not be because the Bridge is entranced by the special One.
handshakes, smiles and applause there will be; a warm appreciation of what he achieved, sure, but Mourinho will find the adoring masses have thinned out in sW6.
Where they were once united in worship they are divided. The banner in his name is no longer found in its usual place.
One writer in the popular Chelsea fanzine now replaces letters in his name with asterisks, a sign of distaste normally preserved for those with spurs connections.
some were loyal to him until the end, branding the players as ‘rats’ and singing the manager’s name after he had gone but this love story was soured by a simmering dispute with supporters.
Flippant remarks about Chelsea fans lacking passion were not well received, especially comparing them unfavourably to Liverpool’s support after 4,000 travelled north for a midweek League Cup semi-final at Anfield.
At a Champions League tie in slovenia, days after, he claimed stamford Bridge felt like an ‘empty stadium’, the travelling supporters taunted him with a chorus of: ‘Jose give us a song’.
Mourinho was furious when they saluted Lampard after his goal against Chelsea for Manchester City and made it clear through fans’ groups he did not want to hear the Lampard song in the away end.
‘second time around, he wasn’t the special one and he wasn’t the happy one — he was the miserable one,’ said cfcuk’s Dave Johnstone.
Maybe it was worth the aggravation as he delivered another Premier League title — his third — but the great unravelling last year exposed damage to his relationship at all levels of the club.
Underperforming players tired of the public criticism and stopped playing for him. Eden hazard walked off in Mourinho’s final game, at Leicester. he was suffering from a nagging injury, was kicked again and decided to soldier on in pain no longer. Those selected by Antonio Conte against Leicester last week included only three players signed by Mourinho — Diego Costa, Nemanja Matic and Pedro. Victor Moses, thriving at wing-back, admits he barely ever spoke to his old boss.
John Terry is still around but Conte’s players are not pining for the departed boss like Avram Grant’s team did in 2007.
‘You fall in love with Jose and he becomes your idol,’ said Andre Villas-Boas, former Chelsea manager and coach under Mourinho. ‘Then you fall on the wrong side of him and things change. You realise that you’ve been blinded.’
At stamford Bridge, it feels as if others have experienced the AVB enlightenment.
The dispute with the club doctor Eva Carneiro went down badly. At board level, not everyone agreed with Roman Abramovich’s idea to bring Mourinho back.
When he was dismissed in December last year, a statement from technical director Michael Emenalo spoke of ‘palpable discord’ and refused to name the departed manager, preferring to call him ‘the individual’.
Last time, Abramovich bought him a Ferrari by way of thanks. Now Mourinho claims they were never really friends and has made it clear he will only reflect on what was good at Chelsea when he returns there tomorrow for the first time since he departed 10 months ago.
‘When some managers leave clubs, they like to, i don’t know the right saying but in Portuguese it is “wash the dirty clothes”,’ the Manchester United manager explained.
‘it means speak about what happened,’ he added. ‘i leave clubs with a very good feeling, the feeling of doing everything to succeed. i gave everything to the club. i don’t like to go back and speak specially about the bad things.
‘i want to keep the good things. At Chelsea, i had so many good things, in terms of results, friends i have for life, an amazing empathy with the supporters.
‘The supporters didn’t change their relationship with me because of last season and a couple of months of bad results. i keep all these good memories.’
But when asked if Abramovich, the man who brought him to Chelsea (twice) and bankrolled a spending spree which saw Mourinho bring success to the club (twice), was one of those friends the Portuguese declared: ‘he was never my friend. We always had the relationship of owner-manager. it was a very respectful relationship. We were never close to each other.’
Mourinho has a habit of lobbing grenades into media conferences that leave press officers staggered and journalists rubbing their hands.
he knows what he is doing and perhaps that answer will be as close as Chelsea fans ever get to finding out why their special One headed out of the door with the club hovering above the relegation zone last Christmas and the Carneiro situation hovering. Regardless, Mourinho will be determined to prove a point in front of his old employer, though he tried to play down the significance of the occasion.
‘To say i care is not true,’ he said. ‘When i go to a football match, i am more focused on the game.
‘i knew that, working in England and staying in the Premier League, sooner or later, i had to play against Chelsea and go to stamford Bridge.’
While those are words to take with a shovel load of salt, the 53-yearold’s affection for his old admirers was from the heart.
‘What can i expect?’ he said. ‘i don’t know. They can remember our great relationship and have a good reaction. They can say: “For 90 minutes, he is Man United manager playing against us, so he is not someone we like at this moment”.’
“Second time round at the club he was the miserable one”