FANS WANT MANAGER OUT BUT I HOPE HE GETS MORE TIME

WE like binary situations in the media, don’t we? Graham Potter, should he stay or should he go? That’s not the way I think about it. I try to look for underlying positives and negatives. One positive is that only Newcastle have shipped fewer goals than Chelsea this season. And they’re not a dull defensive team. They’re playing inventive football, as good as I’ve seen them play for a while. For 35 minutes against Borussia Dortmund, they were really, really special. If they’re not giving much away, they don’t need to change a huge amount. It feels really close. If Potter is to a degree the perfect candidate, a coach who builds over time moulding young players, and if you believe in what you’re doing, you have to be ballsy and see it out.

Remember what Mikel Arteta went through. People said it wasn’t working, it was dreadful. People also forget Pep Guardiola was battered at Manchester City. You can’t play out from the back in the Premier League, they said. Really? It takes a while. You don’t turn around a supertanker in a bath. If they’re brave enough to believe in what they’ve put in place, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them stick with it, until the end of the season. They’ve bought a bunch of youngsters.

Unbelievably expensive youngsters but this isn’t a team for now. It’s for two or three years down the line. We don’t know what percentage of them will work, because it’s never 100 per cent, but this looks to me like planning. Not the scattergun operation when they were signing the likes of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. But it’s Chelsea. It’s the Premier League. The fans are getting fed up. The ownership are under pressure. You don’t have a lot of time and the negatives are you’re halfway down the league and not scoring enough goals. They could go out and buy a striker but Chelsea’s history of buying strikers at the wrong end of their career is extraordinary, from Hernan Crespo to Andrey Shevchenko to Fernando Torres. They want somebody at the right end of their career who can become like Didier Drogba. I would get Victor Osimhen from Napoli if it was me, even though they have Christopher Nkunku coming in from RB Leipzig in the summer. But that will cost a load more money. We don’t know what the new owners are thinking. The previous Chelsea owner would have got rid of the manager. He just wouldn’t have stuck by him if he found himself in 10th on this particular run. Thomas Tuchel clearly just didn’t see eye-to-eye so you can’t gauge anything by that. You can gauge it by how long they stick by the current management team. If they pull the trigger quickly, it’s back to normality with a different manager every year and a lot of Chelsea fans can probably cope with that. A lot of them want it. I just hope it isn’t the case.