Like many, I’m not an admirer of Chelsea football club. Even before Jose Mourinho’s infamous return, I still didn’t like the football club. Yet now, after two and a bit years in the job, Jose Mourinho has transformed Chelsea into a team of babies and cheats, making them the most hated club in the country.
What’s the cause for this? Perhaps it’s Mourinho’s moaning himself. No matter what happens, he seems to find some way to complain about a game, nine times out of ten it tends to be the officials fault. You see, Mourinho’s problem is a lack responsibility. Not once over the past two and a bit years have I ever seen Jose Mourinho say ‘Yep, you know what, that was my fault.’ It’s fairly common for managers to come out after a defeat and say ‘Oh I didn’t get the tactics right’ or ‘I played too many attacking players’ or something along those lines.
But Mourinho seems to believe he’s above that. He’s convinced that it can never be his fault, he can do no wrong. It’s this feeling of supreme self-righteousness that has lost him the respect of many, because some of his claims are absolutely absurd.
In fact I get the feeling from him that he might actually be going insane. He seems to watch a different game to the rest of us. For instance, the claim that Nemanja Matic shouldn’t have been sent off against West Ham is, frankly, ludicrous. And the sad thing is that this is one of hundreds of outrageous claims that he makes week in, week out.
As well as that, to claim that there’s a conspiracy against Chelsea is just shocking. Sir Alex Ferguson believed that refs didn’t give decisions to big clubs, but to come out and actually say that each and every official is after Chelsea is ridiculous, and a disgrace. It’s a pretty, stupid excuse for an exasperated man, who can’t believe he’s managing a club doing this badly.
It has tarnished Chelsea’s reputation; he’s has dragged the name of the once mighty Blues through the dirt.
This is one of the factors that seems to have lost him the dressing room. The Mirror claims today that the players also believe he’s lost the plot. This is unheard of, normally, from Mourinho, well renowned for being a superb man manager.
Personally, I think another key factor is Diego Costa. His outrageous antics against Arsenal were that of a small child with a bad temper. I’d put money on the vast majority of managers coming out after a game and saying, ’Actually he was completely out of order today and I’ll be having a stern word on Monday.’
But no. Mourinho is adamant that his striker did nothing wrong, and takes his side. That isn't right. If a player does something in a game that would be considered as an appalling act in the outside world, it shouldn’t be in the game. The world completely agreed that what Costa did was wrong, but not Mourinho.
And secretly, I reckon some of the Chelsea players thought he was out of order as well, but to then hear your boss say ‘Nope, it was fine’ would sort of make you go, ‘Well, hang on, what are you on about?’
It’s when players begin to question what you’re saying and what you’re doing that things begin to go to Hell. And that’s what’s happening to Chelsea. Mourinho will lose his job. If not this weekend, then the next, and if not that, then the one after that. There will be no recovery from this position for him, he’s a dead man walking.
But despite winning the league, his second spell at Chelsea will be deemed, by most, as failure. Roman Abramovich hates having his club's name brought into disrepute, and the Portuguese has done nothing but do that since rejoining the club, from the boring football fiasco to his outrageous statements.
What effect does this have on Chelsea over the next few years? I think it’s going to take them a long time to recover from this nightmare season, mainly in terms of their reputation. What they need to do is appoint the opposite to Mourinho; a sensible manager, who isn’t known for having a big mouth, perhaps like Pep Guardiola.
They need to completely terminate the belief that everyone is against them from the players minds, because that helps nobody. I think there’s an awful lot of deadwood hanging around that squad, the likes of which the next manager needs to remove.
In terms of recovering as a performing club in the Premier League, I don’t envisage a situation where this group of Chelsea players makes the top four this season, which certainly stirs things up up there. Whether they can make the Europa League is a different story, but these players are too burnt out and damaged by this period that I don’t see a winning run that will see them back in the top four.
What next for Mourinho? He needs to analyse the past year of his career and learn from his mistakes. Wherever he goes next, he needs to learn to shut his mouth, and admit when he’s wrong and rediscover that man management skill that seems to have gone amiss. I think he should definitely take a sabbatical, because this job has been an enormous strain on him, clearly, and my advice (and he definitely won’t heed it) would be to go to a smaller club and try and fall back in love with the game again.
Source: DSG
