By the end, events had spiralled beyond a control freak’s control. A serial winner was becoming accustomed to losing. A manager whose charges tended to believe him implicitly seemed surrounded by doubters.
Jose Mourinho had become everything he wasn’t during the previous dozen years. He had become the inverse alchemist, turning a title-winning team into relegation strugglers, transforming a side packed with players who had seemed the best in their position in their country into one outperformed by graduates of the Championship and apparent mid-table mediocrities. Not once or twice, either, but regularly.
Mourinho was the manager with a virtual immunity to defeat who found wins became a rarity. He suffered nine losses in his first 118 league games as Chelsea manager a decade ago and nine in 16 matches this season.
Manchester City, Crystal Palace, Everton, Southampton, West Ham, Liverpool, Stoke, Bournemouth and Leicester might have each imagined their triumph would echo through the ages, but some blurred into one. Repetition dulled the sense of wonder. Chelsea’s flaws were so familiar each setback felt less surprising than the last.
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They were strangely ragged in defence, oddly impotent in attack, unable to identify their best midfield. Normally when any elite club underperforms, no matter how many others are below par, there are at least a handful of players who flourish personally. Chelsea have had just one: the admirable Willian, who has established a reputation as a valiant damage-limitation expert.
After the loss at Leicester, Mourinho argued his players betrayed him. Perhaps they did. Certainly there were few signs he still commanded their faith. Yet a defining feature of his management is that he has tended to extract more from footballers than any predecessor. Not this season.
He has drawn less from them than others and, crucially, less than he did himself. “Last year I did phenomenal work,” he said at the King Power Stadium with back-patting immodesty. Perhaps he did, too, but by arguing the manager’s input is so influential, he furthered the case that he did appalling work this season.
Eden Hazard is enduring the longest goal drought of his career, with Mourinho sarcastically betraying his doubt the Belgian was injured when he limped off at Leicester. Diego Costa has become a parody of himself, exuding menace everywhere except in front of goal.
Cesc Fabregas has gone from the most reliable supplier of goals in England to a substitute. An iron defence has been breached with remarkable regularity.
This has been an unprecedentedly bad run. For any Premier League champion — Chelsea’s is much the worst defence of a crown — and, more pertinently, for Mourinho. He has seemed bemused and confused, unsure how to respond.
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The notion he is a Machiavellian mastermind with deviously brilliant ideas underpinning his every move has been brought into doubt with every ill-judged outburst.
He has cut an oddly powerless figure, complaining at the fates whenever refereeing decisions have gone against Chelsea. A supposed specialist in psychology has criticised his players only to see them, if anything, produce still poorer performances. He has tried the carrot and the stick, persevering with players and dropping them. That nothing has worked illustrates why Mourinho’s position has become untenable.
His reign has unravelled in extraordinary fashion. Relations have been soured at speed, a decline accelerated.
When Mourinho signed a four-year contract in August, the impatient arriviste seemed effecting a transformation to establishment figure, looking to the long term, charged with developing youth and gradually rebuilding a team. Instead Mourinho’s plans now seem in rubble.
It has been said, and correctly, that Roman Abramovich would have sacked any other manager who got the same results sooner. So he would. It is an irony that Chelsea’s normally trigger-happy owner was punished for an uncharacteristic show of faith. Yet it is beyond anyone’s comprehension that Mourinho could get such wretched results. The Special One became the Sorry One. He lost games, the dressing room and his job.
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