WHY SAY ANYTHING?

Jose Mourinho is a winner, (usually). He is not in the football business to win friends, admirers or even fans. He is in the business to win trophies. In achieving this he may attract some of the aforementioned but, if he doesn’t, he isn’t the type of person to lose any sleep over it.

Having been very successful at every club he has managed, he is now finding out what it is like to be below average. Yes, Chelsea have not only descended from the top of the pile to being average, they have stayed on the elevator for one more downward level to become below average.

What is responsible for this sudden and dramatic downturn? It is not only a collective loss of form, confidence and cohesion, it appears to be a loss of faith and/or trust in the manager. How else can the loss of form of a whole team be explained?

It is very difficult to find one Chelsea player who has played consistently well, with the possible exception of Willian.

Eden Hazard has been a shadow of his former self amid rumours of a fall out with Mourinho. The defence is leaking goals in a way not seen before in the last ten years or so.

Diego Costa has stopped scoring and hasn’t stopped being nasty. He was generally forgiven his misdemeanours by the Chelsea fans providing he was scoring goals. They won’t be so forgiving if he starts to cost his team points without adding to the scoresheet.

Falcao is proving to be as big a waste of space at Chelsea as he was at Manchester United, despite Mourinho’s assertions that HE would be the one to bring the best out of him.

Loic Remy’s situation is a bit of an enigma. He has scored goals wherever he has been, including Chelsea, but has never been able to nail down a first team place for any length of time. Is this because of the modern day requirement that everybody needs to cover every blade of grass and track back for the team? If so then the likes of Jimmy Greaves and Denis Law would never get a game today.

So the reasons for Chelsea’s decline are simple. They can’t defend and they can’t score. Two pre-requisites if you want success in a football match. The question is how has this happened in such a short time? They defended very well last season, they scored plenty of goals. What has changed?

Well, Thibault Courtois has been out for a while with injury. Asmir Begovich may not be the world class keeper that the Belgian is, but he’s no slouch and has actually kept Chelsea in a couple of games, so he isn’t the difference. Falcao hasn’t been on the pitch often enough to be the difference. Has anything else changed?

Personally, I think that Mourinho’s expectations have changed and some of the players don’t like it. I think he wants to successfully defend the Premier League title and win the Champions League. I think he has stressed the importance of winning the Champions League as he hasn’t yet managed it at Stamford Bridge, but doesn’t want to miss out on the domestic title because of this. I also think that he has put this across to his players in such a way that, if they don’t win both, they are failures.

Footballers being what they are, egotistical and selfish generally, don’t want to be told that, if they don’t achieve something, then they have failed. They want an arm round the shoulder and to be told how hard they tried and that it was never meant to be etc., etc.

Unless they DO achieve the goals, then they want to be told how fantastic they are and what good players they are.

Either way and whatever happens, I don’t think that some of the Chelsea players have taken too kindly to Mourinho telling them what he expects of them this year.

Let me know if you agree or not and also, if you know the truth about what’s going on, please fill us in on that as well.