Manager Jose Mourinho looked a lot happier as he watched his Chelsea side hammer four past Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Champions League this week.

But the Portuguese boss will still be concerned about his team’s poor start in the English Premier League, they lie just outside the relegation zone after five games and are eleven points behind leaders Manchester City.

They have a huge league encounter with Arsenal coming up this Saturday lunchtime at Stamford Bridge. Lose that and there could no way back in retaining their league title.

After the cruical derby match against the Gunners, England’s Premier League champions will travel to Walsall as they start their defence of the Capital One Cup.

Interestingly Frank Lorenzo has Chelsea at 5/1 to win the Capital One Cup.

But will Jose go all out to win the League Cup competition or will he sacrifice it to try and concentrate fully on the league and the Champions League? 

Well we know Mourinho likes using the League Cup as a springboard to winning the Premier League championship. He did it back in his debut year with the Blues in 2005 and repeated the trick last season.

But on those occasions his side had started off well during the league campaign and weren’t chasing anyone else. This term has been completely different.

So I doubt winning the Capital One Cup will be a priority this season.

But Jose and his squad could do with as much of a confidence boost as possible and a winning run could be just the tonic to kick-start this campaign.

That would mean that they wouldn’t want to lose many, if any, more games in the up and coming months. That could include those in domestic cup competitions.

Now I’d expect that Chelsea won’t go with a starting-eleven full of first team regulars for the league cup competition but again that could be a blessing in disguise for the ‘Blues’.

In their win over the Israeli champions on Wednesday, Mourinho decided to bring in new boy Baba Rahman at leftback. He also started with fringe players Loic Remy, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Gary Cahill won back a place in the team.

The League Cup could be the best competition to see if these players are really worthy of more starts in the bigger games. It would be good to see more of youngsters Bertrand Traore, Kenedy and one or two from the developmental squads too.

It could also be a perfect place to see more of Radamel Falcao and how fit he is at the moment. It would also be an ideal place to expose new defensive signing Papy Djilobodji to the English game, the Senegal centre-back signed on transfer deadline day.

So it will be interesting to see how Jose Mourinho and his Chelsea side approach the Capital One Cup this season. I’d imagine a rotation policy will be used but I wouldn’t be too quick in writing them off winning it for a second year in a row!

Posted on September 18th, 2015 by scott
Filed under: *New, Article