Forget all the hype, it actually took a lot for Chelsea and Roman Abramovich to come to the decision to sack their manager Jose Mourinho today.

It’s sad to see the legendary Chelsea manager depart in such circumstances but the decision was inevitable.

Look at the cold hard facts; the current Premier League champions are in sixteenth place and are only a point away from the relegation zone, they have also lost nine league games before the festive period and four of those which were at Stamford Bridge.

Passionate Chelsea fans wanted to keep the ‘Special One’ in the clubs hotseat and show him loyalty. But again look at your owner, Abramovich has sacked eight managers (Jose twice) since he bought the club in 2003. It can be argued that out of them all this has been the worst start to a season in that tenure.

People will point fingers at the current squad and state that the players weren’t good enough on the pitch. I agree with that assessment but the truth is that they stopped believing in Mourinho and playing for him. It’s very reminiscent of Jose’s last year in charge of Real Madrid.

Too many players have dropped lost their way and that has to have something to do with the manager and the atmosphere in the dressing room.

Now you could say that if the players down tools then they need to be the ones looking for new clubs. But we are almost halfway through a season and a rebuilding job cannot happen in January. So the board see the fractions in their club between the manager and some of his players, it’s badly affecting the club and they can’t get rid of the players, so it’s the manager who gets the boot.

Now let’s remember that this is almost the exact same squad that won the Premier League title in May and that it’s Jose third season back at the club. The Portuguese coach, by getting rid of players like Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole and Juan Mata was seen as him reshaping the squad. So something has clearly happened.

Mourinho has to sit back and accept a lot of the blame for what has happened this season.

His public spat with former team doctor Eva Carneiro unsettled things and looked bad to the outside world. Jose’s vanity project to bring in Radamel Falcao on loan as a second striker was a hopeless decision and has come back to haunt him. Mourinho’s constant negative press conferences and his sullen face on the touchline spoke volumes that everything was getting on top of him.

Now please don’t get me wrong, I actually admire Jose Mourinho and think he’s a fantastic manager. But I feel the Real Madrid job may have turned him into a paranoid manager who can no longer fully trust his players and who seemed too eager for confrontation.

The fifty-two year old will always be seen as a Chelsea and Premier League legend. He now needs to take a break from the game, assess what went wrong at Stamford Bridge and find his passion for the training field again.

Big jobs could be available next summer and I am sure Jose Mourinho will come back and will be a success again!

But with that said it was inevitable that he was going to leave Chelsea this term. In this modern era, your history counts for nothing if your current team are struggling near the foot of the table!

Posted on December 17th, 2015 by scott
Filed under: Article