No wonder Jose Mourinho was planning to be at Chelsea’s training ground by seven this morning; there’s plenty to be done.
If he were the previous manager, he’d probably have been greeted outside the Cobham gates by a banner reading “Rafa out”, despite the early hour.
At least Mourinho had the consolation of knowing he is still surrounded by love.
It’s a little soon to be detecting a crisis, even at Chelsea. To do so would lack due deference to the Everton side who beat them on Saturday as well as Basle, who, with not just Tottenham but Manchester United on their list of relatively recent victims, should not have been taken lightly at Stamford Bridge.
Were they? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and it could be argued that Mourinho helped Basle to do that by fielding Marco van Ginkel alongside Frank Lampard in the space Murat Yakin’s counter-attackers so expertly exploited.
If the Chelsea manager thought this the Dutch youngster’s moment, he made a big mistake. But to err is human and it must be added that, for all the accusations levelled at Mourinho, a lack of rigour in preparation has never been one of them.
There will, however, be no excuses when Fulham visit on Saturday, or when Mourinho takes his men to White Hart Lane a week later (Spurs fans would have noted the quality of Willian’s debut with cautious amusement), and certainly not when they approach their second Champions League match in Bucharest three days after that.
In other words, Mourinho has until the end of the month to find a winning compromise between his sort of team and Roman Abramovich’s. It is a strange situation — as if he had gone to Porto and been presented with five Decos but no Benni McCarthy or Ricardo Carvalho.
There’s going to be a lot of work on that training ground.
