No Chelsea fan should be too worried about the short term. Roman Abramovich is ready to bring in a caretaker if, as appears likely, Pep Guardiola decides to continue his New York sabbatical and Chelsea do tend to fare well under men hired to keep the managerial seat warm: Avram Grant, Guus Hiddink and — I almost forgot the best example – Roberto di Matteo.
It is the purportedly permanent appointments the Russian has a problem with. When he plays with his toy, he damages it and the manager is always to blame.
At one stage he had the best manager in the world and yet allowed relationships with Jose Mourinho to decay. Manchester United needed no second invitation to resume their erstwhile domination of the Premier League.
Guardiola will be pondering all this. He, more than anyone, knows how good Mourinho is.
They got to know each other when Mourinho was assisting Sir Bobby Robson at Barcelona in 1996-97 and Guillem Balague’s excellent new biography, Pep Guardiola: Another Way Of Winning, tells how the supposed interpreter used to slip extra tactical instructions into the Englishman’s team-talks.
Later, of course, Mourinho returned to haunt Guardiola, taking the Spanish title from his Barcelona in the season that culminated in the Catalan’s well earned walk from the inherent pressure of Camp Nou.
You can understand why the Premier League now attracts Guardiola. Refreshed, he will be reasoning that Chelsea would involve a different and lesser kind of pressure.
My guess is that Carlo Ancelotti experienced that at Stamford Bridge — and even the Italian was not as emotionally entwined with Milan as Guardiola is with Barcelona. In two years, Ancelotti could not turn Chelsea into Milan and Guardiola is unlikely to get more than that to complete a transformation into Barcelona.
If he then took the money and left with a wry smile, it would hardly be a first.
