Couple of interesting articles here from renowned Sports writers. One is from Martin Samuels of The Daily Mail and the other one is from James Lawton of The Independent. Aftermath of the disaster at Old Trafford, they talk about what’s wrong with this Chelsea team.

Martin Samuels in MailonSunday

It was not just the result. It was not the performance. It was not even the decline that began towards the end of last year and has continued into 2009. It is what Sunday’s match said about the future of Chelsea, long and short term, that should worry those charged with the stewardship of the club. Where do Chelsea go from here? Indeed, where are they now going, this season or next, under Luiz Felipe Scolari? It is not just that Chelsea would appear to possess no equivalent of Wayne Rooney or Cristiano Ronaldo, young players whose greatness has been established even before their athletic peak. It is not that Ryan Giggs would appear to be growing old more gracefully than Michael Ballack. The problems are more basic than that.

Where, for instance, is Chelsea’s equivalent of Jonny Evans, the young central defender who filled in so capably for Rio Ferdinand? Where are the players that are coming through, where are the thrusting rivals for Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba or Deco, men whose days in the sun are surely numbered? Manchester United have players whose value would be measured in tens of millions in the current market; not so Chelsea. This is a team coming to the end and not enough thought has been given to the transition. The league table has these rivals neck and neck, but they looked a world apart on Sunday.

Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, invariably finds a way of keeping his playing squad fresh, but at Chelsea a series of managerial changes mean not enough thought has been given to renewal. United have players of quality on the pitch and in reserve; Chelsea have a void. They do not look good enough to compete this season and the next generation will not be ready by the 2009-10 season. If Chelsea are to challenge in Scolari’s time — he only signed a two-year contract — it will need another vast investment from Roman Abramovich in the summer.

The owner was not at Old Trafford on Sunday — he was taking advantage of the traditional Russian holiday period with Daria Zhukova, his girlfriend — so he missed the opportunity for a reunion with a man whose presence in the directors’ box only served to highlight the blue malaise. Jose Mourinho, now manager of Inter Milan, was here ostensibly to spy on Manchester United ahead of their meeting in the Champions League second round but unlike most scouts, including Fabio Capello, the England manager, he stayed to the bitter end, studying Chelsea’s disintegration without outward emotion. Inside, who knows what Mourinho was feeling?

That he watched to the final whistle was seen by some as a Machiavellian desire to let those responsible for his departure twist in the wind for his amusement, unable to leave the scene of their greatest humiliation in a Premier League game since February 2006. More probably, Mourinho had a late flight to Milan so had no pressing reason to exit. Either way, few could escape the thought that this defeat, this insipid response to Manchester United’s late first-half lead, would not have happened had he been in charge. Mourinho did not know the meaning of defeat in the Premier League against the Champions League elite; by contrast, Scolari does not know the meaning of victory. He has taken one point from a possible 12 against Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal this season: a draw and three defeats. With this reversal, he has now lost to them all.

With each passing month, Scolari’s rivals are downgraded. Before Christmas, he was looking over his shoulder for Liverpool. Then Liverpool passed him and he began looking for Manchester United. Now United are on Chelsea’s heels with games in hand. Who next? Aston Villa? Arsenal? On this form, it is no longer unthinkable. Inter Milan coach Jose Mourinho watched his former side Chelsea capitulate at Old Trafford. Wednesday brings an FA Cup replay at Southend United and what was once considered a momentary lapse in the conventional state of things is now an altogether treacherous affair. Chelsea are potential giant-killing fodder, something that would never have happened under Mourinho.

Maybe his expressionless face was registering inner disgust. This is to take nothing away from the performance of Manchester United. Certainly, that which took place in the second half. Until half-time, Chelsea gave as good as they got, albeit without a cutting edge. Their passing was neat and inventive, little triangles all over the pitch, even if it did not take them in behind a resilient back four. Yet it was their reaction to United’s first goal, from Nemanja Vidic, that exposed the difference in the teams. United grew in confidence, created better chances, looked utterly assured at the back. Chelsea lost air like a deflated balloon. Nicolas Anelka arrived to little effect and at the moment Scolari was poised to introduce Juliano Belletti in place of Jose Bosingwa at full back, United scored a second through Rooney and the contest ended.

Apparently, the day after Steven Gerrard was arrested over the fracas in the Southport bar, Ferguson arrived at the Manchester United training ground in a state of high excitement. Seeing his players poring over the news in the papers he seized his moment. ‘See?’ he snarled. ‘That Liverpool lot are celebrating already. They think they have won it.’ All nonsense, of course, the sort of mind games Rafael Benitez clearly thought were being played in public, rather than private; but it did the trick. Manchester United played on Sunday like a team that had a point to prove, that wanted to knock the League leaders off their perch, in true Ferguson style. Chelsea, meanwhile, have long ceased celebrating those autumn days when they played in the style of potential champions.

At Old Trafford, that particular party was well and truly over.


James Lawton in The Independent

It was entirely typical, and not inappropriate, that Jose Mourinho should linger in the Old Trafford directors’ box on Sunday night long after his fellow celebrity Fabio Capello had left. Mourinho, surely, had a sight to relish: living, well barely living, proof that when his former patron Roman Abramovich first began to undermine him he was revealing his slender grasp of what makes a football club. It is the thrust of authentic leadership, the presence of a man with whom the fans can truly identify and, most vitally, the players can both respect and fear.

Whether the fans always respond for the right reasons is quite beside the point, it being their sovereign right to announce their taste in both football and life quite as vociferously as they like. Mourinho may have been guilty of some ghastly behaviour, at times he may have resembled nothing so much as a walking, lurid advertisement for himself, but he gave both a core and a personal identity to the club.

His football wasn’t always lovely and he was twice outsmarted in Europe by Rafa Benitez. But then it was absurd when the word came down from the owner’s suite that he wanted a more pleasing style of play. Mourinho came to Stamford Bridge as advertised: the Champions League winner with Porto who played tight, pressurised football and was never likely to exploit fully the width and skill and bite offered by the current star of Real Madrid, Arjen Robben, and Damien Duff. He wasn’t running a star system but a team made in his own uncompromising image.

However outrageously he behaved or spoke – as in his appalling treatment of the Swedish referee Anders Frisk, the Berkshire Ambulance service, and airy dismissal of the potential of Wayne Rooney – Mourinho became Chelsea. It was not the remote oligarch, counting his toys and his assets and entertaining his friends. As he said in one of his more beguiling moments, Mourinho was a star in his own movie. Now, agonisingly for those supporters who embraced the arrival of the Abramovich years as though they had been assigned from the heavens, the reel of that particular film has long been parted from its spool.

Neither Avram Grant nor Luiz Felipe Scolari have been able to begin to fill seriously the vacuum. They simply haven’t been empowered, Grant because of the widespread belief that even triumph in the Champions League would not necessarily have guaranteed his tenure, Big Phil because if you take away the jaded Deco and so-so Jose Bosingwa he looks to be doing no more than hosting somebody else’s played-out party. It is not a time for reflex gloating because if Chelsea did come to represent an appalling degree of smugness – remember the chief executive Peter Kenyon’s gleeful claim that the Premier League race had come to involve a “bunch of one”? – they also concentrated the minds of Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and Benitez – and set a high bar indeed for any English club with the means and the nerve to make a serious challenge.

Indeed, even in the current crisis created by persistent suggestions that Abramovich’s love affair with the Bridge has become as cold as the wind down Gorky street, and Sunday’s ultimately spineless performance at Old Trafford, Chelsea are performing a certain service to the rest of an English game which can no longer be quite so sanguine about the effects of the recession. They are showing what can happen when a football man like Mourinho loses his ability to represent the club as a true leader rather than a figurehead threshing in his own bruised ego.

It is a mistake that the Glazer family at Old Trafford, whatever the wisdom of their debt-laden financial planning, the rulers of Arsenal and even the harassed bosses of Liverpool are unlikely to make if they dwell for a moment on developments at Stamford Bridge. If Benitez can drive you crazy with his obsessive team tinkering, he deserves everyone’s respect for his jealous protection of his rights as a football man who ultimately will be judged on results – and his ability to make the right signings. In the last few days Benitez has earned scorn in certain quarters for what has been erroneously perceived as his rising to the bait put down so relentlessly by Ferguson. If Benitez loses the title race, it will not be because of his willingness to stand up to Ferguson with arguments that have been researched solidly and expressed with considerable cogency. Wenger goes his own brilliant, nervy, maverick way and, on the heels of such major figures, Martin O’Neill and David Moyes have also announced control over their own destinies.

By comparison, Scolari cut a somewhat forlorn figure at Old Trafford on Sunday. The extrovert winner of the World Cup, and a man who bestrode the Brazilian club scene with untouchable chutzpah, spoke in that mournful tone to which Portuguese often adapts so readily. No doubt his stint at Chelsea will underpin him financially for the rest of his life, but if he is anything he is plainly a football man of great heart.

He must feel he has inherited a club suffering not a financial brake but also a dwindling of passion. That the owner missed a match as vital as Sunday’s suggests that the shortfall is nowhere more pronounced than at the top of the pyramid. He was said to be devastated by defeat in the final in Moscow, the city where he made his name and his billions, and if that state of mind wasn’t terminal it might well have become so at Old Trafford. Chelsea played tidily in the first half but virtually disappeared in the second.

More than anything they lacked the steel and the certainty imparted by strong leadership. Had he seen it, even Abramovich might have recognised where he had gone wrong. If not, the sardonic smile of Jose Mourinho would surely have been a potent clue.

These articles have nicely brought out some stuff that we have been discussing for many months now. As always, the neutrals pick up the problems much much later than the fans and supporters. But the love story between Scolari and the press is over. There is an article in the Guardian titled ‘Is Scolari the root of all Chelsea problems?’. Questions are being asked from every corner.

    What is Frank Arnesen doing? He’s has been with us for about 5 seasons now. I guess that’s enough time to unearth a few youth talents. Given the investment and focus in the youth facilities, we should have a few truly talented youth players by now. Jose Mourinho never got along with Frank Arnesen and he openly criticised that Chelsea’s lack of youth is down to Arnesen’s incompetence. It’s high time Roman looked at the value added by Frank Arnesen.

    Scolari’s form against top teams: It is not a coincidence that Scolari has lost to Man Utd, Liverpool and Arsenal. He just does not match up to the better managers in the league. The points that Chelsea have obtained so far is something that this Chelsea team would have gathered anyway. Managers make their mark in these bug occasions.

    Scolari’s inability to use his squad: Chelsea’s squad has more depth than any of the premier league squads. Scolari’s refusal to rotate the players and use the second choice players wherever possible has rendered the squad players unready and always short of match practice. See how Gary Neville has started playing well again because his place is under threat from Rafael. Scolari’s approach in team selection increases complacency in the first team and creates disappointment for the squad players.

    Scolari’s body language: He is on sackable form. He knows that he is probably only a couple of matches away from a mid-season sack. He is the bookies favourite for the next premier league manager to be sacked. Even otherwise, his body language is not that of a winner. His mentality is spreading across to the team. He is not passionate enough. He does take enough risks.

I’m sure Roman is watching all this. I’m sure he won’t be pleased a bit. If we don’t improve massively, Scolari must be lucky to be here same time next month. If there is one thing that can save Scolari that would Roman’s desire for some stability and managerial longevity. I’m all for stability, as long as there is promise, some hope, some light at the end of the tunnel (pun intended).