As Jose Mourinho stomps around the training ground, Chelsea employees dive into side rooms to avoid him.
|||As Jose Mourinho stomps around the training ground, Chelsea employees dive into side rooms or peek around corners to avoid their temperamental manager.
Nobody wants to come into contact with him these days. Not when the mood is black and the atmosphere oppressive.
Mourinho will not speak about the moment he shouted ‘filha da puta’ at the club’s popular doctor Eva Carneiro during the 2-2 draw with Swansea City on the opening day of the Barclays Premier League season.
Privately, employees at the club are firmly on her side.
It is one of the reasons Mourinho is struggling to motivate the dressing room, creating tension between him and the players.
Carneiro has not been to work for the past 36 days, in limbo as Chelsea prepare for a potential civil action that could cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages.
Mourinho is refusing to apologise, to take responsibility for publicly calling out a highly respected member of the medical profession during an explosive confrontation.
There are rumours at the club that Roman Abramovich’s partner Dasha Zhukova, along with the wives and partners of the players, felt Mourinho was heavy-handed and disrespectful.
He is struggling to hold this team together, to unite this dressing room after they slipped to their third defeat of the season at Everton on Saturday.
It was a pitiful performance, with the body language of the players when they stepped off the team bus suggesting they were about to surrender. Where was the swagger of champions, the aura that is usually associated with Mourinho’s title-winning teams?
Some of the issues can be traced back to last season and the manager’s frustration with Diego Costa goes much deeper than the continued frustrations with the £32million striker’s troublesome hamstrings.
After Chelsea had sewn up the title with a 1-0 win over Crystal Palace on May 3, Mourinho rewarded his players with four days off to give them time to celebrate.
Costa, who flew to Madrid to party, indulged a little bit too much and took an extra day. Mourinho responded by axing him from the team that drew 1-1 at Anfield on May 10, but by then the problems were beginning to pile up for Costa.
Over a three-week period in the build-up to the title triumph there had been numerous complaints about loud noise and parties at chez Costa. By then, the goals had pretty much dried up.
Physically the Brazilian is back in good shape this season, with Chelsea players noting that he has returned to peak condition following the summer’s excesses. Despite that, he has scored just once.
Radamel Falcao, the back-up striker who shares the same agent, Jorge Mendes, as Mourinho, is paid £150 000 per week by Chelsea as part of the arrangement with his parent club Monaco. He has made little impact.
There is also resistance among the players to Mourinho’s autocratic — yet hugely successful — system, a legacy from last season’s title run-in. There are players in that team — Oscar, Willian and Eden Hazard — who would prefer to play with more flair.
But Mourinho is unmoved and the downturn in results this season have made him dig in even more.
To get out of this hole the manager will have to address the internal divisions that are creating so much conflict and bring the players back onside.
This was supposed to be the year when the academy players would flourish, with Mourinho promising at the end of last season that he would integrate four youngsters in the first-team squad. Abramovich is applying the squeeze from above.
Everyone at the club is under pressure to end the 18-year wait for a youth-team graduate to become a regular fixture in the first team. The wait will go on.
There is a general perception within the game that Mourinho will not promote young players, a theory that cost the Portuguese the chance to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United.
When they met with Mourinho, United’s powerbrokers were not convinced that he would continue the great traditions of the club by developing young players.
They called it right, with a staggering 33 Chelsea players currently out on loan to other clubs.
At academy level there is surprise that Dominic Solanke, one of the most talented young forwards in the country, has been loaned to Vitesse Arnhem. Most assumed he would be Chelsea’s fourth striker this year. Instead the club are deep in crisis, with the excuses that this team were under-prepared for the season ahead long forgotten after their alarming start to the season.
This is another big week for Mourinho, starting with Wednesday’s Champions League game at home to Maccabi Tel Aviv followed by the visit of Arsenal on Saturday.
The last time Chelsea played Arsene Wenger’s team — in the Community Shield at Wembley last month, Mourinho lost to the Frenchman for the first time in his managerial career.
If he is beaten again, Mourinho will be running for cover. – Daily Mail
from Soccer Soccer Extended RSS http://ift.tt/1M7ebe3
