At his first Chelsea 2.0 press conference he decleared that after achieving his dream of conquering the top leagues in Europe-Spain, Italy, Portugal, England - he is back as the ' happy one '. Chelsea s pre season during which they won all the matches bar the Cristiano Ronaldo inspired defeat to Real Madrid, the impression was that Chelsea should be stronger than last season. With a stronger squad than previous seasons with new arrivals and return of players who went out on loan. Still, Mourinho appears to be as pragmatic as ever. Despite his claims that he has matured as a manager over the years and promises of an exciting Chelsea, he still same old Jose.
At his previous job at Real Madrid despite an expensively assembled squad full of super stars Mourinho constantly played ultra defensive formations with as many as ten men behind the ball against Guardiola s Barca, mou has constantly shown an act of withdrawing into his shell when facing an equally talented team. While this is not news it was suprising to see Jose turn up with a fancy bus at Old trafford during Monday s Premier league clash, Mourinho sucessfully parked the bus infront of Petr Cech, this time around Chelsea played a striker-less formation with six midfielders he defended himself saying ' it was the best way to hurt the opponent ' the fact is that despite a weaker Chelsea team taking on the same Man utd team last season and coming out on top head to head last season. Mourinho took a stronger Chelsea to Old trafford and chose to play defensive and afraid of loosing against an unchanged Man utd team.
So far since the start of the new season, despite winning the first two matches before drawing Man utd on Monday, the new things we have seen is that Chelsea s best player for the last two seasons Juan Mata has been thrown to the bench in favour of returnee Kevin De Bruyne and John Mikel Obi who is the best defensive midfielder on Chelsea s books has featured sparringly, Jose's preferred midfield pairing has been Lampard and Ramires who are both known to be box to box midfeilders.
While most Chelsea fans won't look at his team selection and the team's performances critically due to their love for him, he is surely not managing this Chelsea team better than his predecessor. Mata and Mikel on the bench is not understandable, while he may continue to win matches as they are playing in safe mode he surely not bringing anything new to the table and the suprises have been negative. Most Premier League fans who were expecting a swashbuckling Chelsea this season would all be disappointed that this talented Chelsea squad will never be used maximally as long as Mourinho refuses to suppress that safe mode nature in him.
Written by Oladele Timilehin.
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
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