José Mourinho’s Chelsea lack anger and intensity of title-winning past

Loss at home to Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool should not spell the end for the Blues’ manager but time is undoubtedly against the Portuguese


Before this match there were some slightly fanciful suggestions that José Mourinho may be actively trying to get himself sacked. If this really were the case the evidence of this bafflingly inert 3-1 defeat at home to an improving Liverpool is that Mourinho has found another aspect of football management he is extremely good at.
Afterwards Chelsea’s manager was frazzled, angry, curt, a little rude. “There are things that are out of our hands,” he shrugged, gnomically. Does he think this was his last match here. “No, I don’t.” Did the players perform below their levels? “No.” Mourinho press conferences are often compelling, sometimes angry, often more fun than whatever might have just happened on the pitch. Here he simply looked like his team: tired, played out, edging towards the end of something.
It is worth pointing out that Mourinho doesn’t deserve to be sacked for losing a game to Liverpool. He doesn’t deserve to be sacked because this team has simply lost its vim, its collective libido. Perhaps he doesn’t even deserve to be sacked for the failure to alter or strengthen a group that has been playing in a minor chord since last spring.

But then, this is football and “deserve” has got nothing to do with it. Here, for all the flickers of zombified life in the last two games, Chelsea simply looked shot, a group of players no longer stirred to play with the levels of anger and intensity that are essential to any Mourinho team. Circumstances had presented the players with a chance to make a shared public statement of hard-running loyalty, whatever the result, to chair their manager around on the pitch with them. Willian and Ramires drove forward intermittently. But this was hardly a bellow of rage, more a polite and dutiful cough, the footballing equivalent of that slightly awkward final elevator ride down towards the door to the street.

Of course, Roman Abramovich has a chance now to spring a surprise of his own, to crisis manage in a more measured manner than he has before. Things are supposed to be different this time around, more long term, a job with room to fail. For the neutral it would be nice to see Mourinho given the chance to do some management now, to reimagine this team on the hoof, perhaps even refresh his own methods, finding a little of the galvanising magic of the great days at Porto and Internazionale.

One thing is clear though. Something has to go. Because right now there is simply an antichemistry here, surely the most bedraggled, meekest, most joyless team Mourinho has ever put out. With 58 minutes gone and the score 1-1 he substituted the reigning footballer of the year. Eden Hazard had contributed almost nothing in his central role. He trotted off past his manager, didn’t kick anything, didn’t even look particularly interested in the way things had turned out.

And in a sense this match embodied over 90 minutes the decelerating lifespan of this Mourinho 2.0 team in the last 16 months. Early gains. Early fluency. A falling back into good, rugged fending. And finally a falling back into bad rugged defending.

Chelsea opened the scoring after four minutes with a superb team goal, brilliantly finished by Ramires. And then … nothing. Liverpool took the lead with 16 minutes to go. Once again Chelsea stood and watched. By the end Christian Benteke had time to take the ball in the area, stop, think, turn one way, look around, before planting it in the corner of the net. Chelsea’s players simply waited for the restart, scattered blue shirts spread in postures of sullen self-possession.
It was fitting that Philippe Coutinho should provide the two moments of individual brilliance that settled this game. The Brazilian scored twice, both times jinking inside and curling a shot into the corner; one right footed, one left. Otherwise for long periods in the middle of the afternoon this was a claustrophobic affair, a game of clanking, compressed, strangulating collisions, not so much heavy-metal football as Status Quo football, the same three chords banged out with mind-numbing repetition by both teams.

Coutinho had played pretty raggedly in the opening hour, goal aside. He will no doubt find himself coaxed into Jürgen Klopp’s system, but for now he remains a free spirit, meandering at times but beautifully gifted. And in a sense here the difference between Liverpool and Chelsea was that where Liverpool were also clunky and incoherent at times, they were at least clunky and incoherent in an interesting way, clunky with verve, a sense of something emerging rather than receding out of sight.

On a soft sunlit October lunchtime, with a kind of haze of heat and sprinkler-steam lingering over Stamford Bridge, Mourinho had stiffened his midfield with Mikel John Obi, the footballing equivalent of the pair of mud-caked wellies you keep in the boot for difficult afternoons such as this.

In spite of which, in between the goals, most of the action in that opening hour took place on the touchline. Klopp, dressed in a baggy club tracksuit, spent his afternoon wheeling around a state of low-level agony, waving constantly, urging his players to move in a certain way, hands sketching patterns in the air, appalled not by a misplaced pass or weak shot but by more abstract geometric forms. At one stage Adam Lallana won the ball back high up the pitch to no great effect, but Klopp was up on his feet, applauding wildly, like the world’s most enthusiastic primary school teacher celebrating a correct piece of working in the margins of another dud long division.

Time is on Klopp’s side, just as it is against Mourinho (yes, another name in the conspiracy). Liverpool are at least at the start of a process. For Chelsea Willian played well, along with Ramires the only real source of drive and forward thrust in this weary-looking team for whom tiredness, fatigue, a loss of tension is the defining, the fag end of a longer cycle.

Looking around Stamford Bridge, for all the nods to triumphs of the 1950s, the real heroes at Chelsea are recent heroes. The banners round the stands refer to recent triumphs. José is still here. JT is still out there captaining, leading, legending. This is a club that feels tied a little uncomfortably to its recent past. And yet it is a narrative that has stalled, run its course without ever producing any sustained show of the kind of football we are told Abramovich wants his team to play.

It can be hard to peer through that luminously toxic Mourinho personality obsession and get a clear look at this Chelsea team. In outline, squint a little, there shouldn’t be a great deal wrong with it that a pair of high class central midfielders and maybe another back-up centre forward couldn’t solve.

The team that won the title was always a patch-and-mend affair, a brilliant cut price piece of one-season team building. The failure to improve on it in the summer, for a manager who has always been a little scorched earth, prone to exhausting the moving parts in his teams, is a part of the wider story.

Mourinho is confident he will stay as Chelsea manager. It is to be hoped if he does he can change not just his players, but the more wearing aspects of his own approach, that driving, draining personality that by the end here seemed to have left a team that has hit a dead end.