Last season, Chelsea won the Premier League. They did so fair, they did so square, they did so comprehensively and in a manner nobody could possibly take any issue with.
Except they did so by cheating.Well, sort of.
Last time around, though, Jose Mourinho basically didn't bother with a squad. Didn't have to bother. Chelsea used 22 players in the league last season, but of those 22, ten made fewer than ten starts in the league, and seven of those made five or fewer. Three players - Branislav Ivanovic,
John Terry and
Eden Hazard - started every single league game,...
What they were, though, was predictable, both in style and personnel. As a Chelsea game loomed on the horizon you already knew how it was going to go. You'd have
Thibaut Courtois behind John Terry,
Gary Cahill, Cesar Azpilicueta and Branislav Ivanovic, and they'd be shielded by Nemanja Matic. He'd be accompanied by Cesc Fabregas, who would be passing to Eden Hazard, Willian and Oscar, and they - hamstrings allowing - would be passing to or running beyond Diego Costa. And he would score. Those players, playing that way, would probably win.
Not this season. On Wednesday night against Maccabi Tel Aviv, Jose Mourinho shuffled his squad not because it was a Champions League group stage game against relatively soft opposition, but because his first team have been playing like malcoordinated buffoons.
Three promising young players started, while half of the spine of last season's side were kept back on the bench. And injuries - so miraculously avoided last season - have started to creep in, too: Pedro and Willian will miss Saturday's game against Arsenal, while Courtois is out for several months
Those injuries are unfortunate for the players involved and, presumably, vastly irritating for Chelsea fans. So too the newfound ineptitude of those who aren't hurt, though that is also highly amusing for the rest of us. But more than that, it's
interesting. All of a sudden, the most settled lineup in the league is falling apart. All of a sudden, for any given game, Chelsea might have to do something unexpected.
Chaos is interesting. Chaos is fun. Not that you'd know it from the state of Jose Mourinho, who is currently in the midst of the kind of funk that would make a hormone-drunk adolescent think "steady on, mate, the world's not
that bad." The only question left hanging over Mourinho as a manager is whether he can break down and rebuild a successful team, and it appears to irritate him.........
Link
For the first time in ages, Chelsea might actually be fun - SBNation.com