A decade on from his spectacular debut season in English football, Jose Mourinho can again smell silverware at Chelsea. Last
summer’s stellar recruitment has transformed a team once dismissed by
the Portuguese as a “little horse” into a thoroughbred stallion that is
unsurprisingly setting the pace at the halfway mark of the Premier
League. Neither club nor manager have ever failed to win the title from
this position.
There can be no deadpan attempts to manage
expectations this time around. Chelsea are the best team in England, one
of the three best in Europe and legitimate contenders to win it all.
Even Nemanja Matic, a man whose talk is usually every bit as understated
as his brilliant game, thinks so.
“I think it's possible,” the
giant Serb told reporters when the prospect of an unprecedented
quadruple was raised in December. “We have a chance. I don't want to say
that we're going to but we're going to try. We have quality. We will
see if we can do. But I am confident, I believe in my team, my
team-mates, so everything is possible.”
After 19 Premier League
matches Chelsea boast 46 points, six more than last season and only
bettered by their total of 52 in 2005-06, when Mourinho’s first great
side retained the title in imperious style. They have already visited
the Etihad, Old Trafford and Anfield and remain on course for 92 points,
a total that would have won the title in every 38-game season except
for 2004-05, the season that saw the Blues claim their first league
crown for 50 years.
Liverpool
await in the semi-finals of the League Cup, the Reds still trying to
discover a post-Suarez identity. In the FA Cup, there is no reason to
suspect Chelsea will not again go deep into a competition they have won
in four of the last eight years. And while Paris Saint-Germain are the
trickiest assignment the Blues could have faced as Champions League
group winners, the French giants were vanquished at Stamford Bridge last
season with significantly more modest resources.
That January will likely come and go without any real drama underlines how well Chelsea did their business in the summer. Andrej Kramaric will join the club’s loan army
but Mourinho needs nothing from the winter transfer market. While
others flounder around trying to salvage drifting seasons the Blues can
sit tight and concentrate on ensuring that the club-record £18.4 million
profit announced in November is no fluke.
Domestically there
appears little for Mourinho to worry about. Manchester City have done
well to narrow the gap over the festive period but Sunday’s shocking
collapse against Burnley highlighted the underlying complacency that has
undermined them at key moments in recent years. Manchester United are
improving but are not yet ready to challenge, while a combination of
recruitment failures and injuries have seen both Arsenal and Liverpool
regress this season.
Real Madrid and Bayern Munich remain the
gold standard in Europe, but Chelsea can justifiably hope to compete
with both on equal terms. Madrid boast more star quality than any other
team on the planet and Bayern’s World Cup-winning spine is formidable,
but Mourinho’s men might be the most tactically flexible of all the
elite teams, equally comfortable and dangerous with or without the ball.
The signing of Cesc Fabregas has given Chelsea what Mourinho
rightly calls “another dimension”. The 27-year-old’s unique background
gives him the perfect blend of Barcelona possession play and Premier
League urgency, boosting the Blues’ ability to dominate matches and do
damage on the transition. His astonishing assist tally speaks loudest
but Fabregas’ biggest contribution has been to make those around him –
and the team as a whole – significantly better.
One of the
biggest beneficiaries has been Eden Hazard. With Fabregas behind him and
Diego Costa in front, the brilliant Belgian is no longer burdened with
the responsibility of being Chelsea’s primary creator or scorer. He can
now concentrate on drifting into matches at crucial times and making the
difference, as he has done against Arsenal, Tottenham and Southampton
this season.
Great players need great team-mates and Hazard now
has the supporting cast he deserves. At 23 he is already, as Mourinho
says, “the best young player in the world”, and 2015 should afford him
ample opportunity to lift his game to the fringes of the Ballon d’Or
discussion.
For 2015 to be Chelsea’s year on multiple fronts,
Mourinho might have to show greater faith in his bench. Only 11 players
have made over five Premier League starts for the Blues this season and
there are too many crucial games in February and March to make shunning
rotation a viable option.
But as the curtain comes down on a
trophyless 2014 at Stamford Bridge, everything is back on the table for
Mourinho and Chelsea in the New Year.
Thursday, 1 January 2015
Why 2015 should be Chelsea's year
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