Chelsea's sexy football thaws coldest hearts
Matt Dickinson, Chief Sports Correspondent
Perhaps it is the flu bug. Or the heavy medication. Either way, it is a strange sensation when you find your cynical journalist’s heart thawing at the sight of Chelsea racing to victory. That may sound an admission of a previous anti-Chelsea bias, confirming all the suspicions of the press office, but all we ever wanted was the club to employ a little charm on their way to global domination. There is every sign of that being the case under the management of Luiz Felipe Scolari. Think of Chelsea over the past five years and, as much as trophies, your mind turns to rucks, plots, money and Peter Kenyon. All that abrasiveness came flooding back last night in the reappearance on our television screens of José Mourinho. “I’m not going to change — why would I?” he told BBC’s Inside Sport from his new home at Inter Milan. “If I came here as a ‘John Nobody’ with nothing in his pocket, then I would have to adapt, I would have to try and do something. But I am not a John Nobody.” Good to see he has not lost any of his humility.
Mourinho is an exceptional manager and one day it may be fun to have him back playing with fire in the Premier League, but the idea that we should miss him has been eroded since Scolari was appointed in the summer and it was surely banished as his Chelsea team took apart Aston Villa at the weekend. Using the same system as Mourinho — 4-3-3 — and mostly the very same players, Scolari has Chelsea knocking the ball around like Arsenal. Or, given the manager’s background, we should probably say like Brazil. Ashley Cole has rediscovered the form that elevated him among the best left backs on the planet a few years ago now that he no longer has to regard the halfway line as an electric fence. And while the wingers are still required to work back, they do not expect a haranguing if they gamble and are caught upfield. Small adjustments, perhaps, but symptomatic of a wider transformation.
We wait to see if this liberation will secure trophies, and Mourinho was never slow in putting his medals on the table. But Scolari’s record is impressive enough to suggest that he is not just opening up the team for the fun of it or to please Roman Abramovich, the club’s owner. It is a stop-start process, with a functional performance in the Champions League only a few days earlier — drawing 0-0 away to CFR Cluj — but that is to be expected. Scolari’s big signing, Deco, has been injured and, of Sunday’s team, only José Bosingwa and Nicolas Anelka (a stand-in for Didier Drogba) did not work under Mourinho. The manager will make further adjustments. What is clear is his intent. At a club who still aspire to break even, or so they say, and yet remain a long way from doing so, winning new friends, as well as matches, does matter. And good press, or at the very least a lack of hostile coverage, is flowing their way.
, When does Drogba return?
