No heart or guts, but this wasn't a one-off calamity for Chelsea

This was a win for "the enemy", he said, and no word of sympathy for the vanquished escaped his lips. Yet the Portuguese did show a certain restraint, by his own standards at least, and even a dash of English understatement.

His description of Inter Milan as "the best team from the first minute until the last" offered little hint of the pulverising superiority the champions of Serie A exerted over a side whose prospects of becoming the champions of the Premier League are now in gravest doubt.

If it was obvious that Chelsea were as abysmal as Inter were sensational, it was harder to discern whether the root of that imbalance lay in the former's lethargic incompetence or the tactical mastery of the latter.

Whatever the answer, with the exception of two 10-minute periods either side of half-time, this felt less like a competitive match than a dismissive masterclass.

The most lavish compliment to be paid Inter is that they controlled events like Chelsea at their harrying, high-octane best. Chelsea, meanwhile, looked so lost, bereft, clueless and fatigued that, had the team been transformed into a Cheltenham horse, it would have been in the back of the truck and on its way to the Pedigree Chum factory before it had even been hosed down.

A total mare is what every outfield player (other from Yuri Zhirkov, who made two fine blocks to deny Inter goals) endured on a night when the entire Chelsea midfield might as well have stayed in the dug-out and knitted a character for Harry Hill.

I refuse to accept the team sheet evidence that Frank Lampard was on the pitch at all. Up front, Didier Drogba was squashed to insignificance by the scary central defensive duo of Walter Samuel and Lucio (imagine playing against those two monsters and glancing across to see Marco Materazzi warming up on the touchline; you'd want a cup of Strychnine).

The eruption of petulance that earned him the red card seemed inevitable long before the event. And at the back, they were sliced apart by the magnificent Wesley Sneijder, who looked almost Cruyffian, at will.

If denying their hosts any width was a strategic triumph for Mourinho, it hardly explained Chelsea's lack of heart, guts and balls. The ability to stir themselves when trailing has been their hallmark ever since Mourinho's time. Yet once Samuel Eto'o had drilled home one of many sublime Sneijder through balls, they resigned themselves to defeat with little more than a sullen shrug.

Were this a one-off calamity, it could be dismissed as what opinion pollsters call an "outlier" (an inexplicable but meaningless statistical freak). Coming so soon after the second-half collapse at home to Manchester City, it leaves no doubt that something nasty is sapping Chelsea's spirit and that something, we may assume, is the John Terry farrago.

His recent form has been patchy, to be generous, but more alarming is the suspicion that his team-mates have lost respect for him (who can blame them?) and that he can no longer impose his yeoman will to rouse them as of old.

What even as gifted and experienced a coach as Carlo Ancelotti can do to repair that, I've no idea. But the odds on Chelsea recovering their confidence to win the league are lengthening while those on Ancelotti departing in the summer contract. Patience is hardly a virtue in the eyes of Roman Abramovich.

God knows who the Russian will turn to next, with Guus Hiddink tied up in Turkey, but one outlandish candidate races to mind. In his post-match interview, Mourinho reiterated his desire to return to England forthwith.

This may have sent a shiver down the spines of Liverpool's Rafa Benitez and Man City's Roberto Mancini, whom Mourinho replaced at Inter. But the real target of this scattergun job application, you felt, was Mr Abramovich.

If the notion of this self-styled prince across the water being restored to the Chelsea throne strikes you as demented, stranger things can happen when desperation swamps the memory of rancour past. You may recall Peter Mandelson's arrival in Gordon Brown's cabinet was not widely predicted.

Whether Mr Abramovich has the humility to bury the hatchet somewhere other than in Mourinho's neck, time alone will tell.

But if so, the narcissist will have cause to reflect, with all the languor Chelsea so curiously displayed last night, that if revenge is a dish best eaten cold, nothing tastes quite as sweet as watching an old enemy being force fed humble pie.