Lack of fighting spirit will be a shock for ghostly Jose

Matthew Norman
12 Jan 2009

How he must have relished his afternoon in Manchester, gazing down in blissful vindication upon the humiliation of the club that rejected him, doing his best not to be seen gloating yet still somehow bringing to mind Ted Heath watching Margaret Thatcher's downfall unfold in slow motion with barely containable glee.

In his official role, as Inter Milan coach scouting for the forthcoming Champions League tie against Manchester United, Jose Mourinho won't have enjoyed the combination of defensive surefootedness and attacking invention displayed by the hosts.

In his unofficial capacity as presiding ghost at this Chelsea famine, however, the Portuguese will have been transported to a paradise of self-righteous ecstasy. He tried to hide his feelings behind an expression of studied neutrality, but once or twice the camera caught a half-smile toying coquettishly at the corners of his mouth.

There was even an alleged eyewitness, or rather ear witness, account of his triumphalism. A certain Conor texted the BBC website early in the second-half to claim: "I'm in the box beside Mourinho and I just overheard him say that Chelsea are half the side they were under him!"

If anything, that flatters them. Yesterday, Chelsea weren't a quarter, and barely an eighth, of their previous selves. Mourinho's side were seldom pretty on the eye, but they had a cohesion, work ethic and resilience that made them exceedingly difficult to beat and such fearsome self-belief that even after he departed they came within the width of a goalpost of coaching themselves to a Champions League trophy.

Eight months on, these pliant pussycats were unrecognisable from the tigers of Moscow.

At the back, John Terry was a disengaged spectator as all three goals stemmed from poorly or barely defended crosses. In midfield, Frank Lampard's main contribution was a mildly malevolent early kick at Cristiano Ronaldo. And up front Didier Drogba, the planet's most physically imposing striker, could barely rouse himself to indulge the theatrics that induced Mourinho's recent admission that the Ivorian may be something of a diver.

The real worry for Luiz Felipe Scolari isn't that Chelsea yielded such a long and noble unbeaten record away from home. There is never any shame in the fact of defeat at Old Trafford. The concern lies in the manner of it, because Chelsea, such ferocious scrappers when behind under Mourinho, looked beaten the moment comatose defending gifted United the lead in first-half added time.

Having been dozing when Wayne Rooney took the novelty corner that led to that contentiously (but correctly) disallowed goal, their slumbers extended to the retaken corner that fell to an unmarked Nemanja Vidic.

Had Mourinho been in the dugout, you'd have been licking the lips during the interval in anticipation of a rousing second-half fightback. But that was then, and while Scolari responded by sending on Nicolas Anelka for Deco, a semi-detached presence when played out of position once again, the fatal flaw lay less with the system and personnel than lack of spirit.

These Chelsea boys, their confidence depleted by recent failures, seemed so meekly resigned to defeat that gossip about dressing-room disaffection visibly took on flesh. Meanwhile, Sky's cameras returned again and again to that spooky presence in the crowd as he waged war against the temptation to poke his tongue out at Roman Abramovich, an absentee yesterday but doubtless watching on one of his hyper-yachts.

Crisis is an overused word on sports pages but the most one-sided Big Four clash in memory (6-0 would hardly have flattered United) brought with it a sense of finality; the niggling suspicion that, with Liverpool matching Chelsea for frailty and Arsenal an irrelevance, the one true thoroughbred in the field has coasted up to the leaders and is poised to storm clear at the lightest tap from Sir Alex's whip.

For all the giant hint, it is too soon to declare an end to the title race, and equally premature to read the last rites for Scolari's Blues' career. But something ails Chelsea, and in the absence of the sort of spending power Mourinho enjoyed in his early days, there is little evidence that Scolari is the man to sort things out.

If Abramovich decides to allow the Brazilian more time, this may have more to do with his disinclination to blow more millions on paying off another coach than a rare attack of patience.

He's lost a few billion lately, after all, and we all know how unnerving that can be. Then again, the sight of his former employee affecting a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger pose of effortless superiority will have done nothing to improve the oligarch's mood.