With the world waiting eagerly to know what would be the future of Jose Mourinho at Chelsea, the board has come out in support of the ‘Special One’ but that support comes with the condition of showing positive results and pronto.
This season Chelsea’s performance has been alarmingly pathetic which has left them at 15th position having collected 11 points of 11 matches. A team who blazed to an EPL glory seems to be in shambles and its unfathomable how this came to be. And Jose Mourinho needs to turn things around if he wants to be called the Blues boss.
Chelsea’s clashes this week include an UCL encounter at home against Dynamo Kyiv and an away fixture in the Premier League against Stoke where the Capital One Cup revenge would be on the cards. Chelsea currently stand at the third position in their group in the Champions League and arguably winning the Champions League is the only way by which the Stamford Bridge outfit can aim to play in the Champions League next season (which is like asking too much from them at this point of time!).
Jose Mourinho’s task is cut out for him but the form and unavailability of his star players does not help his cause. A defense that was last year’s marvel has now become a debacle, his star player is now his biggest problem and a player like Costa who would otherwise be his saviour is perennially picking up bans, all add to his mounting pressure.
In the light of all factors that stand against him his players and the club fans have come out to support him. With Ramires showing trust in Mourinho and saying that there is no mutiny against the manager and the players are fully behind him, John Obi Mikel also joins him saying that “I definitely think that, if anything is wrong, if anything can be fixed, he is the one. There’s no one out there that is going to come in and fix what’s going on. If you tell the team that we are not giving 100% then there is the doubt, but we are giving 100%, we are playing for the manager, we are right behind him.”
In regard to Mourinho’s public ridicule of his players performances Obi Mikel further added that “He has come out a few times and said the players are not giving 100% and then you look at the next few games, the players come out and play better. He is doing everything that needs to be done.”
The fans too have come out in support of the Blues boss as they displayed banners at Saturday’s defeat to Liverpool that read ‘The only way is Jose’ and ‘Jose Mourinho- one of us’. Even in the face of defeat the fans continued to back their team and as Chelsea went slumping down against Liverpool the chants from the fans kept rising up as they filled the stadium with chants of Jose Mourinho.
Though Roman Abramovich wasn’t there to witness the defeat to Liverpool at Stamford Bridge last Saturday, the reactions of the fans and the team backing Jose Mourinho might be the reason why the board has given Mourinho a small string to hold on to. The love is surely running out!