Chelsea Dagger

After an extremely poor showing against Manchester United this past Saturday, Jose Mourinho’s successor is already under fire and in danger of imminent unemployment. Granted that Grant’s position as manager is widely known as having little more than an interim tag, I’m not entirely convinced that he’ll have a job at all in the upcoming weeks. Abramovich will likely remove him from the coaching staff entirely once the seats are warm enough to bring in Guus Hiddink or Marco van Basten.

Though Chelsea have had a great deal of success over the past three years, they haven’t exactly accomplished their feats with much style or flair. In football, the method of victory is often held to be more important than victory itself, as is evident from the extreme popularity of the flashy but often lazy Brazilian National Team. The Italian game is often criticized for being too tactical and methodical, but look at the success it brought during the previous World Cup. Soccer in the United States often suffers from the same criticism, as American players are usually in top physical condition but unable to execute the creativity and finishing ability that the elite teams are able to offer in short bursts.

Mourinho’s system is generally labeled under this defense-first tag as well, but in all likelihood he found a good middle ground. Though Chelsea’s defense has always been the strong point of their game, teams need to score goals to win games, and Chelsea have won games. Throwing an aging Andriy Shevchenko into the attack isn’t going to magically add unnecessary flair to their game. The fact of the matter is that Mourinho had the team playing under a system that worked well for three years. The team got off to a slow start this year, but blaming him for the struggles is not the answer. This search for a new manager is going to yield a second-rate successor, because the best man for the job is still Jose Mourinho.