After Chelsea FC lost yet another game on Saturday against Bournemouth, where do we go from here?
The dejected faces of the fans leaving Stamford Bridge this Saturday left an unanimous atmosphere of disbelief and hopelessness. So much for a comeback, three good performances, three clean sheets…only to lose at home to a newly-promoted team. It just felt like whatever little sparkle of luck that was lingering had now left.
All hope and good feeling leading up to the game quickly disappeared in the shadow of a lackluster performance that rounded off and summed up a miserable start to a season.
Everyone is looking for someone to blame, staff, players and fans alike. Most fans are still behind Jose Mourinho, trusting him to turn this around, but for some other fans, the eighth league loss was the straw that broke the Camel’s back.
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So where do we go from here?
It seems as there are three options: either you buy new players in the winter and get rid of the “rotten” ones; you can play the youth who are inexperienced but hungry; or you can choose the radical path and make managerial changes, if you are Roman Abramovich of course.
There is actually a fourth option, it consists of realizing that we are getting ahead of ourselves. It consists of believing that bad form isn’t something that disappears magically overnight and that it something that is played through and goes away gradually.
People need to see this loss as the glass half full rather than half empty: they need to see that the recovery is there and this is only a case of “two steps forward, one step back”. Obviously, this hypothesis is ephemeral as it will be proved or debunked against Porto on Wednesday, but that’s the beauty of it.
That is in fact the beauty of football: teams lose, good or bad; sometimes champions need to get back down to earth first and realize that they are still humans capable of making mistakes.
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Teams need luck and great teams make their own luck. But Chelsea aren’t a great team. As said before, good form doesn’t happen magically and in order to call ourselves a good team once again, we need this gradual incline. The team needs some new luck.
You can’t predict the outcome of a game, you can’t predict the moments of luck, but you can provide an environment where luck is more likely to surface and that’s entirely down to the players. If they try and reach an inch further, if they jump an inch higher…as Al Pacino said, “the inches are everywhere” and indeed they are, you just need to be willing to fight for the shirt to get those inches.
And that’s what Mourinho was telling the players in that dressing room, in a morbid atmosphere at full time. He told them that they need to fight. He looked at them and to every player he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t do enough for us to win, I need to fight, now repeat it too”.
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That is conjecturing of course. He may not have said this exactly but he knows what to say and that’s why as a proud Chelsea fan (who has lost a bit of pride today) I trust Mourinho to turn this around.
Do you?