Cesc Fabregas went on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football to get a head start on Chelsea FC’s post-mortem. His comments hint that the team has not yet recovered from Jose Mourinho.
The good news is that the #4 acknowledged his and his teammates’ failure to stay fit and ready to train during the off-season. The bad news is he also shouldered much of Jose Mourinho’s responsibility for Chelsea FC’s dismal opening half of the season, flipping the script on a classic passive-aggressive blame-shift.
Speaking on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football, the Spanish midfielder had this to say.
"I think [Mourinho’s] biggest problem was that he trusted us too much. He gave us more holiday because we were champions, he believed in us more, trusted us more, and we let him down. The whole team, all the players. – via Sky Sports"
Well.
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Last season was not Mourinho’s first Premier League title. It was not his first double. It was not even his best double (no offense to the Capital One Cup). Winning is not a new experience for Mourinho, and it was not a new experience for many of the players.
Everyone involved knew how to handle themselves after a commanding league championship complemented by a domestic cup. Yet Fabregas wants us to believe that the master strategist – the Portuguese Puppeteer – let the players walk out of Cobham in late May with a simple finger-wagging “You boys behave yourselves, now.”
The players and the coaching staff – from Mourinho down – are all responsible for the physical condition of the team at the start of the season. But a lack of off-season discipline and the attendant drop in fitness is an explanation with a short half-life.
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The Week 2 3-0 loss to Manchester City and Week 5 3-1 loss at Everton could be attributed to off-season laxity. By the time of the 3-1 losses to Liverpool and Southampton – with several uninspiring draws in between – the players were fit. The club just wasn’t match ready.
It is hard not to see the hand of Mourinho in Fabregas’s remarks. Fabregas properly acknowledged his professional responsibility for his fitness and performance. But rather than deflecting the heat away from his former leader, he took Mourinho’s blame as his own – taking two hits for the price of one.
With any other manager this might go unremarked. But this is Mourinho. The man who once talked about parking a cow in front of the net. The man who threw Eva Carneiro under the bus and then backed it over her repeatedly. The man who taunted and trolled his rival (a “specialist in failure”) that climaxed in the Touchline Shove. The man who would rather pay fines to the FA than surrender control of the story or admit a mistake.
A manager known for manipulating those around him and evading culpability manipulated those around him to evade culpability
Mourinho excels at controlling situations and people. He has the hardware to prove it. At his best, his players will “run through brick walls for him.” The flip side is that there is nothing on the dial between 0 and 11. When the motivation runs out, his grip on the locker room and the results sheet vanishes.
Didier Drogba knows better than most the short shelf-life of Mourinho’s mind games. In his autobiography he discussed as much.
"Things often come in three-year cycles – we’d arrived at the end of such a cycle. By the start of the fourth season that Jose had been in charge, I think we had started to reach a point where it was harder for his message to get through. We wanted to hear it, we tried but somehow we had lost a little bit of what made us special. – via Evening Standard"
Search for this quote online and you’ll find that it’s been thoroughly Mourinho’d. You have dig through any number of blogs, articles, hot takes and think-pieces about Jose’s response before you find out what The King said in the first place.
Drogba made a professional, even-handed critique of a former manager with whom he won all sorts of hardware. By the time Mourinho was done with it, he had complete control of the narrative. The story was no longer about him, but it revolved around him. In a lesser man’s hands it would be a case of “he said, he said.” In Mourinho’s hand, it was simply “I say.”
You have to marvel at Mourinho out-Mourinho-ing himself. A manager known for manipulating those around him and evading culpability manipulated those around him to evade culpability.
Fabregas said he still talks to his former manager. Like any time two exes get together, the specifics may change but the old dynamics always re-assert themselves. Mourinho was probably the first to say “My only mistake was trusting you,” and in that Mourinho way of his it was only a matter of time before Fabregas internalized it to “His only mistake was trusting us.”
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