MANCHESTER City’s attempt to become the new Chelsea is going well, isn’t it.
They mob referees, base their game on sterile defence and flaunt their wealth with graceless arrogance. They will probably sack their manager soon. Chelsea had five changes over 20 months, and Roberto Mancini is finding there is more to keeping a mega-rich owner happy than wearing a scarf stylishly.
The team’s start to the campaign is worse than it was last season under Mark Hughes. After nine games under Hughes, they had 18 points and had lost only once. Now, the baying bullies have lost two and have 17 points. And Mancini has spent more than Hughes. But something remarkable has happened at the genuine Chelsea. They’ve become, erm, nice.
Regular readers (and it is nice to talk to you both again) will be shocked to find that sentence in this column. For years I believed Chelsea had something dark at its heart. The seasons I am talking about were when chief executive Peter Kenyon was telling us he had not talked to Sven-Goran Eriksson when he had, and when Jose Mourinho insisted Frank Rijkaard had entered the referee’s room when he hadn’t.
The era when three youngsters, all contracted to Leeds United, were invited down to a top hotel in Surrey and shown around Chelsea’s training facilities. The seasons when Mourinho used foul abuse in premeditated attacks on referees to divert attention from defeats.
Over more than three decades of detailed studies of football machinations, I had never encountered a club so malign, so thoroughly seeped in nastiness. So the change under Carlo Ancelotti is like seeing a maggot metamorphose into a firefly.
Ancelotti went through his own transformation. As a trophy-laden player, he worked under Fabio Capello. When his own turn came to manage, Ancelotti aped his mentor’s rigid insistence on disciplined play and, like Capello, forced his players into rigid tactical systems. Later, Ancelotti learnt to change his formations to suit the talents at his disposal.
He cannot take all the credit for the change at Chelsea, because there is a new spirit of friendly co-operation behind the scenes, but the most visible manifestation of the altered image is the glorious verve with which they go about their business on the field.
The paradox is that, while attempting to bury opponents under an avalanche of goals, Chelsea have become even more parsimonious in defence than they were under the miserly Mourinho. But now, once they have withstood an opposition attack, they immediately respond with a forward sortie of their own.
The new approach is personified by Ashley Cole. Under Mourinho he was forbidden from crossing the halfway line. Now, under Ancelotti, he has become a key attacking component. And although Cole is still apt to give the referee a mouthful, he is not the snarling embodiment of disrespect he used to be. John Terry doesn’t lead a belligerent gang towards the ref to challenge every decision these days either. Instead, they take their lead from their good-humoured coach.
Like every other manager he sees refereeing decisions through the prism of his own understandable bias. But he greets perceived injustices with a raised eyebrow rather than an exaggerated tantrum. It is the temperate response of a decent man. And he has made Chelsea a decent club.
