José Mourinho said so himself. He has never started a season so poorly and he is very unhappy about it. But the Chelsea manager had a more categoric point to make. This was not 2007 all over again – the year when his first spell at Stamford Bridge ended in such an explosive fashion. His relationship with the owner, Roman Abramovich, remained solid. He was not going anywhere.
“Let’s be objective,” Mourinho said. “I don’t want to leave the club in any circumstances. And the club doesn’t want me to leave. I’m not going to walk away. The club is not going to sack me. Point. Point.
“If anyone thinks that I walk or I leave the job, it’s somebody that doesn’t know [the situation]. I think these people are not Chelsea fans because Chelsea fans know me for good and for bad, and that’s not my profile – to run away from problems; in this case, to run away from bad results.”
Abramovich was at the club’s training ground in Cobham on Friday, at around the time that Mourinho was holding his pre-Everton press conference and the manager stonewalled the inquiries about whether the pair had spoken, and about what. “He is the owner! He is allowed to visit his club,” Mourinho exclaimed.
The memory of his departure from Chelsea, which followed the breakdown of his relationship with Abramovich, remains clear. And with times tough at present, the questions that Mourinho faces, invariably, chip away at whether there is the scope for another meltdown.
In 2007, Mourinho had been frustrated since January at the club’s decisions on the transfer market, together with the one to appoint Avram Grant as the director of football. The situation came to a head after the 1-1 Champions League draw with Rosenborg in September – a game watched at Stamford Bridge by only 24,973 spectators.
Mourinho’s team had started that season with better results than this time – they have just four points from four Premier League matches so far. They go to Everton on Saturday lunchtime with players out of form and in urgent need of a tonic.
During the past transfer window, Chelsea failed to sign Mourinho’s top central defensive target – John Stones of Everton – although they did eventually land the Spain winger, Pedro, from Barcelona and Mourinho has frequently cut an irate figure. His latest setback is the news that Thibaut Courtois is a long-term casualty with a knee injury; the goalkeeper underwent surgery on Thursday.
But Mourinho made it plain that he was a more content person now than he was in 2007, partly because he had achieved his target of managing in Italy and Spain, at Internazionale and Real Madrid respectively.
There was also a classic Mourinho moment when he suggested that Abramovich himself had come to appreciate him more fully, having experienced life with a host of other managers since 2007. After Mourinho’s exit, Abramovich worked with Grant, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Guus Hiddink, Carlo Ancelotti, André Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo and Rafael Benítez.
“When I was here in 2007, I had two things on my mind,” Mourinho said. “Go to Spain and go to Italy. Today, I have been in Spain and I have been in Italy. I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here. That makes a difference. Mr Abramovich, in 2007, in his football life, he knows only two managers – [Claudio] Ranieri and myself. In this moment, he knows a lot of them. It’s a difference too. So there are differences.”
Mourinho and Abramovich were able to patch up their relationship after the trauma of 2007– otherwise, as Mourinho noted, they would not be working together again – and the manager made the point that the owner had given him a new four-year contract at the beginning of last month. “A few weeks ago, I have two years’ contract,” Mourinho said. “Now, I have four. It makes a difference.”
Mourinho has worked with only a handful of his players for the bulk of the past fortnight, due to the international break but heis optimistic ahead of the Everton game, insisting that the team’s performances so far have deserved greater reward. “We have one problem,” Mourinho said. “We are not getting the results we always expect to get. That’s our problem. I never had four matches four points, never [at the start of a season].
“I’m not happy and I’m happy that I’m not happy. But I’m optimistic. I trust the players and the players trust me. So it’s not such a hard situation because you feel that better results will arrive. It’s not something that you don’t see the way to leave the situation. We are going to leave this situation, for sure.”