Schürrle fires and hits the bar, but he was flagged offside beforehand. That short sentence tells the story of Chelsea’s excursion to Old Trafford last week, in other words: a lot of noise about nothing. Chelsea never threatened De Gea’s clean sheet and seemed happy to settle for a point at the end. As ugly as the game, and the tactics applied by Chelsea on the pitch, were there may be a grandiose plan behind it. Recently, in the press (Worrall, Espn) suggested that Mourinho’s plan was to simply avoid defeat in big games and to win against the lesser teams in order to conquer the title. However, I believe Mourinho’s plan goes even further; he (and his ego) wants to be a football immortal, hence, his machinations are all steered towards the ultimate goal in football: Perfection.
The Portuguese has no patience and knows that tenure of twenty plus years with a team a la Sir Alex Ferguson is not a path he is willing to walk towards immortality. So, he aims to take a shortcut and achieve what almighty Fergurson could not: enter the realm of English Football’s undefeated teams, plus in the process making Arsene Wegner a footnote. Mourinho knows that with his resume (multiple championships, including two Champions League trophies) if he steps on the only remarkable accomplishment by Wegner, he will become an immortal.
The question becomes: is it feasible? And how exactly can he achieve such a goal? The answer lies on the game plan exposed against Manchester United last Monday and the unexpected signing of Samuel Eto’o.
Yes, as Worrall pointed out, his path to become an invincible stands upon not losing in big games, taking care of business at home, and win as much as possible while playing the weaker teams away from Stamford Bridge. This tactic if successful will yield approximately 90 points (57 points from all [19]home wins, 4 points from taking at least a point while visiting the top four teams in the league, and earning at minimum 27 points out the 45 possible points, in the remaining [15] away games). It looks like an impossible task, yet looking at Mourinho’s record it becomes a real possibility.
In his first season 2004-05 at Chelsea, Jose came really close, only losing one game to the pedestrian version of Manchester City not the multibillion dream team that is now. The following year 2005-06 Chelsea only lost 5 games with the defeat to Manchester United being the only one against a top four opponent. Still, it can be said that the Chelsea team that he has now is very different to the one established back then, so we need proof beyond Mourinho’s early years at Chelsea. Thus, rewind to the times when Mourinho was living in Portugal leading Porto to two successive league titles. His team only lost 2 matches on each of the title winning seasons. Now, Fast forward to 2009-10 with Inter, and the Portuguese manager tasted defeat in only four occasions, with Roma the only team to defeat him from the top four that year.
Therefore, putting everything in context, you have a top class team in Chelsea, regardless of the manager in charge, that in its previous irregular season succumbed only 7 times to the opposition, bring the old adventures’ partner in Samuel Eto’o and you take one point from a trip to the reigning champions’ field, stirred, and add a hint of Mourinho’s unparalleled undefeated home league record and we have: The Portuguese’s Machiavellian plan is doable and well under way. Let immortality descend upon us.
PS: This was written before Chelsea’s defeat to Bayern and is purely hypothetical!