Richard Williams assesses Chelsea's season and suggests they should be doing better for the money spent

A single point at home against Manchester United at lunchtime today would be enough to give Chelsea their second consecutive Premiership title, while enabling Jose Mourinho to celebrate the remarkable achievement of four national championships in a row - two in Portugal and two in England. And yet, on balance, the report card on the manager's second season in London will read: must do better.

Michael Ballack, due to arrive at Stamford Bridge for the start of next season, probably does not consider himself to be on a rescue mission, although his no-fee transfer from Bayern Munich was agreed before Chelsea's reputation began to be stained by an increasingly widespread distaste for the club's modus operandi on and off the pitch.

In terms of Chelsea's continuing evolution, however, the German midfielder is the only visible light on the horizon. Andriy Shevchenko is the other main summer transfer target but the decision by the referee Markus Merk to disallow the Ukrainian striker's perfectly valid goal against Barcelona on Wednesday is unlikely to persuade Silvio Berlusconi that it is time to accept Roman Abramovich's standing offer of tens of millions of pounds plus Hernan Crespo in exchange for the 2004 European player of the year.

Meanwhile Mourinho and his staff are left to contemplate a set of curiously unresolved emotions. Last year Chelsea won the League Cup to go with their championship. Given they started the season with a shattering burst of victories which led to a general assumption that the title race was over after barely half a dozen matches, there was no reason to suppose that they would not equal or even better the number of trophies this year.

This time, however, all three knock-out competitions proved beyond their grasp. Charlton Athletic knocked them out of the League Cup on penalties in October, Barcelona removed them from the Champions League in March and a week ago Liverpool ended their hope of the classic league and FA Cup Double previously claimed by Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.

This is also the first time in four years that Mourinho has not finished the season with a pair of trophies to show for his work. At Porto he claimed the Uefa Cup in his first championship season and the European Cup in his second. Now voices inside and outside Stamford Bridge are asking how and why, if he could win the Continent's biggest club competition with a team that cost, by his own estimation, one tenth of the Manchester United squad vanquished by Porto in the round of 16 two years ago, he could fail with a bunch of players on which Abramovich has spent £298 million in transfer fees, almost half of it at Mourinho's behest.

A season which began with such blazing promise is ending with mutters of discontent, their volume raised by Mourinho's curious tactics at Old Trafford last weekend, when he left three of his four wingers - Arjen Robben, Joe Cole and Damien Duff - on the bench and started the match with Paulo Ferreira, a full-back, in midfield. The original selection looked perverse; the attempt to rectify it in the second half was a ham-fisted failure.

Utterly unapologetic, blaming the referee for the result and the wingers themselves for a mysteriously synchronised loss of form, Mourinho explained that the failure to build on the foundation of his debut season in London was the responsibility of those supporters who, their expectations satisfied by the club's first title for half a century, failed to put pressure on them to follow it up.

"You need to be challenged from the beginning, to be under pressure a little bit, to feel the need to improve," he said, "and we never felt that."

At a salary of around £5 million a year one might think that he could be expected to provide that pressure himself, as well as taking steps to ensure that his four wingers - including Shaun Wright-Phillips - did not experience a drop in form all at once.

Given that he has made good on his original pledge to operate with a squad of no more than two dozen players, Mourinho will presumably be inviting some of them to park their Cayennes and Continentals elsewhere next year.

He will certainly resist Juventus's continued interest in William Gallas, seen by the Italian club as the ideal replacement for the ageing Lilian Thuram, but there will be less opposition to Real Madrid's overtures to Ricardo Carvalho, who cost £19.5 million two years ago. Either Paulo Ferreira or Asier Del Horno might leave and it is hard to see Wayne Bridge being invited to rejoin the squad after his loan period at Fulham. Like Tiago, Maniche is likely to enjoy only a brief stay, with little indication that his loan move from Dynamo Moscow should be made permanent.

Then there are the cases of Cole and Wright-Phillips, young men who may be feeling that their confidence is not being enhanced by Mourinho's whims. The manager seems to blow hot and cold on the former and appears to have condemned the latter, for whom he paid £21 million, to oblivion.

In terms of incoming talent, the two main candidates suggest that the club's priorities are concentrated on the short term. By a curious coincidence, both Ballack and Shevchenko turn 30 in September.

And the German's arrival is genuinely puzzling, given that in style and function he seems to provide an almost exact duplicate of Frank Lampard, one of Europe's outstanding performers over the past three years. Away from the headlines, however, Chelsea continue their policy of signing up other Premiership clubs' most promising academy students.

What is highly improbable is that next season will see any alteration in Mourinho's methodology, as he likes to call it. As he prepares his attempt to emulate Alex Ferguson's unique feat of winning three consecutive English league titles, he will keep faith with the approach that delivered his early success. Based on powerful, hard-running players and a narrow range of specified tactical options, it leaves room for his own penchant for dramatic interventions at times of crisis.

The facts are beginning to suggest that these interventions seldom work, particularly in sudden-death games. He does better with less flamboyant adjustments to his team's shape and tactics, and with the long haul over a league season.

And now, given that he has never acted as the head coach to any team for longer than two years, he is on the brink of entering unknown territory, with only his self-belief for company.