Ken Early: Mourinho may already have lost the Chelsea dressing room

Is Jose Mourinho trying to get himself sacked? After his extraordinary seven-minute TV harangue in the aftermath of Chelsea's defeat to Southampton, you had to wonder.

Mourinho told Sky Sports that he had no intention of resigning and that if the club wanted rid of him, they would have to sack him. This was strange, since he had not been asked anything about his future.

After all, it's still only five months since Chelsea won the league. There was every chance the reporter might not even have raised the question of the sack.

Managers usually aren’t eager to be the first to mention the S-word, because once it’s in the conversation it can be hard to dampen speculation. So it was surprising to hear Mourinho pre-emptively introduce a debate around his possible sacking, and even lay out the basic terms under which he would be prepared to leave the club.

The last time Chelsea sacked Mourinho they had to pay him a reported £18 million in compensation. He’s currently two months into a four-year contract.

It’s just as well we know the great football men are not motivated by money. Otherwise people might be looking at the curious incentive structure of football management, where the fastest way to make a gigantic fortune is often to lose your job, and draw all the wrong conclusions.

Mourinho then declared he was the best manager Chelsea could ever hope to have. It was therefore a crucial moment in the club’s history. If they sacked him now, they would be locking themselves into the failed patterns of the past. They’d be saying that at Chelsea it’s always the manager’s fault, and never the players, even though it’s clearly the players’ failings on the field that have left Chelsea in this sorry state.

Public challenge

There might be some truth to this argument, but Mourinho is not currently in a position to issue a public challenge to his employers.

Of course, by publicly urging Chelsea to mend their ways, he’s implicitly suggesting that they have been run as a madhouse club, where not even the best manager in the world can hope to survive in the long run. Maybe that argument will help limit the damage to his reputation if the sacking he seemed so keen to talk about goes ahead.

Mourinho's demeanour as he delivered his message was no less remarkable than its content. If there was a Premier League record for holding your lip curled in a sneer of disgust, he would have broken that too. You suspect Chelsea's players have seen rather a lot of that sneer over the last few weeks. Last week, there were newspaper reports that some senior figures in the squad were concerned at Mourinho's habit of scapegoating players for bad results.

Mourinho will have noted these reports. When he was at Real Madrid, Mourinho became obsessed by a mole in the Madrid dressing room who was supposedly leaking information to the press. The same theme has now resurfaced at Chelsea.

The day after the “scapegoating” stories emerged, Mourinho told reporters at his pre-match press conference: “I’m sure you have some rats who can tell you what is going on.”

It would sound familiar to the El Pais journalist Diego Torres, who listened avidly to all the various rats and moles that infested the Bernabeu and compiled their accounts into a brilliant study of Mourinho's time at Madrid, The Special One.

Mourinho described the book as “fiction”, but if so this is fiction that eerily foreshadows many of the real problems we’re currently seeing at Chelsea.

For instance, Torres claims that Mourinho told the Madrid players: “You must learn to rationalise the attacks. If you see that if you go up, you’re not going to be able to get back into position quickly, then don’t go up. If you’re not sure, regardless of what you might get out of it, stay put. I’m going to be checking this on the pitch.”

In Mourinho’s teams, each player knows that if the team concedes a goal that can be traced back to positional exuberance on his part, he will be blamed for it. They soon learn to be pessimists on the field.

When Southampton broke to score their third goal, you wondered: where is Matic? He's usually the guy who breaks up that sort of attack. But Matic was marooned ahead of the ball on Chelsea's left wing. He'd put in a cross that was deflected, then lingered in that advanced position for a fatal instant, maybe hoping he could help win it back high up the field. Some might say he needs to learn to rationalise the attacks.

Matic was substituted immediately after that goal, just 28 minutes after he had come on as a half-time substitute for Ramires. The substitution looked more like a punishment than a solution.

But then, Mourinho never looks more forlorn than when his team are chasing a game. When he’s losing in the second half, his answer is always the same: put on another striker. If you’re out of strikers, move a centre-half up front and hit long balls.

A team full of pessimists is a team that works hard in defence, but it’s also a risk-averse team that doesn’t score many goals. It’s a team that gradually loses faith in its ability to score. A team that has a fatalistic tendency to believe that if you’re trailing midway through the second half, the game is already lost.

Fight back

Mourinho seems to share this tendency. Was he even seriously thinking about ways in which his team might fight back to get a result in that last 20 minutes, or was he already composing that seven-minute post-match speech?

Mourinho did not spare Matic’s feelings when the time came to explain the substitution.

“Matic is... not playing well. He’s not sharp defensively. He’s making mistakes with the ball. Not the best decisions.” Mourinho said that he chose to take off Matic rather than Oscar or Fabregas because Oscar is more creative, and Fabregas performs better in high-pressure situations.

So by implication Matic is not only out of form, he’s also uncreative and mentally fragile. It would have been a damning assessment coming from a TV pundit, so imagine how crushing it sounds coming from your manager.

Some players would see that as a betrayal of trust. It might be beyond the ability of a normal manager to repair the relationship. Thankfully, Mourinho is the best manager in the world.