Chelsea FC - Blues In A Post-Player Power World

Chelsea FC have always struggled with player-power dominating managers, but Frank Lampard insists that was never the case. Is he right?

It doesn’t take a lot to realize that if there was someone who could have broken Chelsea’s famed backbone of Cech-Terry-Lampard-Drogba and gotten away with it, without even so much a blot on his resume, it would be the man who forged it in the first place : Jose Mourinho.

Conventional wisdom would have it that Mourinho left behind a group of his most trusted lieutenants embedded deep within Chelsea, tasked with one mission alone – to keep the Mourinho method the de facto way of doing things and passive-aggressively wreck the ambitions of any new manager seeking to do away with the old. With that lofty task accomplished, and a job well done, it was time for the trusted band of merry men to be disbanded just as Jose made his triumphant return.

That might be a bit of a stretch but you get the drift.

Just how instrumental the spine was in undermining Chelsea managers is up for debate. There are those who believe they ran the club through remote control, presumably not the same one used to run David Luiz. There are others who believe Roman Abramovich rules the roost with such grim determination that anyone exercising any amount of influence would be terminated with extreme hostility. Yours truly has, at various times, fallen firmly in each of those camps.

Felipe Scolari failed to rehabilitate the injured Drogba and Andre Villas Boas dared to dream of a world without Lampard. They were both rewarded with stints, at the helm of Chelsea, which barely stretched to around 75 games. Put together.

Ancelotti who followed his first season at Chelsea, an unprecedented double-winning one, with a decent one was also at the receiving end of some player-power. With the team struggling in his first season and all but certain to fall from their perch, John Terry called a clear-the-air meeting – because apparently that’s what team captains do. Never mind the fact there hadn’t been a clear-the-air meeting in Chelsea’s history or in the history of the Premier League for that matter.

Can you imagine David Beckham calling for a clear-the-air meeting between the squad and Sir Alex Ferguson in response to a string of poor results? That would warrant a boot in the face. That’s not really a phrase, as much as a restatement of past events.

And yet, that was considered perfectly normal given the circumstances at Chelsea where managers toed the players’ lines just as the rest of the board (Buck, Emenalo) nod in assent at every thought Roman Abramovich has ever had. It was an unspoken, unstated clause to signing on the dotted line when taking up the job.

And so it seems a bit odd, that Frank Lampard – arguably the most powerful voice in the room, while not the loudest – should pooh pooh the idea of player power in an exclusive with The Sun. Now, Super Frankie is an extremely intelligent and articulate gentleman, and so it should be no surprise that his arguments to that effect should sound perfectly valid.

“No one at the club was. Even Ash [Ashley Cole], who I know wasn’t happy not playing week-in week-out, would never have run off and said, ‘Please sack the manager, we’ve had enough of him’. That’s plain ridiculous. We are professionals.

“Can you imagine what Roman Abramovich would’ve said to him? ‘I pay your wages, I make the decisions, now f*** off and play.’

In the world of football, where owners and decision-makers are often caricatured as out-of-touch plutocrats, there isn’t naturally a lot of credit for nuance and subtlety. Lampard’s argument is that none of his teammates marched up to Roman Abramovich’s bedroom door and knocked it down at 3:00 AM insisting Villas-Boas and Scolari be given the boot.

It would be presumptuous to think Abramovich didn’t know how his star players were feeling under those new regimes, even without them having to spell it out. It is also presumptuous to think Abramovich wasn’t capable of the kind of pragmatism it would take to make a U-turn and reinstate your best players, if your attractive football plans were panning out as planned. [Lampard seems to insinuate that Andre Villas-Boas himself was under orders to move past the old order and usher in a new spring.]

So while Frank Lampard makes a convincing case that none of them would have approach Roman with such a strange request, it is undeniable that a bunch of senior players with less than charitable intentions towards an unpopular Chelsea manager can certainly influence the pace of his dismissal by dropping their shoulders.

With the world on his shoulders, all Atlas needed to do to shake things up was shrug. When Scolari and Andre Villas Boas got too tiresome to bear anymore, Chelsea’s biggest names shrugged.

And that was enough to see the manager off.

Chelsea FC – Blues In A Post-Player Power World

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