After Basel Loss, this may be Mourinho's Toughest Season

It's not going entirely to plan. Mourinho was supposed to return to Chelsea and bring back their glory days. Make them the force they were under him. With some odd defeats in the league and now....BACK TO BACK LOSSES AGAINST...wait for it....wait for it.....BASEL??? Mourinho may now face the toughest challenge of his whole career.

We all get old. Biology is a bitch and we just need to deal with it. During Mourinho's first rule of the Blue land, Lampard and Terry were younger and formed the spine and heart of the team. Now, Terry may still be performing well in a position that does NOT require youthful legs, but mature brains but for the central midfield position, you need that stamina and that energy. Players like Lamps are reaching that age where they can't cut it anymore. Just like Gerrard, they are finding it hard to compete with elite teams who have fitter and younger midfielders. A lot of the central midfield role requires experience and knowledge, but a lot of it is to do with sharpness and quickness, lightness with feet. Lampard is not getting any younger and up against the might of that Bayern midfield, he will get swallowed up WHOLE. Then to add even more to it, the other players in the Chelsea squad are perhaps to young to really take the reins off of Lampard.

That's the other issue Mourinho has. One half of his players are really old, and the other half are really young with still a few years before they hit their peak.
   Hazard and Oscar are both EXCELLENT players. Their skill and footballing talent is there to see and they are amongst the best. Despite this, youth is youth and there will be times when the going gets tough that the lack of experience will shine through. They have not yet figured out how to pace themselves or how to psychologically make an impact in a game that is not going your way. That only comes with time and a few more years in the game. They need to get through enough matches in order to start to learn how to adjust those little details in their game to ALWAYS have an effect.

It's far too early to say anything yet, but loaning out Lukaku may have been a big mistake for Mourinho. One can always point to the fact that I actually did that if Lukaku was with Chelsea for this season, it wouldn't have automatically meant he would have been scoring goals like he's doing for Everton. Jose will point to that fact but deep down, it will burn him seeing Lukaku scoring so freely and his own strikers unable to constantly find the net.
   It's going to be a tough season for Chelsea. At no point so far have you felt they have settled into a rhythm that he has liked. The two losses against Basel just goes to show how things are VERY different from the Drogba era where they would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS come close to being in trouble against a team like the Swiss boys. If anyone can do it, Jose can. It's going to be hard, the challenge is there and Mourinho has a nifty knack of proving all of you doubters wrong...I have seen enough of you on facebook. Just look at Mourinho's titles and his credentials and really ask yourself if you have the balls to doubt him leading Chelsea to the title and perhaps sneaking through to the Champions League final with good hard, grinding defensive displays.


HH