He Who Pays The Piper..............

"I get the feeling, and this is just a personal feeling, that there are people within the club, non-football people if you like, who are making too many football related decisions. You might not like the way Chelsea play but it's winning football."

That was Graeme Souness speaking on Sky's Champions League coverage on Wednesday night about five hours before the news broke that the special one and the rich one had parted company by 'mutual consent'.

Jose Mourinho was good for English football, there's no two ways about it. He brought a different tactical approach to the game, where a team ethic of hard work counted for more than individual expression, a freshness to television interviews and a self deprecation that hadn't been seen in any of the top managers since Kevin Keegan retired.

I remember the summer of 2004 when the European Championships were being held in Portugal Mourinho was interviewed in the Independent and said that coming to England was a challenge and that he promised Chelsea fans he wouldn't ask his team to play in the 4-4-2 'tramlines style' that English teams liked to play in. When you looked at the players at his disposal and the seemingly bottomless pit of Russian billions backing him you thought that we might be seeing a return to the days of 'sexy football' at Chelsea - the attacking flair of Vialli's sides combined with some Portuguese pragmatism.

It wasn't to be though.

If Manchester United and Arsenal were the purveyors of sexy football then Chelsea were selling the football equivalent of a housebound virgin snogging his sister, it was wrong but it was the only way they were going to achieve anything. Whereas Wenger and Ferguson believe that the easiest way to win football matches is to score more goals than the opposition, Mourinho was from the continental school that has Capello, Lippi, Magath and Benitez among its alumni, the school of thought that says the best way to win football matches is to stop the opposition scoring first.

From a neutrals point of view though the football club itself made some mistakes, as did some of its supporters. The night before his resignation/sacking, supporters were phoning-in TalkSport to tell Ian Wright and Adrian Durham that they couldn't be 'motivated' to go to the Bridge to watch Rosenborg. As Adrian Durham said if they couldn't get motivated for a Champions League game maybe they weren't proper supporters after all, maybe they were glory hunters. The next caller was a guy called Steve from Dorset who had relocated from London he said that he sat next to a group of Chelsea supporters at the previous home game who hadn't heard of Kerry Dixon. The point may have been that not everybody had been to watch Chelsea away to Bournemouth or Cambridge United back in the 1980's conversly it may have been saying, 'look, people like what Mourinho is doing and want to be part of it.' Quite why football clubs shouldn't attract casual supporters is beyond me anyway.

Not that the 'silverware over style' approach mattered to the die-hard Chelsea supporters, those who had watched as the club had visited the lower regions of what is now known as the Championship. Neutrals watched and wondered how the talents of Damien Duff, Hernan Crespo, Arjen Robben, Joe Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Andry Shevchenko and Michael Ballack could be squandered in the pursuit of success. Chelsea under Mourinho were best summed up by their two central defenders: Terry and Carvallho, two non-footballing, uncompromising, team players of the highest order who made Chelsea one of the hardest teams to beat.

Chelsea under Mourinho weren't successful because of the money he spent, they were successful because of the way he moulded the players he inherited and the players he bought into a cohesive unit that played for each other, in the way Australia's cricketers play for each other. Chelsea paid over the odds for some players, Shevchenko for example, but the players that Mourinho signed fitted into the system. One of the big football questions of the summer of 2005 was how would Ashley Cole fit into a system where full backs weren't encouraged to cross the half way line, the answer was simple: Cole either fitted in or he was dropped.

The by 'mutual consent' decision seems strange given that it came only forty-eight hours after one of those 'non-football' people, Peter Kenyon, had stated that Chelsea needed to win the Champions League twice in the next six seasons. In Patrick Barclay's excellent biography of Jose the former Chelsea manager says that he couldn't ever see himself walking away from Chelsea, it would be the wrong thing to do, the wrong thing to do to the players and the fans. He also says that his only ambition outside of club football would be to manage the Portuguese national side, but not for another ten years.

I suppose with £25 million in the bank and a confidentiality clause in place he can sit back, keep quiet and wait for the offers. Whilst I didn't like the way Chelsea played under him, I liked him, most of the time and I hope he finds an outlet for his talents.