Mourinho: Chelsea Won’t Sack Me

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho is confident that the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, will not make a ‘rash decision’ and sack him, it has been revealed.

Mourinho, talking at the press conference before his side face Porto in a make or break game in the Champion’s League tonight, said, “Abramovich believed in me twice: one, when he brought me back to the club, and the second time when he gave me a new four-year contract in the summer”.

The self-proclaimed ‘Special One’ won two Premier League titles, two League Cups and an FA Cup in his first spell at Stamford Bridge from 2004 to 2007. He returned in the summer of 2013, having also endured success at Inter Milan and Real Madrid in the intervening six years.

This season has seen Chelsea Football Club endure a torrid start to the campaign, losing eight of their first fifteen league games. The defending Premier League champions lost just one of their first 99 home league games with Mourinho at the helm, but they’ve now lost four of their last seven at Stamford Bridge.

With the Blues already out of the League Cup and yet to ensure their qualification to the last sixteen of the Champion’s League, rumours have emerged that the Portuguese boss is set to lose his job if Chelsea fail to win their next two games.

Mourinho, though, doesn’t think that’s likely as long as Abramovich is at the top of the club. He said he believed he would be safe “Because I think I did lots of good things for this club. I don’t think the owner is a person to change with the wind. I know the wind of results is an important wind and I know this wind is really strong because the results in the Premier League are really bad”.

Chelsea, who won the Champion’s League in 2012 when Roberto Di Matteo was manager, must avoid defeat tonight if they are to make it through to the knockout stages of the competition. With Manchester United failing to do just that last night and Arsenal’s qualification far from assured, the pressure is on Chelsea to join Manchester City in the next round to represent the English clubs.

Chelsea’s former defender, Wayne Bridge, thinks that his former club and previous manager shouldn’t be under-estimated. He said, “You wouldn’t say it on current form but it would be a great story for a team that doesn’t do too well in the Premier League. To go and win the Champions League – it’s something he [Mourinho] is capable of – but it’s a very big ask at the moment. But with Mourinho being there you can never underestimate what he can produce”.

The Chelsea manager will be hoping that his former defender is right and that the club could yet produce something special in the Champion’s League. If they fail to then the Portuguese maestro could find that the ‘winds’ change in the wrong direction and his faith in Roman Abramovich is misplaced.