Chelsea FC Sack RDM

Chelsea have once again parted company with another manager, and looking closely at it there was a certain amount of inevitability about it. I could not have found a hotter topic to start this blog with but here it is and everyone has a view on this, Chelsea fan or not.

Since Roman Abramovich took over we have seen plenty of managers come and go but I doubt many have come as much of a surprise as what happened this morning with Roberto Di Matteo. That is not to say that things were all good for Di Matteo. The team have been on something of a decline pretty much since the defeat to Manchester United, we have lacked potency in attack and look incredibly frail at the back. That is in stark contrast to the start of the season where we were strong in defense, fluid and potent in attack. Fingers have been pointed in many a direction, mainly at the absence of John Terry, the form of Fernando Torres and the unpredictability of David Luiz.

For me what I saw was a team that was losing it's belief. The pace that we were playing at has dropped off dramatically, we have moved from fast paced quick incisive passing to the type of slow build up passing that we saw last season with lesser creative players. But for me the biggest problem we had was with pressing. The players seem to have been sent out with the instruction to not press and get close to the opposition, this has made us so easy to play against and teams are almost literally able to walk through us to get to goal. How many times have we seen recently crosses coming in totally unchallenged and us concede from it, far too often. Last night was just further evidence of that, we do not put teams under any sort of pressure and that is highlighted by the possession stats, the teams we are playing against have more possession than us because we allow them so much time and space.

I was finding it hard to see how Di Matteo was going to get things turned around but i was not expecting him to be sacked this morning. But should we be surprised  Having won the Champions League and FA Cup having taken over from Villas-Boas many said that he should be given the chance to take on a full season as manager to see what he can do. Roman also came to that conclusion but it took him a while and you get the feeling that for him Roberto probably was not the ideal man for the job but also felt he should be given the chance. However, maybe if there had been better options available to Roman things may have been different for Di Matteo in the summer.

I think this is part of the reason we have seen Roman have such an itchy trigger finger, having had doubts in the summer with things now not working out he does not want to see a situation where we are in big trouble as we was under Villas-Boas in the league, we are already teetering on the edge of being out of the Champions League and we need to ensure a top 4 spot in the league. 

Was it the right decision to make? Who knows now if Di Matteo could have turned things around, but I was beginning to have my doubts. Time can be healer but it can also break you and I think Roman did not want to take a chance. The Chelsea circus continues....