Firefighter Guus Hiddink could be the best man for the Chelsea job

Confidence is a currency in football that is worth more than any amount of Petrodollars.

On Sunday, in the FA Cup, we saw a battle between two sides with more of the latter currency than any other teams in English football. Thanks to Manuel Pellegrini's fit of pique at the scheduling of the game by TV executives, though, only one team approached the match with the confidence that they might actually win. The mismatch was ultimately an embarrassment for Manchester City.

Pellegrini's complaint, that his side were set to travel to Kiev for a match in the Champions League three days after the game, was entirely negated by Chelsea's own fixture list: which took them to the very same Ukrainian location three days after beating Aston Villa back in October.

Pellegrini, undermined by his employers' decision to axe him in favour of Pep Guardiola at the season's end, could not muster the spirit to even try in this FA Cup fifth-round tie.

Hiddink, meanwhile, has reinstalled the bit of the joie de vivre so missing from Chelsea's squad during the final weeks and months of Jose Mourinho's intense, argumentative reign.

Blues midfielder Oscar this week described Chelsea's serial interim boss as being like a “friendly uncle” – something which has given the players the freedom and the will to pull out performances far better than had been seen earlier in the campaign.

Caution is advised in assessing some of those matches, especially given the paucity of quality in several recent opponents, though it is a fair bet that Mourinho's Chelsea would not have notched-up a 5-1 scoreline against MK Dons, Newcastle, or City's kids. Even the 2-1 defeat away to Paris Saint-Germain last week was far from disastrous, in a season of almost unparalleled negativity.

Hiddink continues in the same vein we saw seven seasons ago, when he was instructed to pick up the pieces from Luiz Felipe Scolari. Then, the nuts and bolts of his job were much the same: installing group spirit, tactical discipline and the will to win in a team whose outgoing boss had seemingly lost the roadmap for all three.

But could Hiddink have a longer term future than merely his ad hoc caretaker role suggests?

The names doing the rounds for Chelsea are all well-known coaches on the European and international stages: Diego Simeone, Antonio Conte, Jorge Sampaoli, Massimiliano Allegri.

But the question remains as to how many of those would want to leave their comfortable long-term roles, where the unknown is generally kept a good deal further away than the intimate places it tends to inhabit at Chelsea.

This weekend surely ended the candidacy of Pellegrini – whose inability to ready a competent side for two games in a three-day turnaround surely rules him out of contention for a role where that has to be done 10 or 12 times a season.

The outgoing City boss had been put forward as a candidate by Blues' technical director Michael Emenalo – a recommendation which is surely now unsustainable. Which may well leave Chelsea with Hiddink as their best option.

Some will question his ability in a full-term permanent role, pointing to his lack of success in jobs between leaving and rejoining Chelsea.

His failure to qualify the Dutch and Turkish national sides for successive European Championships will be used by those arguing the case that he does not have the staying power for a regular club campaign.

But Chelsea is no normal club, and the average tenure of a permanent boss over the last decade (91 games) is not dramatically longer than that of the average for the steady procession of interims (41 games).

Hiddink is 69, and clearly not a long-term option. But who, at Chelsea, is ever for-keeps?

If Hiddink can maintain present levels of confidence in his side, and steer Chelsea back into Europe via either one of their two cup competition routes, he may yet emerge as their best option to carry on for at least another season.