Victory at a price

When Ken Bates bought the struggling West London club for a pound in 1982 a gradual revolution eventually established them as a top-six Premiership club with a succession of domestic and European trophies in the cabinet, particularly under Gianluca Vialli in the late 1990's.

The employment of former Valencia and Sampdoria boss Claudio Ranieri pushed them closer to the Manchester United-Arsenal duopoly of English football, and when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich wiped the club's 80million pound debt to take overall control in 2004, rapid progress seemed inevitable.

Ranieri was aided by a transfer kitty that saw the multi-million pound purchases of Hernan Crespo, Juan Sebastian Veron, Joe Cole and Wayne Bridge, and in his first and only season of the Abramovich era finished second in the league and took Chelsea to the Champions League semi-finals.

But this was not good enough for Abramovich, who had given Ranieri a season's grace before bringing in his own man for the 2004/05 season, the highly respected young Porto coach Jose Mourinho, whose spiky yet progressive management style had brought unfashionable (and poor) Porto UEFA Cup and then Champions League glory in consecutive years.

While Chelsea had long-been subjected to accusations of buying their success, the seemingly bottomless pit of cash now on offer brought snipes about an unfair playing field, putting the achievements of Mourinho down to fiscal as opposed to footballing prowess.

However, Mourinho's credentials cannot be questioned. When the former translator took over Porto in 2002 they were a club in mid-table and relative crisis after the sacking of unpopular coach Octávio Machado. He took them to third place that season and, after introducing innovative training and motivational techniques, won the title and UEFA Cup in his first full season, beating Celtic in the final.

His second season saw Porto win the domestic league by an eight point margin and an unexpected Champions League triumph. So it cannot be said that Mourinho can only operate with a free budget, a budget which may be available to him but is not a guarantee for success - just look at free-spending yet trophyless Real Madrid and Inter Milan.

While part of the anti-Chelsea sentiment prevalent in the UK media can be attributed to pure jealousy of the resources available to a club outside the traditional English aristocracy, there is a degree of willfully provocative behaviour by Mourinho and his team that is a component of but oddly clouds their undoubted will-to-win.

Mourinho has been hauled up in front of FA committees, censured and criticised by UEFA, tarnished with fanning the flames that saw referee Anders Frisk retire from the game and accused of arrogance, impudence and a lack of grace in defeat.

However, is this any worse than the ruses employed to such great success by Premiership managerial greats Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger? The accusations of cheating, the refusal to acknowledge poor behaviour from players, the complaints about referees... Creating a siege mentality and diverting media attention to the coach is a tried and tested way to relieve players of pressure and allow them to focus on their game.

Chelsea's pragmatic tactics have also been criticised for being "ugly", that they are a team of long-ball bruisers incapable of matching the classical brush strokes of Barcelona or the irresistible counter-attacks of Arsenal.

Yet they have scored an average of two Premiership goals per game this season, and while they play-to-win as opposed to providing pure entertainment, the skills of Arjen Robben, Frank Lampard and Joe Cole - who scored a stunning solo goal in the 3-0 win over Manchester United at the weekend - would be most welcome in both aforementioned teams.

Furthermore, as international football comes under increasing pressure from the big clubs' desire to protect their investments, Mourinho is a breath of fresh air regarding the pride in representing one's national side, something the fans will appreciate over the grumbling negativity of rival bosses.

Would Arsene Wenger have encouraged his players to travel to Egypt for the African Nations safe in the knowledge their future at the club would not be under threat? Would Sir Alex Ferguson offer to rest his key international players at the end of a title-winning season to keep them fresh for the World Cup? Gerard Houiller, in his time at Liverpool, would have sent them away for surgery that could have waited until the pre-season (Steven Gerrard's absence from the 2002 World Cup springs to mind).

Jose Mourinho understands the importance playing for your country has for players and fans, that it is the only sphere of top-level football where financial reward is not the ultimate goal and that the experience of playing in a major international tournament only improves the confidence and footballing education of players.

On Boxing Day 1999, Chelsea became the first British side to field an entirely foreign line-up in a Premier League match against Southampton, for which they were rightly criticised. In recent months Arsenal have regularly fielded a side that seems more Francophone than many Ligue 1 teams, with not even a Brit on the bench.

Yet Mourinho uses a backbone of English players in his first-team, an English captain and a squad and youth program littered with locally-bred players. For this the club should be commended.

Ultimately the discontent - which led Mourinho to claim rather truculently that he considered leaving the Blues because of the bad feeling around the club - will quiet once Chelsea's rivals bridge the clear gap at the top of the Premiership and give fans of other clubs something to hope for, but until then the remarkable achievements of this abrasive character should be trumpeted and not knocked.

Chelsea crowned champions with win over rivals