Team Focus: Have Jose Mourinho's Chelsea actually been boring?

Are Chelsea really boring?

Last week I wrote a piece for the Guardian in which I described Jose Mourinho as a “fallen angel”; an extraordinary number of top-level modern coaches worked at Barcelona in the nineties – not only Mourinho but also Pep Guardiola, Luis Enrique, Louis van Gaal, Julen Lopetegui, Ronald Koeman, Frank De Boer, Philip Cocu and Laurent Blanc – but where the rest all prefer a style based on pressing and possession, the Chelsea manager, at least in big games, favours a reactive approach. He is happy for his team to sit deep and wait for mistakes.

None of that seems to me especially controversial, but the piece attracted well over 1000 comments and I was besieged on Twitter. The point was not to criticise Mourinho, but to acknowledge that there is a facet of the game in which he excels; he has the courage to step apart from the crowd and do things his own way and that is why he is so successful. I speculated that one of the reasons he so revelled in that role was that he felt a sense of rejection from Barcelona and so relished showing theirs wasn’t the only way of doing things.

Perhaps because I wrote the piece in St Peter’s Square in Rome while waiting for the Pope, I made the connection to Satan in Paradise Lost, which I suppose to those who haven’t read the poem may seem condemnatory. Satan, though, despite Milton’s best intentions, rapidly becomes the hero of the poem, aligning himself against a far more powerful force on a point of principle. One of the fascinations of Paradise Lost is Milton wrestling with the fact that Satan is a more attractive character than the often priggish heroes of heaven – just as those who prefer Barcelona’s style of play often become sanctimonious in insisting it is the “right” way.

Chelsea have scored most goals away from home along with Man City

At the Emirates on Sunday, Arsenal fans chanted “Boring, boring Chelsea.” You hope there was some self-awareness there from a club that had the jibe directed at them during the George Graham years (and that won the 1997-98 title under Arsene Wenger by keeping 12 clean sheets in a 14-match run and scoring just 19 goals in a 16-game stretch from November to March). But there are some who seem genuinely angered that a manager can set his side up to defend; they’ve paid for their cable subscription and they demand entertainment.

Football, hopefully, will never just become players taking turns to do tricks as the self-entitled seem to demand but, anyway, just how boring have Chelsea been? Only Manchester City have scored more than Chelsea’s 65 goals and nobody has scored more than the 34 Chelsea have managed away from home.

They may have had only 41.7% possession in drawing at the Emirates on Sunday and 32.9% in beating Manchester United the previous week, but over the season as a whole they’ve averaged 55.1%, the fifth highest figure in the division. Their total of 528.2 passes per game is the third highest – behind only the two Manchester clubs. Reactivity has only been for certain circumstances. 406 accurate short passes per game – which might be considered an in indicator of a Barcelona-style approach – is the fourth-highest figure.

They’ve managed 14.9 shots per game, the fourth highest figure in the Premier League, 5.6 of them on target, the second highest figure. They’re not even that stifling: the 10.9 shots they’ve conceded per game is only the joint-fifth best mark in the division. The real indicator of how they defend is the 9.7 interceptions they’ve managed per game, by some distance the lowest average in the division: rather than seeking the ball, they allow the opposition possession and wait for the mistake.

Still, though, that’s merely a matter of style. This Chelsea is capable of playing a higher level of reactive football than anybody else in the Premier League; it’s baffling that that should be spun into a moral issue.