Chelsea are relying heavily on a gamble to appoint the very inexperienced Andre Villas Boas to play themselves back into the title reckoning.

Overview

Make no mistake, Villas Boas has a massive job at Stamford Bridge which would be beyond the capabilities of many managers vastly superior to him in experience and past success. For all his triumphs in Portugal which, as we’ll dissect shortly, speak for themselves doubts must remain about his ability to succeed in the situation he has been headhunted to with Chelsea.

Firstly he has taken over an ageing squad. Players who have been a mainstay of this hugely successful team for years and now reaching the end of their shelf lives. Man Utd have shown that shrewd management of game time and fitness levels can continue to bring the best out of people like Ryan Giggs many years after his top level career should have been winding down, they’ve also been ruthless with others like Gary Neville at the first sign of age catching up with them and have surrounded the ones kept on with new, exciting young players like Antonio Valencia, Phil Jones and Ashley Young.

There’s long term planning in almost everything that Alex Ferguson does, and almost nothing I’ve seen Chelsea do in recent years. The result is there for all to see. United are standing toe to toe with Manchester City despite the billions spent at Eastlands while Chelsea are lagging behind while still relying on the same old faces – John Terry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, Petr Cech, Branislav Ivanovic. None of them getting any younger, or any better.

Secondly the days when Roman Abramovich cured all ills at the club by throwing more money at it have, while not quite ended, certainly been reigned in somewhat. There has been no outlandish spending spree from Andre Villas Boas who I’ve no doubt is frustrated that prior to his arrival some £75m was squandered on David Luiz and Fernando Torres. Luiz was hanging around at the back of the line chatting with Theo Walcott when they were handing out footballing brains and consequently has the positional sense of an epileptic gnat. His signing seems almost as strange as the decision to ostracise (completely) Brazilian Alex in his favour.

Torres’ troubles are well known, but they were pretty well known when Chelsea paid that ridiculous money for him. This was an ailing player, who had not played well for Liverpool for at least 18 months and hadn’t even looked good playing up front for a magnificent Spanish national team at a low quality World Cup. Be it injuries, confidence or, I suspect, both Torres was a mindless investment and has proved to be a total embarrassment. Only this summer, when they signed two other Spaniards – 23 year old Juan Matta from Valencia and 20 year old Oriol Romeu from Barcelona – did Chelsea finally seem to be returning to some form of sanity and intelligence in the transfer market. Gary Cahill arrives in lousy form but is a good age for a centre back at 26 and a good transfer price as well assuming they didn’t bow to the outrageous wage demands quoted in the paper.

Thirdly Chelsea’s academy has produced almost nothing that Villas Boas could call on to lower the average age of his side. Since Abramovich has arrived the modus operandi of the club’s Cobham based youth facility has been clear – if the child looks like he might possibly end up being quite good one day perhaps then throw money at home and his parents until he’s safely under lock and key at Stamford Bridge. What happens next, they’re not really bothered about, they just didn’t want anybody else to have him. Players like Scott Sinclair and Michael Mancienne have looked elsewhere through a succession of loans and eventually permanent moves when really Chelsea should have been blooding them into their first team. Josh McEachran should be straight into the team next year if he succeeds at Swansea over the next six months as Arsenal did with Jack Wilshere after he returned from Bolton. I have my doubts whether he will be though – three seasons of loans and then a move permanently elsewhere is my bet.

Clubs like Tottenham and Chelsea hoarding young talent in the way they do and never graduating any of it to their first team is a regular ranting topic of mine and one of the key reasons England are so bloody dreadful at international level. It’s gratifying to see the policy finally biting Chelsea on the arse a bit as well.

Fourthly, Villas Boas has walked into a dressing room crammed more full of egos than most others. The player power at Chelsea is immense and here is a manager no older than many of the senior pros, with little managerial experience, charged with breaking up the cliques and building a new team while still extracting results from the team while it’s in transition.

Those results are crucial because fifthly, none of these problems have dulled the expectation levels much. Supporters expect titles and trophies, Abramovich still lies awake at night dreaming about winning the Champions League. To freshen up this team and get it back in a place where it can compete for the title is going to take at least 18 months, and that’s assuming they aren’t left behind by the new grotesque spending force in this country on the blue side of Manchester. Abramovichh has never shown any inclination to give a manager any time at all and it seems strange to get rid of Carlo Ancelotti in the way he did, only to then give this new kid on the block three years to get the team back on track.

If the team selection and performance against Portsmouth in round three are anything to go by Villas Boas recognises this more than most, and showing knowledge beyond his years has realised that a victory in this year’s FA Cup will buy time as much as anything else.

Manager

That, and the fact that his first coaching job came when he was “just” 21 and he was put in charge of the British Virgin Isles senior squad, has been the crux of just about all of the hundreds of profile pieces that have been written about Villas-Boas since he became the new Chelsea manager in the summer.

To be fair to the hacks who’ve each taken a turn with one of the Premiership’s more intriguing managerial appointments in recent times there isn’t really a lot to go at. He has no playing career of any sorts to look back on, because he’s so young, and he hasn’t really managed in that many places either, because he’s so young.

Apart from his age and time in the British Virgin Isles, where he was apparently rather too keen on the beach but still a very conscientious coach, the other main hook for stories about him has been the parallels with Jose Mourinho. Both grew up under the tutelage of Bobby Robson – Mourinho as his translator at Barcelona, and Villas-Boas as part of the set up when Robson was at Porto after fate threw them together in the same apartment block.

“The Special One” came to Chelsea after winning the Champions League against the odds with Porto and while Villas-Boas can’t quite match that, his record in Portugal last season was immense. He won everything there was to win – the Portuguese title, domestic Super Cup and cup and the Europa League. In fact Porto didn’t lose a single match in any competition last season, the won 27 and drew three of 30 league games. In the cups Nacional beat them once to knock them out of the League Cup, and they suffered two single game defeats in the Europa League before winning through on aggregate. That’s three defeats in 54 games and four trophies in total. Chelsea’s 3-1 defeat to Man Utd in September was the first suffered by their manager in a domestic game since his previous spell with Portuguese minnows Academica.

With Chelsea he faces an immense task. A squad to be renewed and revitalised, an impatient chairman, and a notoriously cliquey dressing room full of strong characters. His work has begun with the departure of Nicholas Anelka, but the transfer window system is going to make this a long drawn out process which neither he nor his chairman look like they have the patience for.

Scout Report

Villas-Boas tends to favour that fluid 4-3-3 system that develops into a 4-5-1 set up out of possession. The problem with the way he sets it up is it relies heavily on a holding midfield player sitting in front of the back four to not only protect the defence but to collect the ball from them and distribute it quickly and effectively when in possession. It also requires a decent striker for the centre forward role.

Sadly for Chelsea Villas-Boas inherited John Obi Mikel for the first role, and Fernando Torres for the second. I’ve spoken about Torres already and the numbers are there for all to see: 42 Chelsea appearances, five goals, four goals in 26 appearances this season. That is a centre back’s record. Mikel, too, was playing very poorly indeed in a key position in the team when these two teams last met.

I’ve never really understood the fascination with this player, who always looks big, slow, ungainly and ineffective when I see him play. Defensively he was fine in the position, offensively his ponderous nature in possession slowed Chelsea down to the point where a counter attack was something they’d only ever read about in books and, eventually, teams cottoned onto the fact that he could be closed down when trying to slowly bring the ball out from defensive positions – Liverpool have exploited that well in their games against Chelsea this season and in fact Mikel was taken off at half time in their 2-1 defeat to Kenny Dalglish’s side at Stamford Bridge in November.

Chelsea have a young replacement for Mikel who has impressed when used of late, Oriol Romeu, but only really have Didier Drogba to play instead of Torres and he is ageing. Personally I’d try and shift Drogba, Torres and Solomon Kalou on this summer and rebuild the entire attack with the talented Daniel Sturridge playing with a new, younger, effective lone striker – highly likely to be Hulk who scored bag loads for Villas-Boas at Porto but I’m not convinced would succeed in this league.

The other problem this season has been the defence. Villas-Boas initially favoured a high line of defence but this played to none of the strengths of the players he had at his disposal. John Terry is incredibly uncomfortable these days when there is grass in behind him and he has been made to look very foolish indeed in home defeats to Arsenal and Aston Villa. It doesn’t suit David Luiz either who rampages off down the field enough as it is without being asked to play any higher up the field. The defence has dropped deeper to better effect in recent games, although the signing of a younger and more mobile centre back Gary Cahill hints that this may be a temporary measure while a larger rebuilding job takes place.

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