It was less than a hour after the final whistle at Goodison Park, in a match that Chelsea lost by a single goal away to Everton, that one of the greatest managers football has ever produced was brutally sacked. Some close to Carlo Ancelotti say he’d been expecting it, but that doesn’t diminish the ruthlessness with which then-Chelsea chief executive Ron Gourlay informed the Italian he was out, in the away team dressing room.
This was the Italian coach who’d won the league and cup double in his first season at Chelsea, who’d brought with him to West London an incredible pedigree from Italy, with scudetti and myriad other silverware during his spells at AC Milan and Juventus. Ancelotti had, it is said, even been seen as the model manager in Roman Abramovich’s eyes, given that he’d regarded the rossoneri as the template for Chelsea, stylish, successful in Europe. And yet, despite winning the Premier League and the FA Cup in his first season at Chelsea, Ancelotti was summarily fired on the final day of the domestic season - for simply guiding the club to second place. By the same token, then, you have expected history to have repeated itself yesterday at Goodison Park. A frankly pathetic Chelsea squandered a second successive league game in hand to remain in sixth place with only the momentum of their Europa League run keeping them in with a chance of playing in the Champions League next season.
I can't, then, be the only one obsessively checking Twitter yesterday evening, or hitting refresh on the BBC Sport home page today, expecting the headline "CHELSEA SACKS SARRI" (and the obligatory tabloid splash, "WHO'S SARRI NOW?". "Clueless Sarri," as The Sun branded him today surely must be reaching the end of the line. Surely, now, it's a case of 'when', not 'if'? I've tried to be sympathetic to Sarri, that implementing his philosophy must take longer than the eight months he's been at the club. And, to offer some benevolence, until the previous Sunday's frustrating draw with Wolves, we’d been beginning to think that Sarri had turned a corner, prompted by that Carabao Cup final when, even what seemed like a predictable team selection (Hazard as a false 9, etc) turned out to be inspiring, defensively frustrating a free scoring Manchester City and pushing them to a 0-0 scoreline after 120 minutes. Even the ridiculous “misunderstanding” with Kepa Arrizabalaga won Sarri extra respect. Momentum in the Europa League, too, has carried positives, as crowd-pleasing and rare appearances (and goals) from 18-year-old Callum Hudson-Odoi, plus better all-round team performances, have given fans the hope that the Champions League next season is a real possibility.
But despite that apparent European momentum, the sharp focus remains on Chelsea in the Premier League, and here Sarri seems to be going down the Antonio Conte route of talking himself out of a job. "I don't know [what happened]," he told Sky Sports after the Everton defeat yesterday. "The players don't know what happened and at the moment I can't explain the change. We played, in my opinion, the best first half of the season and we could have scored four or five times and then suddenly we stopped playing. It is very strange. We stopped to defend and to counter-attack, everything. [We became] another team, I don't know."
Well, if he doesn't know, then who does? Over the last few weeks, as disappointment has given way to underachievement, Sarri has fallen back on his player's mindset, and thus he did the same yesterday: "I think the problem was mental," he told Sky, "so if you have a mental problem suddenly on the pitch the system and the tactics are not enough." This is just not good enough. I rarely support the notion that it begins and ends with the manager, and in most cases where a manager gets sacked, the players should absorb plenty of the blame. But there's something seriously lacking in the motivation department for Chelsea to play as resiliently as they did in the first half against Everton yesterday, and then, defensively, look like puppets with their strings cut in the second half. Not even the replacement of the poor Higuain with Giroud, and the introduction of Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Hudson-Odoi to bolster the attack could compensate for how poor Chelsea were at the back. There may be individual failings, but the manager trains the team and prepares them for matchday, and should select the most effective and motivated combination of players. Sarri's team were anything but in the second half. Which brings the blame game back on Sarri himself.
Given the history of premature, in-season departures of predecessors at Chelsea who failed to come up to expectations, Sarri has probably been under a stay of execution. Perhaps, though, it’s not that much of a mystery as to why he remains: Marina Granovskaia, the defacto Chelsea chief executive, placed a heavy bet on bringing Sarri and Sarri-ball to Chelsea. Abramovich presumably gave his blessing, but the Chelsea owner has been largely invisible over the last few months as he wrangles with the British government over his visa. It's hard, though, to imagine that the Chelsea hierarchy - in whatever amorphous form it currently takes - hasn't or isn't considering a replacement for Sarri. With a two-week international break, it even has the opportunity to bundle the Italian out and get in someone else without too much disruption to either the club's domestic or European programme. The question, of course, is who: Zinedine Zidane is now off the market, Massimiliano Allegri is unlikely to want the job, and Frank Lampard is only in his first season at Derby County. There's the possibility of John Terry, of course, perhaps with former Chelsea assistant coach Steve Holland being prised away from the England set-up. Or the club dives once again into its directory of Italian managers looking for an out.
Whatever happens, it is becoming clear that whatever Sarri has been trying to achieve at Chelsea is not working. Sky Sports have been reporting "sources" as saying that Sarri's future is now, finally, under evaluation by the club's hierarchy. That should have some bearing on Granovskaia herself for placing such a huge bet on the 60-year-old, but if there's one other thing the hierarchy should be evaluating, its why Chelsea should be looking at yet another season in which it jettisons its head coach not much longer after he arrived.
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