My decade with Chelsea, by Martin Lipton
Three Italians, a Portuguese, an Israeli, a Brazilian and a Dutchman.
From one secretive regime, where the true source of the finances were never known but the chairman was never short of an opinion, to a billionaire Russian recluse who makes Greta Garbo look like a talkaholic.
More controversies than trophies - although there were plenty of them, too.
And even now, still, the one prize they want above all eludes them.
Welcome to SW6; welcome to Stamford Bridge; welcome to a decade with Chelsea.....
If on January 1, 2000, anybody had tried to tell you that the next 10 years would bring such story, of epic highs and lows, it would have been dismissed as the stuff of delusional fantasy.
Ken Bates, old Captain Birdseye himself, was at the helm, with Colin Hutchinson his right-hand man, while Luca Vialli, having replaced Ruud Gullit as part of a dressing room split, was in charge and looking the part.
When Roberto Di Matteo struck through a crowd of Aston Villa shirts to score the only goal of the last FA Cup final played at the old Wembley in May of that year, all seemed set fair.
Vialli spoke confidently of his plans for the future, how having won a trophy with "his" team would be the springboard.
In fact, as it was to prove for both the successors to lift the same trophy in the 10 years that followed, it was more like the gang-plank.
Within four months, off the back of an unimpressive start to the new campaign, Vialli was gone, replaced by the Tinkerman, Claudio Ranieri.
And once the madness began, it simply did not stop.
For the first year or so, Ranieri was a public relations disaster. It did not help that his awful English was compounded by the club's in-house translator, who was adept at turning an extended, detailed three-minute response into: "The manager says we were not good in the second half."
Chelsea were neither fish nor foul, not good but not bad either. Just on the margins of the Champions League slots but horribly inconsistent.
And in 2003, as Hutchinson went into the dressing room before the final game of the season against Liverpool, to tell them the club was in danger of folding unless they could win and break into the Champions League, on the brink.
That victory was, in fact, the platform for all that followed, for surely Roman Abramovich would not have committed his unprecedented level of funding had he not been sure of a place among Europe's elite, with a chance to fight for the prize he cherishes above all others.
Suddenly, Chelsea were the story of football. Abramovich's money promised plenty but nobody could really believe the Russian would deliver in such a fashion.
It started slowly, bailing out relegated West Ham financially by taking Joe Cole and Glen Johnson, adding Damien Duff before the splurge, with chief executive Trevor Birch pulling the financial strings, started for real.
The cast list blew your mind. Veron, Mutu, Crespo and, after a see-saw battle with Real Madrid, Makelele.
Yet for Ranieri, this was where the problems started. From the outset, and especially after Birch was ousted to create space for Peter Kenyon (what price loyalty?) to come in from Old Trafford, the Italian knew the plotters had it in for him.
And once Chelsea stopped winning - and, in the world of Abramovich, a draw is a defeat for which you get a point - the knives started to come out, too.
The season had started with Sven Goran Eriksson "taking tea" with Abramovich and by mid-February, the day before a home defeat by Arsenal, the briefings from within made it clear Ranieri was, indeed, a dead man walking.
Ranieri knew it, revelling in the gallows humour, laughing as Eriksson - the England manager, remember, but as scared of a pound note as Giant Haystacks was fearful of a pie - was offered his job.
It might have turned back again. When Wayne Bridge stunned Highbury in the Champions League quarter-final, Ranieri's frenzied, disbelieving reaction endeared him to the public and saw Abramovich - never the most decisive of men - start having second thoughts.
Kenyon cured him of those and on the eve of the semi-final first leg in Monaco was spotted lunching Jose Mourinho.
Ranieri lost it privately and, on the pitch, a calamitous and needless tactical gamble against 10 men - sending on Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and going for broke when he only had to keep his head - turning to disaster as Chelsea lost 3-1 and suffered the first of their endless near-misses in the competition.
The coup de grace took forever - or at least until Mourinho had won the Champions League with Porto, but nobody could really have anticipated the whirlwind that was set to blow through SW6.
From day one, Mourinho was something different. "I want to be one more manager but - and don't call me arrogant - it is true that I'm the European champion," he announced. "I'm not just one out of a bottle. I'm a special one."
Yes, Special. Brilliant, intoxicating, driven, demanding, unmissable and relentless. The sort of manager you would run through a brick wall for.
But also spoiled, petulant, childish, nasty, a man for whom anything was acceptable as long as it brought the end results.
Yet for Abramovich's Chelsea, the embodiment of the brash, new kid on the big block, the perfect choice.
What was strange was his choice of friends - and enemies.
Mourinho cultivated a bond with Sir Alex Ferguson even though his approach to football - pragmatic and win at all costs - was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the romantic instincts of the Scot, while he spoke warmly of the likes of Alan Pardew and Chris Coleman.
But it was hard to work out whether his animosity towards Arsene Wenger was greater than his visceral hatred of Rafa Benitez - at least, once Liverpool starting knocking the Blues out of the Champions League.
Mourinho inspired loyalty from the fans too, and understandably so.
After all, in Chelsea's 99-year history before Mourinho arrived, their major trophy haul was: one championship, three FA Cups, two League Cups, two Cup-Winners' Cups, one European Super Cup.
By the time he left, forced out as he pushed Abramovich too far by complaining about the quality of the eggs he was being asked to make his omelettes with, Mourinho had added five domestic trophies, including back-to-back titles.
It helped that the recruitment drive - Petr Cech, Arjen Robben and Didier Drogba - had begun before he was appointed, but the arrival of Ricrado Carvalho was another major plus as Chelsea became the dominant force in the English game.
All the way through, however, there was an edge of danger.
Only Mourinho could have been branded "the enemy of football" by UEFA, after his attacks on Swedish referee Anders Frisk; only Mourinho would have called Wenger a "voyeur"; only Mourinho would bang on endlessly about a "ghost goal" or accuse Cristiano Ronaldo of "not showing maturity and respect", due to his "difficult childhood" with "no education".
You never knew what you would get from him. At one stage, I had my own "special" seat to the right-hand of the Special One for his briefings with national journalists.
He would greet you like a long-lost friend if you stood in the arrivals haul of airports waiting for the squad to come through, smile and joke, enticing you into his world.
But the next day, it could be snarl and bark, the school-yard strop, nonsense about the media having to back Chelsea even when they were in the wrong, about having to show him "love".
It could only last so long. While Abramovich wanted to win, he wanted more - Barcelona in blue shirts.
Mourinho, cut from a different cloth, where the only thing that mattered was the result - remember his appearance in a credit card advert where he tells his players to block off the opposing keeper in the box, a tactic which Ricardo Carvalho pulled off in that unforgettable win over Barcelona in 2005 - was never going to give him that.
The briefings from both sides simply opened up the fissures. When Chelsea surrendered their crown to United in 2007, winning the Carling Cup and FA Cup, senior boardroom figures made it clear that was not good enough.
Mourinho knew the writing was on the wall and while there was a brief rapprochement with Abramovich during the summer tour to the USA, it could not last - and did not.
The Portuguese was not helped by the cliques that operated under the Abramovich umbrella, although his own group, of the coaching staff he had brought with him, contributed to the instability.
But there was also the "Russian" group - mainly Eugene Tenenbaun (actually Canadian) and Eugene Schvidler - the "Dutch" group, comprised of Abramovich's football guru, Piet De Visser and Danish sporting director Frank Arnesen, the Israeli coterie, led by super agent Pini Zahavi and then Kenyon's own inner circle as well as, bizarrely, the influence of former Blues boss Bobby Campbell.
Too many conflicting interests, too many whispered asides, too much confrontation.
Even so, it was a shock when, 24 hours after being booed off the park following a 1-1 draw with Rosenborg, Mourinho texted senior players as they attended the preview screening of a club DVD to tell them he was off.
The reaction from the Chelsea fans - who seemed to forget that, without Abramovich and his millions, none of it would have been possible - was apoplectic, especially when Mourinho's replacement was the lugubrious Avram Grant.
Grant, however, stuck to his guns, ploughing on and ignoring the nasty, frequently anti-Semitic attacks.
At times, the Israeli did not help himself. He knew when he was picking the team for the Carling Cup final against Spurs that he was making a rod for his own back, but felt he had to reward Shaun Wright-Phillips for playing so well during the African Nations Cup exodus, although he was aware that losing to Barnsley in the FA Cup was a shocker.
But where the fans had complained that he could only beat the small sides and could not make changes, victories over Arsenal, Liverpool on a tumultuous European night and United took the quest for the ultimate Double into the last matches in both competitions.
It was not to be. United won, easily, at Wigan to retain the crown - and then came Moscow.
Grant could not have done more as Chelsea dominated the second half, with Michael Ballack - never loved by Mourinho - the orchestrator, even after Drogba was sent off.
Had John Terry kept his feet, rather than slipping at the vital moment with the kick that would have won the trophy, it might have been all different.
Then again, we will never know. Senior figures insist that Grant was toast come what may. Yet the final decision would have been taken by Abramovich alone, and he can be both mercurial and flighty.
Not that that was any consolation for Grant, booted less than three days after the retreat from Moscow, as Chelsea insisted they needed the manager to take them to the next level.
The choice was not controversial. Luis Felipe Scolari was the scourge of England, masterminding successive knock-out triumphs over Eriksson's side in 2002, 2004 and 2006, and appeared to have the track record.
But he had not been a club manager for nearly a decade, never in Europe, and never under the daily scrutiny of Chelsea.
Indeed, while Chelsea started brilliantly, the signs were there from the beginning, as a row over Frank Lampard's future and contract broke out on the day Scolari - actually the second choice and only appointed when Carlo Ancelotti elected to stay in Milan - was unveiled.
Not that it looked that way on October 26. Victory over Liverpool, extending their unbeaten start to nine, and Chelsea would have been established as champions elect, Big Phil growing into the job.
Instead, they lost, thanks to Xabi Alonso's deflected strike, ending that staggering 86-game unbeaten home league record which had survived three changes of management.
And from that moment, it all started to unwind very quickly, as the gripes and groans of an over-powerful dressing room started to seep out.
Scolari's feud with Drogba was the catalyst, his decision to implement a zonal marking system and then half-ditch it leading to chaos and confusion at the back and as faith disappeared, it became a matter of time.
A home defeat by Arsenal kicked off an eight-game spell in which Chelsea picked up just 10 points, catastrophic by the club's standards and as senior figures started asking if they would even finish in the top four, it was a question of when, not if, he would go.
That Scolari was sacked while Kenyon was on a sun-lounger in Barbados signaled the looming end for the chief executive - blamed for what was deemed a flawed appointment - as well, and while Ancelotti was the choice for the summer, in came the Dutch Red Adair.
Guus Hiddink was what Chelsea needed. Mature, experienced but with a track record of success at big clubs and with big countries - and he changed the mindset of the dressing room from the start, restoring Drogba and reaping the rewards.
Yet even the Golden Guus could not lay the Champions League egg that Abramovich still craves - although Norwegian whistler Tom Henning Ovrebo will never be welcome in south west London after his shocker in the Barcelona semi-final second leg - while Scolari had left him too far behind United in the battle for the crown.
And while, just like Vialli and Mourinho before him, Hiddink barely lasted beyond the bottles of bubbly after a Wembley FA Cup triumph, it is a fact that, had he started the season and achieved what he did, the Dutchman would have been branded a failure.
Madness, although a madness Ancelotti, who survived eight years of Silvio Berlusconi at the San Siro, was willing to accept at the second time of asking.
So far, at least, it has gone reasonable well for the intelligent, humorous and decidedly decent Italian.
But he has only been there for six months. At Chelsea, as the last 10 years proves, you can take nothing for granted.
For a journalist, Chelsea represent that rarest of beasts - the gift that keeps on giving.
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