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Guus Hiddink: Chelsea To Lose A Really SPECIAL Manager?

Roman Abramovich made a complete error of judgment bringing in Scolari but fair play to him, on the outside it sounded like a good idea – the man had won the World Cup after all. However, you only had to give it a little more than a passing thought and ignore the hype in the media and you started to realise it might not actually work.  After all, my mother could probably have won the World Cup with the players Scolari had at his disposal, and the odd international here and there is nowhere near comparable to managing week-in-week-out in the best league in the world.

I remember questioning fairly early on whether Scolari’s naivety in the Premier League would bite us on the arse and eventually it did – well, that and the fact that he never really seemed all that bothered anyway.  First off, whilst we might have had an excess in personnel to an extent, Scolari pared the squad down to the bare bones – highlighting his inexperience (or even his homework) around the physical demands his players were likely to come up against.

Not only that, but even after he’d earmarked – and lost out on – the player he felt he needed to bring in if we were to play the way he wanted us to, Scolari merely shrugged his shoulders and said we’d cope. Except we didn’t – and the reason we didn’t, in my opinion, was because Luiz Felipe Scolari lacked conviction. So much so, that before Abramovich started waving this particular manager’s P45 around, we were looking like a club in serious trouble. Ok, so we weren’t exactly relegation fodder and maybe I’ll be judged as yet another Chelsea fan who believes we ‘have a right’ to be in the top four – but as far as I was concerned, we’d gone from a season where we’d just reached our first ever Champions League final, at the same time as running a very good United side close in the title race, and yet mere months later with the same team, looked like we might not even qualify for the Champions League – so bloody right it felt like a crisis!

But as we all know, Roman Abramovich personally stepped in and rectified his mistake – not only that, but this time, his choice was spot on.  Roman, like the rest of us, must have been aching week in week out as he saw what Scolari was doing to our players – or more to the point, what he wasn’t doing – and he must’ve known it was going to take something – or someone – special to turn things around in such a short space of time.  And this time, he picked someone really special.  This time, he picked Guus Hiddink.

In Guus Hiddink, Abramovich has found a manager who knows his game irrespective or what country or what league he happens to be in. This is a manager who can see when something needs changing and he responds. There’s no hesitation in his reaction, no ‘wait and see’, no ‘hit and hope’, not even great sweeping changes, just subtle but significant adjustments. Because this manager has clearly had a look at his resources and sussed out how to get the best out of them – and I just can’t help liking him.

To be honest, I’ve tried dead hard to stay as unemotional and detached about Hiddink as possible. As far as I was concerned, he had a job to do and he had a time in which to do it – if he kept us in the top four then job done, and if he managed anything else, then that’d be a bonus. But whatever happened, come May he’d be gone so there was no point seeing him as anything other than a quick fix. 

So why do I suddenly feel so gutted about that now?

Well obviously, like the vast majority, I don’t want him to go. Maybe, like others, I’d secretly hoped he wouldn’t and yet he’s made it clear he will. You just know by the very way he’s come in and gone about his business, quietly doing the job he was asked to do – and more probably – he has more professionalism in his big toe than any replacement is likely to have in their entire body. He certainly has far too much integrity to go back on any promises he’s made – not to mention Roman Abramovich not wanting to make himself an enemy in his own country.

So here we have probably the best manager we could ever have – and we’re about to lose him. I mean let’s be honest, would we have got past Liverpool in the quarter-finals of the Champions League with Scolari? Would we have beaten Arsenal to get to the FA Cup final? Clearly the answer’s no because these sort of games didn’t happen under Scolari. We couldn’t even compete with these sides with him in charge, nevermind bloody beat them. Because actually, for all the talk of Scolari’s ‘Brazilian football’, the better football this season has actually been played since his departure.

Gutted.

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