As the 2014/15 season kicked off, a familiar face was back in the Chelsea dugout for the start of the season, as José Mourinho, who had departed Chelsea under a cloud in 2007 had cleared out players he didn’t rate such as Juan Mata in 2014, had built his new squad with the crucial purchase of Diego Costa from Atletico Madrid for around £32m.
While Mourinho’s first season had been one of dismantling the work that had gone before him, Mourinho’s second season was – as it often was during the Portuguese’s early managerial career – highly successful and ended with his team as champions.
The set-up for Chelsea in the 2014/15 season was breathtakingly simple. Protecting his ageing back four with players like Nemanja Matic crucial. New signing Diego Costa was the battering ram, with Didier Drogba the returning hero who was the back-up plan. Cesc Fabregas, brought in from Barcelona and Eden Hazard were the creative players given reign to cause chaos at the other end, with Willian and Oscar both contributing on that front too.
Chelsea’s tactics were to push forward and score early goals, preferably getting two goals ahead, then lock up the shop and play with brutal efficiency on the counter-attack. It worked like a dream in the first half of the season, and in particular the first four games, where Chelsea won 3-1 at Burnley, 2-0 at home to Leicester, 6-3 at Goodison Park and 4-2 at home to Swansea. Of those games, the nine-goal thriller away to Everton was a classic.
Of the opening 12 games of the 2014/15 Premier League season, Chelsea won nine and drew three, not losing once. In that time, they travelled to Manchester twice, drawing 1-1 at both Old Trafford and the Etihad Stadium, proving as difficult to beat in big matches as ever. It was the ultimate flat-track bully behaviour. Chelsea beat up sides below the top four with almost unbeatable tactics. Against top four sides, they made sure not to lose, then took their chances where they fell.
In the first half of the domestic season, Chelsea’s only defeat was at Newcastle United, where Papiss Cisse would score twice in a 2-1 victory for the home side. Mourinho’s career has been spectacular, but he has never enjoyed visiting Tyneside and so it proved again.
While there was a New Years Day defeat to Tottenham and an F.A. Cup debacle at home to Bradford City that remains one of the stand-out shocks in the competitions history, elsewhere, Chelsea were domestic Gods. After January 1st, Chelsea remained unbeaten in the league until the league was won, eking out wins when necessary against bigger sides and bullying smaller teams into submission along the way.
Chelsea had none of the swagger that they enjoyed under previous managers like Carlo Ancelotti, but they always got the job done. A run of four victories between March and April symbolized their season. A 3-2 win at Hull was followed by a 2-1 victory at home to Stoke, a 1-0 win at Q.P.R. and another 1-0 win at home to Manchester United. The final game of that run was the perfect example of how Chelsea could suffocate the game and take the three points without engaging in anything that approached a game of football.
When Chelsea won 1-0 against Crystal Palace on May 3rd, they sealed their first EPL title since Carlo Ancelotti led them to victory in 2010. It would only be a two-year wait for another top-flight title, but due to a spectacular fall-out in the following season from this success, there would again be a new man in charge at Stamford Bridge.
Mourinho’s last English Premier League title came in an era where football could be played the way he liked, as a tactical battle that didn’t rely on pace, attacking football or passing prowess. The battering ram technique of Mourinho’s Chelsea teams has since faded into obscurity, and no team who has won it since has done so in such a defensive manner.
