What has Roman ever done for us?

Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, if you're a Chelsea fan, the Romans - well, one in particular - have actually done quite a lot.

On June 30, 2003, Chelsea was a struggling club with a somewhat great history but an uncertain future. 24 hours later, a newly-minted 36-year-old Russian billionaire by the name of Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich handed over £60 million for a 29.5% stake in the club, and at a stroke changed its direction and, arguably, English league football.

By the start of the 2003-2004 football season, Abramovich had successfully bought up the remaining stock and took the club into private hands. The Roman Revolution had begun. The Roman Empire had expanded. It didn't take long for such puns to appear on the back pages, along with the sneers. Chelski. Yes, that was a good one.

Ten years on, foreign ownership, in one way, shape or form, is no longer that new. Before Roman there was Mohamed Al-Fayed at Fulham and that was just about it. Football proprietors were still, largely local. Today it's almost uncool not to have a Russian, Qatari or American oil baron owning your club.

What, understandably, left people suspicious of Abramovich - and continues to do so - is his secrecy. In ten years he's given one interview that revealed nothing, instead relying on acolytes like club chairman Bruce Buck and chief executives Peter Kenyon and Ron Gourlay to speak for the club. This has notably had mixed results, especially as the club's managerial merry-go-round has frequently left fans struggling to understand the club's strategy, especially when it comes to firings (such as Ray Wilkins' departure for, allegedly, looking at Roman the wrong way) and hirings (Rafa Benitez...WWDBD? passim...). Amid all these situations, Abramovich maintained his silence, that slightly childlike half-smile on his face, while the buck was literally passed to Buck and others to burble about direction this and ambition that.

In the main, though, the Chelsea fan has stoically accepted that this is how it is. Would we accept yet another managerial firing if it meant finally winning the Champions League? You betcha! Would we be indifferent to the club wasting a shedload of cash for damaged goods like Schevchenko, Torres and Ballack when it meant having true gems like Cech, Drogba, Makele and, when not crocked, Robben? Obviously.

As confusing and regularly frustrating as the Rule of Roman has often been, the bigger picture takes precedent. In hiring José Mourinho to replace "dead man walking" Claudio Ranieri after Mourinho had just won the Champions League with Porto, he added one of the most exciting, controversial and, let's face it, entertaining managers since Brian Clough, who took the club to its first league title in 50 years, and repeated the same feat a season later.

After José's 2007 implosion, Avram Grant took the club to its first ever Champions League final. Meanwhile, the FA Cups kept coming. In Carlo Ancelotti - supposedly Roman's original target when he first took over the club - he had a manager who won the Premier League at the first time of asking. And then there was the Champions League itself, an accidental trophy perhaps, but still the European Cup secured under Roberto Di Matteo, before the hapless Benitez came along and somehow contrived the Europa League title.

Of course, on circumstantial argument, it looks like Abramovich's Chelsea  have bought titles, especially when the European wins give the impression they were more fluke than the result of tactical endeavour. But do we care? No!

Ask any football fan (apart from the odd pathetic fundamentalist) and they will take silverware over all else for their clubs. That's the success they crave, those are the events they desire, when the beer flows and grown men bear hug each in pubs where, on any other night of the week, such behaviour would be the launch pad for flying glassware.

These last 48 hours, with newspapers running the rule over Roman's rule, it's been fun to have seen the colossal, £683.75 million expense of the last ten years' player movements appraised. For every Drogba, Mata, Hazard, Makelele, Carvalho and Luiz there have been duds like Schevchenko, Torres (let's be honest), Veron, Kežman, Wright-Philips, Sturridge, and others who made even more fleeting appearances at the club.

The 'plan' since Day 1 has been to get the company financially self-sufficient. The UEFA Fair Play rules are making that even more imperative. The mega splurges of the early Abramovich years have been replaced by more prudent, self-financing acquisition programs. The club is, now, on the way to being somewhat financially sound, with the recent £300 million, 15-year adidas kit supply extension going a long way to help.

But there is - as it has been since the beginning - still a sense of unease: the constant shredding of managers has left every fan sceptical that anyone will last more than a season. Even Mourinho's return has rendered much of the Chelsea faithful of the opinion that they should enjoy it while it lasts, and it won't last long. We can't help looking enviously at the almost 27-year stability Manchester United enjoyed under Sir Alex Ferguson, during which they still managed to maintain an annual haul of silverware in some form..

And then there is the question of Chelsea's long-term legacy. English football had been irreparably changed forever long before Abramovich came along: Sky had seen to that with in revolutionising how the sport is televised and financed. Abramovich, however, bent English football's DNA further, like one of those plastics newspapers like to panic about getting into the food supply.

Italian and Spanish football may have been perfectly happy with money-no-object signings, but English football had been used to signing players at 14, nurturing them to adulthood and then blooding them into the first team. Chelsea's preference for buying fully-formed first-team players while picking up attractive baubles of youth potential that are immediately put out on loan has at times looked more like an investment strategy than a development approach.

There is also the somewhat ridiculous argument pushed yesterday by Ray Wilkins - a club hero whom I've always admired, but... - who informed the Daily Mail that he thought Abramovich's ten-year tenure was "for the worse". "Unfortunately the influx of foreign players...has been such that our young players are not getting an opportunity," Wilkins said. And it's true, but is that Abramovich's fault?

The hiring of foreign players wasn't an Abramovich invention - Erland Johnsson, Ruud Gullitt, Gianluca Viallia, Gianfranco Zola, Tore Andre Flo, Roberto Di Matteo...even Petar Borota in 1979 all pre-dated Abramovich's money. Foreign players have long been in the English leagues, going right back to the formation of association football itself.

But I don't disagree with the general notion that the widespread adoption of non-English players has had an adverse affect on the national team, and in particular, the Under-21s. It would be insane to blame England's recent abject failure at the UEFA Under 21s in Israel on Chelsea, but the sight of young English players whom you know will struggle to break into the first teams of the Premier League elite served a timely reminder that England's future should be in the hands of England's clubs. But isn't.

Is this the fault of foreign owners like Abramovich? Yes, probably. But here I come back to the fans' dilemma. We Chelsea fans have had a decade of unprecedented and, let's be honest, unaccustomed success under Abramovich. And we brazenly dodge the moral question - "At what cost?"

Lamps on, Lamps off?

“Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble. And if I stay it will be double. So come and let me know.” (Headon/Jones/Simonon/Strummer)

Plenty in life baffles me. Like, why it is that, at the slightest outbreak of anti-American snippiness, freshly-minted US flags are set alight in market squares througout the West-hating world. What efficient supply chain ensures this? Is it un-advertised inventory of the Mailboxes Etc. chain? Does every branch keep folded, fresh and flammable Stars & Stripes flags under the counter, next to the porn, just in case someone comes for a protest?

Then there's Frank Lampard. What is it about one of the most successful, prolific and naturally gifted midfielders England has ever produced that draws scorn from opposing fans and blinds his own club management to the value he can still bring to the game, even four months shy of his 35th birthday?

Is it is Lampard, himself? Perhaps each morning, on his 40-minute drive down the A3 from Kensington to Chelsea's Cobham training ground, he is playing The Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go? over and over again on his Ferrari's 1000-watt JBL sound system.

The vexed truth of the matter is, no one seems to know. In any given week for the last several months, at least one newspaper has claimed, exclusively, that Lampard may sign an extension to his Chelsea contract, while in the same week, at least one newspaper has claimed, exclusively, that there will be no extension and Lampard will be free to take his current superb form elsewhere at the end of the season.

In January, Steve Kutner, Lampard's agent, made it clear that Chelsea had told him his contract would not be extended under any circumstances. Last week, Kutner was saying that there had been no change in the situation. And still, the claims of an Abramovich U-turn go on.

Depending on who you read or who you believe, it's either Lampard's fault for wanting, allegedly, a two-year extension, or Chelsea's fault for wanting to prune it's expensive roster of over-30s. Take another view, and he's been offered a one-year extension, like Ashley Cole (who accepted), but has rejected it wanting the 24 months.

Either way - and who am I? - there should be some grown-upness injected into these proceedings. Lampard's strike against Brazil on Wednesday was no fluke, but an example of the sublime quality Lampard has been demonstrating for Chelsea in recent weeks, a goal-scoring form that has only been undermined, seriously, by the general malaise surrounding the club under Rafa Benitez.

A couple of months ago, Daniel Finkelstein, The Times' political leader writer and hobbyist football statman, calculated that Lampard was, de facto, the Premier League Player of the Decade. His methodology, which involved  correlating various parameters of in-game performance, calculated a league table of individual players, based on their contributions to the games they figured in. Cutting a long - and, admittedly, mind-boggling story short - Finkelstein's conclusion was that, ahead of players of positional consistency (led by the base of Chelsea's spine, Petr Čech), or points generated for each minute they were on the field of play (Cristiano Ronaldo), general excellence (Steven Gerrard) or game-changing impact (yes, Darren Bent), there could be only one 'Fink Tank' Premier League Player of the Decade: Frank Lampard.

There is only one Frank Lampard. There is only one player who is just five strikes away from equalling Chelsea's club record of 202 goals, currently held by Bobby Tambling. And this is a midfielder we're talking about, not some prolific, hits-'em-in-for-fun show-pony striker.

Equally baffling, and frustratingly so, is the treatment Lampard receives from England fans. It's to be expected that West Ham fans, in their own little world of bile and steam, still consider it necessary to boo and hiss Lamps 12 years after he moved to Chelsea. But whatever cretinously petty issue exists behind this pantomime animosity, (and it is, sadly, as cretinously petty as the fact that he dared quit the club as it was taking one of its regular exits through the Premier League trap door), Lampard has gone on to be the most consistently effective midfield player in world football for more than a decade.

Yes, some of his England performances - with or without the Gerrard combination conundrum - have been disappointing, but his 94 caps have been totally justified. His goal against Brazil on Wednesday was his 27th in national colours, itself an achievement of prolific endeavour. And he has more to offer: "I understand where I am in my career," he said after the Brazil game, "but if I can continue playing for Chelsea then I am getting nearer to 100 [England caps]. It's certainly a target for me and, yes, I will try to keep playing at a good enough level to get there."

Which raises questions about where he plays next. David Beckham has demonstrated that a move to LA Galaxy, and a move to the US MLS, is the equivalent of dropping a couple of divisions in terms of quality, although it would probably be the equivalent of going up two in terms of wages.

The difference between Beckham and Lampard, however, is that Beckham has been able to build the 'brand' to maintain his profile. How else would a 37-year-old whose best years are long behind him manage to sign for Paris Saint-Germain in a blaze of publicity that managed to eclipse PSG's signing of Zlatan Ibrahimović not so long ago?

Frank Lampard has built a profile to fit Frank Lampard. He's an eloquent, intelligent footballer. Never the nightclub jockey, and now with a celebrity girlfriend who appears to have successfully mastered the art of being a glamourous WAG and girl-next-door TV sweetheart at the same time.  

Privately educated, thanks to father Frank Sr.'s desire for Frank Jr. to have a good foundation, this has been matched by Lampard's dedication to the game. While still a West Ham apprentice, Lampard was known to take extra training sessions, largely because of the discipline drummed into him by his father, and largely because he felt that with Frank Sr.'s brother-in-law Harry Redknapp in charge of the club, he had more to prove that he wasn't there through nepotism.

Even today, Lampard Jr. continues to put the hours in on the training pitch. It's an effort that kept him off the treatment table for successive seasons, a record that has only really started to unravel in recent years as age has inevitably started to catch up. And it is why I've never understood the 'Fat Frank' barbs: for a football crowd whose diet consists mostly of pies to call Lampard "Fat" is like Kim Kardashian raising questions about Paris Hilton's career aspirations.

Lampard insisted that he retains the fitness and drive to play at the highest level for another two or three years, suggesting he is not yet ready to accept a lucrative quiet life in America or the Far East. Publically, he has repeatedly stated his desire to end his career at Stamford Bridge. Privately, he may have accepted that if he can't have the deal he wants at Chelsea, he'll get the deal he wants at another club. And there certainly won't be a shortage of offers, be it LA Galaxy, PSG, China or - swallows something hard and jagged - even Manchester United.

"I’m not the kind of player to see out my time and sit with my bum on the bench too much," Lampard has said recently. "I want to be involved. That’s my character. I will keep trying to do that, whatever the circumstances."

Which comes back to the Chelsea question. I get the point that with rules on club finances coming in, you've got to tighten the belt accordingly. And a £160k a week for a player in his mid-30s is a lot of money. But then so is spending £50m on Fernando Torres, and how's that working out?

If Ryan Giggs at 39 is young enough for Manchester United, a relative whippersnapper like Lampard should - and obviously does - have a lot to still give Chelsea. Current form and history combined, it really would be madness to let him go. But, then, when has sanity played any part in the revolving door of managers at Chelsea under Roman Abramovich, let alone players coming and going?

Rafa fiddles while Roman burns

I can’t verify this, but it is possible that the under-communicative oligarch Roman Abramovich is currently still enjoying the good life on St. Barts. For it is there that the Chelsea Football Club owner has been - and may well still be - enjoying an extended New Year’s holiday with his pregnant girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova. And good luck to him. Everyone needs to take time out to spend with their nearest and dearest every once in a while.

Unfortunately, while Roman has been sunning himself on his Nimitz-class yacht, his football asset - managed by a hapless Rene-from-'Allo 'Allo lookalike - has acquired the sort of toxicity that turned Erin Brokovich from struggling single mother living in the Californian desert into the subject of a blockbuster movie.

It is, though, still the pantomime season in Britain, which means that seasonal booing and hissing is a national ritual at this time of year. So, as matinee audiences of Cub Scouts and church outings boo soap stars and game show hosts playing Baron Hardup in provincial theatres, Chelsea fans are booing anything not nailed down at Stamford Bridge. 

First, there is Rafa Benitez, the ruddy-cheeked, portly Spanish restaurateur who, despite being as popular as a fart in a spacesuit before he was appointed "interim first team manager", has succeeded in galvanising his unpopularity via a variety of methods: 1) getting out of bed in the morning; 2) turning up for matches; 3) picking star striker Fernando Torres; 4) not picking club legend Frank Lampard; 5) winning some games handsomely while drawing or losing quite disastrously others.

It's not all Rafa's fault, of course. The club's reward for Lampard and Ashley Cole continuing to be, respectively, a prolific goal scoring central midfielder and the world's still-finest left back, is to show them the door at the end of the season and not extend their contracts. Meanwhile Torres, who these days permanently carries the demeanour of a sulking 15-year-old girl, is not even responding to diagrams of cow's backsides and instructions on how to hit one with a banjo. Demba Ba, the crock-kneed Senegalese brought in from Newcastle for a fraction of the Spaniard's money is, however, scoring goals everytime he smell a goalkeeper's boot polish.

Into this background is the club's extraordinary approach to fan engagement - i.e. to not have one. This is a club that would rather do its business in private, with the owner "advised" by a coterie of people whom, it would appear, are no more qualified to advise about running a Premier League football club as I would be about running a hospital. Unless you regard Michael Emenalo, the former Nigerian defender and now Chelsea's technical director as being of distinguished experience in the game. 

Thus, the rare on-pitch appearance of club chairman, Bruce Buck, making a pre-match presentation to goalkeeper Petr Čech, results in the sort of sustained and vitriolic booing chancellor George Osborne earned when turning up at the Olympics last summer to give out medals. Booing the chairman may sound like impudence bordering on frustration, but the fact that the fans were bothering to boo a club executive they'd never actually bothered about at all previously says a lot about where fan sentiment at Stamford Bridge is at the moment.

There are those - including club executives - who will continue to dismiss the religious singing of Roberto Di Matteo's name on 16 minutes each game as rambunctious fandom, even considering it morale-boosting collective sprit. It's not. Most of us do genuinely regard the sacking of Di Matteo as counter-productive, and the appointment of Benitez as poisonous as opening a Spurs club shop opposite the Emirates Stadium.

The singing for Di Matteo, even the singing for Jose Mourinho, is not just a rallying call. Chelsea - and for that we must assume Abramovich - have miscalculated too often the depth of stakeholder sentiment. It is, of course, a valid argument that Abramovich's decision to sack managers has often produced the results he'd hoped for - an improvement in form and silverware - but it would appear that with this latest act of petulance, there won't be a happy ending.

Despite a few impressive results, like the pre-Christmas mauling of a pathetic Aston Villa, who barely seemed to have turned up, Benitez is still struggling to make impact. Torres is a waste of space, although Ba has become a bright spot, but the defensive frailties that Di Matteo was suffering with are still there, if Wednesday night's embarrassing 2-0 lead turning into a 2-2 home draw to Southampton was anything to go by.

And so, as Chelsea go into a weekend when they face Arsenal at Stamford Bridge - a fixture rich in both turbulent entertainment and sour disappointment over the years - there is a creeping deflation amongst supporters of the West London club. 

Most Chelsea fans have never had a problem with the club being unpopular with other fans. We don't really care. We've been perfectly happy with our club long enough - whether courting 1960s celebrities, being seen as a bunch of Fancy Dans in the 1970s, being pretty rubbish in the 80s and almost bankrupt, or being regarded as a home for ageing internationals in the pre-Abramovich, latter Ken Bates era. We have worn the "shit club, no history" goading with good grace. But whereas "shit club, no class" used to wound - but perhaps they have a point. 

The constant upheaval, the inability to retain managers, the lack of consistency in player policy ("Will we not buy this summer due to lack of funds and then buy some expensive trinket of a player in the January window as a panic acquisition?"), on youth development and even stadium development.

Every football fan will find fault with their club of choice. That's why we love football. Football IS chaos! It is still our excuse - and I'll admit, an almost exclusively male preserve - to have a moan about something. Even if our team is running away with a telephone number-nil win, we'll find something to niggle. 

However, the complaints against Chelsea are piling up and, yes, much has to be directed at Abramovich. Elephant in the room, and all that, but the man who has ploughed an insane amount of personal fortune into the club is also directly responsible for creating the toxicity around it. 

It comes from a lack of communication. Yes, we get plenty of communication from whomever is in charge of the team from one week to the next, but do we have any idea about what is really going on at the club? No.

We assume Lampard and Cole are being treated shabbily because that is how the press is reporting it, how Lampard and Cole's people are telling it, and our instincts are receiving it. But we could be wrong. Perhaps a little explanation of the strategy would go a long way. Perhaps Abramovich himself would break cover and speak. After all, it's hard to really read a man when we only ever see that half grin of his as he stands at the back of his executive box in the Stamford Bridge West Stand, the grin occasionally evolving into high-fives with his sidekick Eugene Tennenbaum, before returning to its bemused state.

Like the wizened old crone that I am, I'd foreseen much of this disease spreading at Chelsea in November when the club's annual Halloween nightmare rendered Roberto Di Matteo redundant and Benitez installed. I even suggested that Pep Guardiola, the manager coveted by Abramovich more than any other, might be wise to give Chelsea a miss when he chose to come back to football management. 

And thus it proved to be so, as arguably the greatest football coach of his generation chose Bayern Munich over anyone else. In so doing, he chose a club with history, with class, with money, with German efficiency, in a league that is quietly becoming Europe's most exciting. As opposed to a club with history, money and a boatload of dysfunction. Well, maybe an expensive super yacht-load of dysfunction.

From Russia With Impatience

With his scruffy little beard and penchant for cheap-looking nylon leisurewear, the multi-billionaire Roman Abramovich doesn't exactly cut the image of a prototypical James Bond villain.

He may not (to my knowledge) possess a white Persian cat, which he strokes for camp and menacing effect, but like 007's nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Abramovich is clearly capable of dispatching underlings whenever the whim takes him.

So here we are again. Another November, another dip in form, and another Chelsea manager looking for work. Roberto Di Matteo took a decent and dignified stride in his brief managerial tenure at Stamford Bridge. But from the moment he was euphemistically installed as "interim first team coach" he knew he wasn't exactly the anointed one. He may even have been another 'dead man walking', as Victim No.1, Claudio Ranieri, referred to himself.

Go back two managers, which in Chelsea years means to last March, and Abramovich had grown impatient with his bizarre gamble - football's very own Charlie Buckett, Andreas Villas-Boas - and in looking for a replacement was desperate for Barcelona's Pep Guardiola. But with the 41-year-old Catalan making clear he was, at season's end, taking a year's sabbatical in New York with his family, the unemployed Rafa Benitez was being fitted up for a temporary spell in the manager's chair.

But when Benitez threw one of his customary hissy fits at the prospect of being a mere seat warmer, Abramovich had no option but to install, quickly, the popular old boy, Di Matteo. The club's history of appointing from within has not always gone well: Ruud Gullitt and Gianluca Vialli both fell foul of Ken Bates over money, while Ray Wilkins felt the sharp end of Abramovich's sword for, it would appear, looking at the Russian the wrong way.

Di Matteo - a club hero still for scoring the fastest FA Cup Final goal after 47 seconds of the 1997 final - had been AVB's assistant, fulfilling a role similar to that Wilkins had been employed for at Carlo Ancelotti's side - a link to the club's history for both fans and players.

But in being condescendingly titled Interim First Team Coach, it was clear that Di Matteo was only installed by default.

How embarrassing, then, that he should go on and end Chelsea's desperate hunt for the European Cup, land yet another FA Cup trophy at the same time, and galvanise a fractured dressing room.

Perhaps Chelsea had to accept a moral obligation to give Di Matteo the job full-time after all that. Drop him then and Chelsea's reputation for lousy manager management would have made the club toxic for anyone else to become interested - least of all, Pep Guardiola.

Abramovich had been making overtures to Guardiola again in the run up to Di Matteo's sacking. But this obsession with landing him is turning the Russian into the greatest stalker since Max Cady came after Sam Bowden and his family. And he's done it before: so the story goes, Abramovich fell in love with football by watching AC Milan, and set about buying the club. With that not possible, he set about recreating the club by buying Chelsea and installing Andrei Schevchenko, the rossoneri's star striker, while trying to lure Carlo Ancelotti as coach,

He didn't, but then he got Jose Mourinho, and that didn't work out too badly. Or, at least, until Chelsea's results started to go "in the wrong direction", the self-same excuse given for firing Di Matteo. Like Mourinho, Di Matteo delivered silverware and good times for the club. But as soon as things started to cool off - i.e. results went against them - they were summarily fired by the itchiest trigger finger since Dirty Harry.

Abramovich, then, has a totally unrealistic level of expectation. But he also appears to lack strong leadership and footballing advice around him. There's a reason why Manchester United are the most successful football club in history - it's because they've had the same manager for 25 years, who has built, invested and reinvested in consistency and excellence. Personally I loathe the old Scottish git, Alex Ferguson, but you could never knock his record, or indeed his club's ongoing support for him.

For Chelsea, eight managers in as many years is not only inconsistent, it's an embarassment. We want success and we've had success. We want our club to be led by a dynamic manager whom we can get behind. We had that in Mourinho, we had that in Guus Hiddink, we had that in Ancelotti and we could have had that in Di Matteo.

But, from now until the end of this season (and, it is claimed, with an extension to next season if "mutually acceptable"), Chelsea will be managed by the most divisive managerial appointment it would have been possible to appoint: Benitez.

You may, already, sense some antagonism towards Benitez. That's because many Chelsea fans consider him a tactical fool, more interested in defensive formations and squad rotation than anywhere near the attractive, free-flowing attacking football Abramovich himself is said to desire.

It's also because he spent an inordinate amount of time as Liverpool manager winding up Chelsea fans and, especially, Mourinho, and then behaving like an emotionally challenged teenager whenever things went wrong. He's been out of work for two years, with only a short spell at Internazionale since leaving Liverpool. That speaks volumes.

Abramovich has, at times, treated Chelsea like a plaything. When he's pumped more than £1 billion into the club since 2004, that's his prerogative. But you wonder whether he has always had the best advice. Did the club really need a physically crocked Andrei Schevchenko, or a mentally and physically crocked Fernando Torres, each for vastly inflated transfer fees and equally inflated wages?

The problem is impulsiveness and impatience. If Roman wants a bigger yacht, he orders it. Bigger mansion? He knocks through the rest of the street. This has been the 'see it, want it' nature of his ownership of Chelsea (which isn't that dissimilar to the way many Premier League players splash the cash around). More than just an oligarch, like some emperor acquiring lands at will, he has made some ridiculously rash decisions at Chelsea.

Benitez is going to have to endure six months of indifference and hostility from Chelsea fans. Even after Di Matteo had been appointed in March, Chelsea fans still let it be known at Di Matteo's first home game in charge that Benitez wasn't and would never be welcome. And so here he is, like the frog in Peter Gabriel's song Kiss That Frog "all puffed up, wanna be your king".

At any other club, the sort of success Di Matteo brought in just 167 days in charge would have had his name emblazoned above a new stand at the stadium. But not at Chelsea. This is a club which, for all you or I know, may have fired Benitez before he's even begun, and hired - and fired - his replacement.

Benitez has a rough ride ahead of him. Even if he does well, he'll be out on his ear as soon as you know it. Pep Guardiola knows it too. Just as Ancelotti was the coveted one, once, there is no life expectancy at Chelsea. And if he has any sense, Guardiola would give Chelsea one almighty swerve.

Who let the Drog out?

There can be no more fearsome sight in football than Didier Yves Drogba Tébily, head bowed, charging down a defender like an enraged stallion. It looked ferocious enough from the East Stand Upper Section at Stamford Bridge, where I sit, so God only knows what it must be like at pitch level with the Ivorian coming at you.

Drogba has been a formidable centre-forward for Chelsea these last eight seasons. Putting aside his ridiculous histrionics, his handbags-aloft huffing, puffing and sudden, life-threatening twinges when games have started to go against him, and, of course, his at-times comical diving talents, there hasn't been a player to wear the No.11 shirt quite like him - at Chelsea or any other team for that matter.

And now he is off, confirming this evening in a statement: "It has been a very difficult decision for me to make and I am very proud of what we have achieved, but the time is right for a new challenge for me."

Saturday night's Champions League triumph has, as expected, lowered the curtain on eight seasons of high-octane entertainment, when part of the fun of watching Chelsea has been wondering which Didier Drogba runs out onto the pitch.

"As a team we have accomplished so much," said Drogba's statement, "and have won every single trophy possible. Saturday was a very special moment for everyone at the club and for all the fans. I am very proud to have played my part in bringing many trophies to this club, which has been my home for the last eight years."

Drogba's statement was intended to hose down speculation - and confusion. Smart money is that he will join former Chelsea teammate Nicolas Anelka at Shanghai Shenhua in China, although his agents were still maintaining yesterday that a deal could be struck with Brer Abramovich and his team of shadowy advisers.

However, if Drogba accepts Zhu Jun's generous bag of silver, he will not only be lining the pockets of his family's future prosperity, but that of his foundation. This institution has become an increasingly important part of Drogba's life as he reaches the early stages of twilight in his playing career (he donated his £3 million endorsement fee for a Pepsi commercial to building a hospital in his hometown Abidjan, the Ivory Coast capital).

If Drogba had remained at Chelsea for another season, age should not have been an issue. He is only 34, and injuries not withstanding, in excellent condition. Age has clearly not been a factor in Ryan Giggs' continued timeshare ownership of Manchester United's left flank, either, and he will be 39 in November (as long as he stays out of trouble in the bedroom...). Paul Scholes, exactly 12 months younger, has also proven that old dogs don't always lie around, drooling on the carpet (although the lateness of some of his tackles this season might suggest a certain age-related decline in his mental faculties...).

Wherever Drogba plies his trade next, evidence from the last few weeks has demonstrated that he is far from the knackers yard yet. His potency in front of goal, his love of the big stages - especially Wembley - and his tremendous work rate (when in the right frame of mind) have been exceptional in Chelsea's amazing, unlikely last few weeks, continually showing the sulky Fernando Torres what it's all about.

The Didier Drogba I've enjoyed more than any other at Chelsea has been the Drogba holding up opposition defenders one minute, scoring with a deft twist and a powerful volley, and then popping up as an auxiliary central defender in front of his own goalmouth minutes later. Few critics seem to recognise that side of him, such is their usual rush to leap on his obvious diving tendencies.

My spectacles aren't, though, so blue-tinted that I can ignore the theatrical aspects of Drogba's game. And we've seen as much of that side of him this season as any other: his continual rolling around, like a B-movie actor getting shot every three pages of script, may have successfully disrupted the home leg of the Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, but it was bloody annoying to watch.

Not surprisingly, we've let it go, but don't ever think that the mood in the stands is approving. We have regularly screamed ourselves hoarse for the upright Drogba, the Attack Drog and the Guard Drog, to perpetuate the awful back page headline puns. This is Didier - Team Player, the Drogba who, in the Champions League semi-final at Camp Nou was a powerful presence in the nine-man wall Chelsea erected in front of Petr Čech. Although the occasionally necessary forays back into his own penalty area haven't always been helpful (he conceded two penalties in consecutive European games in virtually the same circumstances each time), no one has ever been able to fault his team ethic.

Opposition fans, neutrals and defenders will be glad to see the back of Drogba but for us fans who've endured both the good and the bad of the club for most of our lives, we will be saying farewell to a remarkable workhorse.

We will be saying farewell to a striker who is Chelsea's 4th all-time scorer, ahead, even, of the legendary Peter Osgood - the King of Stamford Bridge. Drogba's 157 goals in all competitions, including more than 100 in the Premier League itself, have been capitalised further by his simply towering personality on the pitch, geeing up the fans when support has been felt to be lacking in a game. Drogba is a showman, and while not in the same league of all-round charisma as Gianfranco Zola or Thierry Henry, he has been - when on form - a player worthy of the entry ticket price alone.

I'm sure, as he leaves, there will be plenty of platitudes from within the club about Drogba having been "Chelsea through and through" (indeed he has said himself: "Chelsea is in my heart. My blood is blue and my heart even more so"), even if, like Patrick Viera, rumours of a departure have surfaced almost every summer since he joined from Marseille in 2004. But whatever loyalty Drogba has been able to summon in his eight seasons at the club, his legacy is assured.

If it hadn't been assured before, the last four weeks have locked it in tight. Drogba's remarkable history at Wembley, with seven goals in finals and semi-finals, has been augmented by that stunner against Tottenham in this season's FA Cup Semi-Final which led to a 5-1 rout. Then, just three days later, he delivered another blessed strike in the home leg of the Barcelona fixture. Back to Wembley again, the winner against Liverpool to win Chelsea the FA Cup itself.

Fittingly, poetically, romantically, even predictably, Drogba was centre-stage again in Chelsea's greatest night, it's greatest triumph.

His injury-time equaliser will go down in club history right up there next to Zola coming off the bench and scoring 20 seconds later to beat Stuttgart in the 1998 European Cup Winners Final. And while we're at it, Dennis Wise's unlikely equaliser in the San Siro against Milan in 1996.

The difference is that the equaliser in Munich on Saturday, just a couple of minutes after the hosts had taken the lead, was classic Drogba: timely, dramatic, game changing.

That he also scored the winning penalty in the inevitable shootout was possibly the work of an overactive Hollywood creative. Even now I'm suspicious of what I saw, but then so much has been an odd whirl since Saturday night, my head amongst them.

Now we know that Champions League Final was Didier Drogba's final game for Chelsea, and that fifth penalty his last kick in a blue shirt. Contrived or not, I'll take that as his sign off and happily walk  away from one of the greatest - and often most infuriating - player to have ever worn the blue shirt.

Real Gone Kid

OK, hands up who had nine months? Come on, someone must have had André Villas-Boas getting fired after nine months in the betting pool, surely?

It was hardly the most difficult prediction to make, given that Chelsea managers are usually fired in January or February, unless they're extremely unlucky and fatally piss Roman Abramovich off in September, as Jose Mourinho did.

It's actually become quite boring to be referring to Chelsea's managers as dead men walking so soon into their tenure; the history of Abramovich's patience wearing thin has become such a well trodden path there's not much point retracing it again now that AVB has inevitably bitten the dust.

The question is what does Chelsea do next? If Champions League and World Cup-winning managers aren't going to last, then Chelsea could just keep going through a never-ending list of people until, probably, they end up with me, and still not find the satisfaction the club is looking for.

Was Villas-Boas the right man for the job? Who knows? Nine months to turn a team built around an ageing spine of powerful egos, with the promise of blooding younger players and importing others, doesn't seem long.

AVB was an almighty gamble when he was hired last June, following the briefest of ascendance in the Portuguese league, with an admittedly intriguing success in landing the national title in Portugal and the Europa League with Porto at the first attempt. But should he have been immediately imported into the Premier League and a club like Chelsea with a trap door so poorly disguised Indiana Jones would swerve around it with ill-concealed contempt?

We are now playing with hindsight. If Chelsea were currently flying away with the league and chugging into the final 16 of the Champions League barely out of third gear, Villas-Boas would be being hailed as a boy genius, football's equivalent of a precocious teenager who has outwitted the cream of academia to win Mastermind.

The reality is that Chelsea are in no such position. A barely contained fifth place in the league, not helped by another anaemic performance, with a resugent West Bromwich Albion recording their first victory over Chelsea since Christopher Reeve made his screen debut as Superman. Next up will be an unnecessary FA Cup replay against Birmingham City, followed by an always-tricky home league fixture with Stoke. And then, on March 14, will be the potential home banana skin against Napoli, as Chelsea attempt to reverse a two-goal deficit against the potent Italian street fighters.

It's all depressingly familiar. Aren't we exactly where we were a year ago? Then we were only to Carlo Ancelotti's second season as Chelsea boss (his first ending with a league and cup double at his first time of asking) and in turn four years since they'd won the league twice on the run under Jose Mourinho. Factor in FA Cup wins and Champions League semi-final and final appearances, and Chelsea's record hasn't been too bad since Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. I'm sure there are Arsenal fans who would take a recent history like that quite happily.

So why has such a track record been regarded so indifferently by Abramovich? Is it really as simple as the fact he expects success without question, and no matter who he puts in charge? If Chelsea won the quadruple every season with Dale Winton as manager and a selection from the cast of Glee as his team, would he really not mind as long as the silverware was stacking up?

Somehow I doubt it. Which begs the question, does Abramovich and his coterie of acolytes running Chelsea really know what they're doing? Were Mourinho, Ancelotti, Scolari and even Avram Grant really doing that badly when they were fired? Was Andre Villas-Boas, at 33 and with no comparable experience of football management at this level really the only option open to a club of Chelsea's wealth and stature? What was this ridiculous three-year "project" they kept talking about?

The thing that winds me up more than anything else about Chelsea is the sheer waste - of money, of time, of resources, of reputation, of people. Chelsea's executives really do give the impression that they don't have a clue. They quite happily spend £50 million on a useless pup like Fernando Torres, or blow £13 million on buying an inexperienced young manager out of his club contract in an inferior league, and nine months later wonder where it all went wrong.

So, for the seventh time since Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea we're about go through the guessing game of who will be the next mug to fail to live up to expectation. Will it be Barcelona's Pep Guardiola who, despite creating one of the most exciting and invincible teams in the history of club football in any country, is starting to show signs of weariness (though it shouldn't be forgotten that he, too, was a novice when he became Barca manager in 2008)? Or will it be Mourinho, again? Or maybe one of a number of exotic sounding managers currently plying their trade in the Spanish or Italian leagues who, on paper at least, might tick the box marked Exotic, but once embroiled in the rough-and-tumble of the English Premier League soon find themselves unprepared for the sort of combat that more seasoned home-grown managers take for granted.

And what if Chelsea took the domestic approach, of bringing in a David Moyes or even gazumping Harry Redknapp from under the noses of the FA? Would they fair any better? Would Abramovich's expectations of European glory without question and with style still prove too much?

The point is, no one really knows. For the next 48 hours, at least, the back pages will be filled with speculation and, probably, names you or I haven't ever heard of before, but which make you wonder just where Abromovich's people are doing their talent scouting.

Years ago, on arriving at Brussels Airport, I jumped in a taxi and asked to be taken to the airport Hilton, only to be informed by the driver - who, bizarrely, was British - that it was right next to the hotel, and promptly got out the other side of the cab. I only thought such gags happened in comedies, but it happened for me in real life. I've since realised that it also happens on an annual basis at Stamford Bridge.  And with the revolving door still spinning from the last departure, Andre Villas-Boas is coming out of the 'In' door almost as fast as he entered, another pointless experiment in the branch of Muppet Labs that Dr Bunsen Honeydew-Abramovich seems to be administering in his quest for who knows what.

Woke up this morning with dem same ol' Blues blues

It was a mad idea last summer and it has grown progressively madder. André Villas-Boas - at the age of 33 and after just 21 months in professional football management, taking over one of Europe's biggest sides, owned by one of sport's most impatient proprietors - was a preposterous idea on June 22 last year when Chelsea announced the precocious Portugeuse as its new manager. 

Now, nine months later, and with Chelsea not only losing sight of the Barclays Premier League title, but automatic qualification for next season's Champions League, Villas-Boas is looking increasingly like he couldn't run a hot dog stand at Stamford Bridge, let alone a team of ageing superstars with egos to match. 

Yesterday's 1-1 draw to a diminished Birmingham City in the FA Cup 5th Round merely highlighted a relatively poor season getting steadily worse, and a managerial position creeping close to becoming untenable. Which is unfortunate. Because it's not really his fault.

When Villas-Boas arrived at the Bridge last summer (well, returned to it), conventional wisdom was that this was - as high-risk appointments go - as risky as electing Charlie Sheen mayor of Las Vegas. Why, when a manager of Carlo Ancelotti's European pedigree and maiden season league-and-cup double achievement wasn't good enough, should a manager with such a patent lack of experience do any better? 

One could be tempted to think that Roman Abramovich's decision to hire AVB was some cruel form of bloodsport. Not only was football's very own Charlie Bucket getting the keys to the entire chocolate factory, he was also inheriting a squad dominated by the politically-savvy John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba, as well as the woefully disappointing and outrageously expensive Fernando Torres.

On paper Chelsea are one of the most exciting teams in world football. When you look at the talent throughout the squad you do wonder how this group of players should have been so poor yesterday to Birmingham at Stamford Bridge, a home venue which not so long ago was an impenetrable fortress.

And yet to see Villas-Boas looking isolated and seemingly out of his depth on the touchline, you wonder what this much-vaunted "project" is that he and his superiors keep talking about. To me "project" doesn't exactly sound like a firm commitment. In corporate life, a high-flying executive who gets put in charge of 'Special Projects' is usually on their way out because the CEO doesn't know what to do with them. Perhaps Villas-Boas is merely on a three-year internship. Either way, it hardly suggests a long-term appointment. 

Little is really known of what Villas-Boas' project actually is, however. Is it to finally win the Champions League, the prize most coveted by Abramovich? Is it to modernise a squad still built around the nucleus of players assembled by Jose Mourinho more than five years ago? Or is it to try and help Fernando Torres understand what the three white sticks with a string bag attached to them are at each end of the pitch? 

Villas-Boas has been defiant to the point of cockiness that his job is safe. Despite a noticeable uptick in the number of visits Abramovich has made to the team dressing room post-match and to the club's training ground in Cobham in recent days, Villas-Boas maintains that the Russian has demonstrated nothing but "empathy and motivation for next year's project". 

However, it's this year's project that is the concern. With the club lying fifth in the Premier League, and on Tuesday night playing Napoli in the Champions League, facing an on-form team in a notoriously oppressive environment, Abramovich is in a difficult position. If he fires Villas-Boas now he will merely confirm what many critics of Chelsea have been saying, that the oligarch doesn't have the first clue about owning a football club. This view is supported by the ridiculous turnover of managers and the acquisition of crocked players like Torres for non-sensical sums of money. We might never know what Abramovich actually thinks: but if the sight of Chelsea's chief executive Ron Gourlay puffing out his cheeks in a despondent (or relieved) manner at the end of yesterday's cup tie was anything to go by, AVB's bosses are clearly concerned about their head coach.

If, on the other hand, Abramovich sticks with Villas-Boas, despite the team looking unlikely to claw their way back into the top four and a European place next season or, possibly, not winning a trophy at all this season, questions will be asked as to how much true progress has been made in Year 1 of the three-year project. On this, I suppose, you've got to start somewhere, and if that means being brave enough to drop the likes of Terry, Drogba and Lampard - despite their supposed power base within the club - then Villas-Boas is trying to get somewhere. But, maybe, not far enough. Or soon enough.

Stop the clocks

British politicians have been arguing for more than 100 years over the pros and cons of putting the clocks forward an hour in the spring, and bringing them back an hour in the autumn.

Those in favour have claimed it improves national productivity during the lighter summer months, adding to the economy as people shop and dine out later in the evening, while saving on electricity used for lighting in the process. There are even claims that remaining permanently in line with continental European hours will reduce childhood obesity (I guess through more outdoor exercise, rather than later ice cream van patrols), as well as improving road safety.

One person who will probably appreciate some stability in the British clock is Roman Abramovich. Much like a vampire nearing sunrise, the Russian zillionaire must dread the onset of winter in Britain. For every time the clocks go back, Chelsea seem to fall into a mid-season slump from which they don't recover until the last of the Christmas cards are being put out for recycling.

One year ago, Chelsea spun into a November nightmare, starting with a 2-0 defeat away to Liverpool, followed by a limp 1-0 home win over Fulham and then a 3-0 kicking at the same venue from Sunderland, with not even a glimmer of weak, winter sunshine until a 7-0 fillip over Ipswich in the FA Cup in January restored confidence. By which time Carlo Ancelotti had already been marked as the next Chelsea manager to get the trademark Abramovich double-tap to the head.

Roll on 12 months and it's all looking worryingly familiar: yesterday's 2-1 loss at home to, yes, Liverpool, came too soon after that 3-5 humiliation to Arsenal at Stamford Bridge at the end of October, and the anaemic 1-1 draw against Genk (who they?) in the Champions League just three days later.

The difference is that this time around Chelsea aren't being managed by a veteran coach who had won the Scudetto, the Champions League twice and the Coppa Italia with Milan before winning the Premier League at the first time of asking with the Blues. Before getting fired, of course, for not winning it the second time.

No, this time Chelsea are managed by something of an experiment. André Villas-Boas, the 34-year-old Portuguese lad who, prior to becoming the club's seventh manager under Abramovich's patronage, had been, ahem, manager of the British Virgin Islands, Académica de Coimbra and FC Porto, winning with the latter Portugal's Primeira Liga, the Portugeuse FA Cup, and the UEFA Europa League Cup in his one and only season at the club.

As What Would David Bowie Do? remarked at the start of the season, it would appear that Charlie Buckett had unexpectedly won the entire Wonka industrial empire when the ginger-haired youngster was appointed to manage a side which contained players barely younger than himself.

So what's made the difference between this November and last? You could argue that Chelsea's slump last year had a lot to do with the summary dismissal of Ray Wilkins. No one has ever been certain of Wilkins' tactical nouse - good egg and media-friendly Chelsea old boy though he is - but his departure seemed to uncannily coincide with a loss of form that ultimately cost them a title they were due to win for a second time by coming out of the traps in August with all guns blazing.

This time there has been no behind-the-scenes politicking. All that could be blamed is the ongoing nonsense involving captain John Terry's alleged racist remarks to Anton Ferdinand in the game that arguably started the clocks-going-back slump, against QPR on October 23. It is entirely possible that the latest scandal to cast a long shadow over Terry's integrity is interfering with team unity, given the racial mix of the Chelsea squad. But the likelier culprit is the defense around which Terry is pivotal. Their vulnerability was self-evident yesterday against Liverpool, as had been savagely so against Arsenal and, bafflingly, against Genk - as toothless a side to have ever made it passed the Champions League qualification round.

For all the talk about Fernando Torres not scoring, Daniel Sturridge has proven to be a potent striker this season for the Blues, but for all the good he's doing up front, it is the backline that is letting things down.

Terry, for one, is a ghost of his former self, the invincible, never-say-die centre half. David Luiz, the frizz-haired Brazilian, when played next to him has been more of a liability than a help (Gary Neville - in a moment of unusual erudition - suggested that Luiz was playing like he was being controlled by a 10-year-old playing on his Sony PlayStation...). Even Branislav Ivanovic, who was becoming a dependable partner to Terry, has looked untidy and susceptible to oncoming strikers, while the unsettled Alex hasn't been much use to the centre of defence either.

And to complete the misery, Ashley Cole - in theory, still the finest left back in the world - has found himself too easily turned by strikers, with his right-sided counterpart Jose Boswinga looking just as faint when it comes to providing defensive cover up and down the length of the pitch. Even goalkeeper Petr Cech has been looking a worry, with doubts creeping in about his eminence, depute having been universally regarded as the best keeper in the world not so long ago.

It is only November 21st, and, as under-fire football managers are want to say, there is a long season still to come. "We need to organise ourselves a little bit better," Villas-Boas bravely tried to say at the post-match press conference yesterday. A little better? Now there's understatement. "We are a team that does not concede a lot of opportunities but the opponent has found the efficiency that we haven't found yet."

Even allowing for the fact that English is not his native tongue, effectively saying that opponents are simply being more efficient is a sniff of hubris AVB's mentor and compatriot Jose Mourinho would have raised a titfer to. The fact remains that, for the second November in a row - and not for the first time in their recent history, either - Chelsea are struggling as they face the pre-Christmas phase with tough fixtures ahead: Leverkusen in Europe, Liverpool again in the League Cup, a resurgent Newcastle away in the league, and then Manchester City at Stamford Bridge. With every chance that Spurs will, tonight, win over Aston Villa, the boys from SW6 will be down to 5th in the league.

"It is not impossible to turn it around," said Villas-Boas. "It doesn't look good 12 points behind a strong leader but the December fixtures give us hope and we have to make the most of them." We've heard all that before, and with a single again Guus Hiddink back on the market (managerially speaking - and not to be confused with Demi Moore by any stretch of the imagination), Villas-Boas better watch out that Abramovich isn't dusting off his Tokarev 9mm with screw-in silencer. For it was just after yet another winter slump that the World Cup-winning Luiz Felipe "Big Phil" Scolari was dispatched, to be replaced temporarily by Hiddink.

Confidently, Villas-Boas believes he's bullet-proof: "The owner didn't pay 15 million Euros to get me here from Porto only to pay another fortune to get me out," he said yesterday. Perhaps, but he shouldn't forget that Scolari was sacked after four losses in 25 league games, and Villas-Boas has managed to lose as many in just 12. Mourinho was sacked after winning the league back-to-back, while Ancelotti - the most successful coach to come to Chelsea - was sacked at the end of only his second season in charge.

True, the season isn't over yet, but to see Chelsea battling for fourth place takes me back to the pre-Abramovich era, when every season seemed to be a struggle for sixth-place mediocrity. Ironically, it was a Chelsea win over Liverpool which elevated them into fourth place and Europe in 2003 which made Abramovich's mind up to buy Chelsea and not Liverpool.

It's this time of year when he might well be wondering whether he made the right choice...

The history of Chelsea's mid-season Premier League slumps

Dead men walking in the Roman empire

"I knew my time was up. I knew from the start, from the very beginning I was just a dead man walking." Those were the reflections of Claudio Ranieri, the likeable if somewhat erratic Roman sacked by Roman Abramovich as Chelsea manager after a year of speculation. The poor man had to endure almost a season of rumours, including the clumsy, clandestine meeting between the Russian oligarch and Sven-Goran Eriksson.

When Ranieri was sacked, after a season in which he had earned the tag "Tinkerman" for his often eccentric team selections, he left with a rare dignity in an era of professional disrespect in football. Contrast that with his replacement, Jose Mourinho.

Roll on seven years and history has repeated itself: Carlo Ancelotti, another highly likeable Italian, has been dispatched by Abramovich, with the club explaining that: "This season's performances have fallen short of expectations and the club feels the time is right to make this change ahead of next season's preparations." This is the same club which won the Barclays Premier League title and the FA Cup in Ancelotti's first season in charge, the first league and cup double in Chelsea's history (patronisingly, the official club statement does make a nod to the Italian's achievements by adding: "Carlo will always be welcome at Stamford Bridge, where he will be given the reception and respect his position in our history deserves." Cheers. Thanks. Grazie.)

It is, of course, ludicrous to sack a manager who wins The Double in one season and only manages the  runners-up spot in his next. By this token, Arsene Wenger would have been fired years ago. But when you're Roman Abramovich, Britain's third richest resident and the 53rd richest man in the world, you can - and patently do - whatever you want.

What makes it all the more ridiculous, however, is that Ancelotti was the manager Abramovich wanted in the first place, even before he signed Mourinho (who remains Chelsea's most successful manager ever). So the story goes, when the newly-minted billionaire decided that his next 'must-have' bauble would be an English Premier League club, he began an obsession with winning the European Champions League - just as AC Milan seemed to be very good at doing...under then-manager Ancelotti.

Abramovich is said to have courted Ancelotti to become Chelsea manager several times before he eventually prised him away from the San Siro in 2009. Until then, all Abramovich had been able to get out of Milan was the perma-crocked and extremely expensive Andrei Shevchenko. With Ancelotti finally he had the manager he'd always wanted; and with the results of the 2009-2010 season, it would appear his obsession with the Reggiolan had been worth it.

Come the new season, and Chelsea came back out of the traps like Wile E. Coyote strapped to a new Road Runner-seeking rocket, winning their first two games 6-0 and seemingly running away with the Premier League before most people's summer tans had started to peel. But then the wheels started to fall off: Ray Wilkins - the genial former club captain-turned media-friendly coach was informed - at half-time of a reserve match, if you please - that his contract wasn't being renewed. Both the timing and the motivation of this stank. Almost at once, Chelsea's fortunes turned, soon conceding top spot and the generous margin it had built over Manchester United, and enduring a winter of discontent which even saw them fall out of European positions for next season.

Whatever magic Ancelotti had applied in his first season had somehow been irretrievably lost down the back of the sofa by Christmas. Nothing, and no-one seemed to be getting the side up on its feet. Ancelotti was already looking like the next dead man walking. Given that Abramovich had dispensed with Jose Mourinho after an indifferent Champions League match in September 2007, his successor, Avram Grant went within days of taking Chelsea to within a penalty kick of the European Cup, and his successor Luis Felipe Scollari walked the plank after just seven months in February 2009, Ancelotti's departure was a foregone conclusion, regardless of the logic.

To his credit, the club rallied: despite or in spite of the preposterous £50 million arrival of Fernando Torres in the January transfer window (an arrival which has produced just the one league goal since), Chelsea clawed their way back into contention for the league title itself. However, as incredible as it seemed that they could still retake the top spot they'd conceded to Manchester United some months before, defeats in Europe and the league to the Mancunians sealed Ancelotti's fate.

Disarming and dignified to the last, the Italian maintained a que sera sera stoicism that whatever would happen wouldn't bother him. There would be no wailing or gnashing of teeth, no Latin histrionics. He would politely walk away.

No Chelsea manager walks away empty-handed, of course: the modern penchant for golden parachutes means that in prematurely jettisoning five managers in seven years, Roman Abramovich has also forked out a substantial amount of money - as much as the price of a Torres - in payoffs.

And so, Chelsea starts its search for the eighth manager of the Abromovich era. Money is already changing hands on who will be the next lucky individual. Meanwhile, Sir Alex Ferguson celebrates his 19th league title in almost 25 years as Manchester United manager. That's almost a quarter of a century, and 27 trophies in all. No prizes for guessing the secret of his success, then.

Success for anyone mad enough to take on the Chelsea job will always be fleeting. Jose Mourinho won back-to-back Premier League championships but was still sacked; Ancelotti was even the one Abramovich had wanted, but was still sacked. Whoever enters the Roman lion's den next will have but one objective - win the Champions League. If he fails, there will be only one outcome.