Liam Rosenior a fever dream but Chelsea remain in the BlueCo nightmare | OneFootball

In April 2021, Christian Pulisic was scoring a goal against Real Madrid in the first leg of a Champions League semi-final that Chelsea would go on to win ahead of beating Manchester City in the final in Porto a month later.

Almost exactly five years on, a man who was taking his first steps into coaching as assistant manager of Derby County while Thomas Tuchel was lifting the greatest gong in club football, was sacked as head coach of a group players-cum-assets by harebrained executives who run an institution which still purports to be Chelsea Football Club, though bears very little resemblance to the one they took the reins of in May 2022.

Rosenior was never the villain of the piece. He very quickly established himself as a figure of fun at Stamford Bridge through “ageing men” and “respecting the ball”, but is also very evidently a “nice guy” and not necessarily a bad coach. He was just someone for whom this job came far, far too soon.

He leaves with sympathy as one of the most doomed-to-fail Premier League managers in history.

Enzo Maresca had earned the respect – and in some cases great affection – of the Chelsea players after winning two trophies and guiding them back into the Champions League with a style of football that was bearing fruit and looked as though it would continue to do so, particularly if sporting director double-act Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart took any note of his wishes.

It’s rare that a manager is sacked when things are actually going really rather well, and the psychological blow of their leader being taken away from them was going to be hard to recover from no matter who came in as his replacement. The need for players to google that replacement should have raised alarm bells.

A fine start which saw Chelsea win seven of their opening eight games under Rosenior was put down to them essentially still playing in the style of his predecessor. Time on the training ground to establish his own philosophy coincided with their demise.

‘A motivator more than a coach’, the players didn’t appreciate Rosenior’s “LinkedIn” language and took against his training sessions, which were ‘not as good’ as they were under Maresca or Mauricio Pochettino.

The final straws were his post-match press conference after the 3-0 defeat to Brighton, in which he questioned the players’ commitment, and a ‘strange admission’ in a team meeting this week in which he admitted ‘he was feeling extremely vulnerable’.

It’s not hard to imagine the thoughts and feelings of players who had already been making jokes about his glasses at that stage, and in one of very few things we agree with BlueCo on – along with their aversion to John Terry becoming manager – it made his position ‘untenable’.

Here’s hoping BlueCo’s period of “self-reflection” extends beyond their search for a new manager and involves them questioning whether they should in fact leave.

Concerns over which nation state will take on a football club now in such extreme debt are for another time.

The BlueCo downfall and what next?

The BlueCo mistakes are numerous and wide-ranging but can be summed up neatly by them starting their ownership with a world-class Champions League-winning manager at the helm and now being without a manager having sacked someone after 106 days whose previous experience was with Hull City and Strasbourg.

The ‘did that really happen?’ questions typically require a bit of distance from the baffling event, but the incredulity at Rosenior being the actual Chelsea manager is immediate.

Chelsea have won two Champions Leagues, five Premier League titles, they destroyed the champions of Europe in the Club World Cup final nine months ago and BlueCo really, genuinely, actually thought that their best option as manager was someone whose best achievements to date were taking Strasbourg into the Conference League and not getting Hull into the Championship play-offs.

Who comes next? Any proven manager would be mad to join what is now the most unattractive big club in Europe. A relative novice will either prove not worthy, like Rosenior, or become too big for their boots for BlueCo to control and be sent packing, like Maresca.

Awakening from a fever dream like Rosenior’s tenure typically involves wiping cold sweat from your brow and a deep sense of relief, but Chelsea fans are the extras in a Christopher Nolan film; it was a dream within a dream, a three-and-half month hallucination in the BlueCo nightmare.