The Chelsea manager’s difficult start puts one man’s pedigree and another man’s patience under scrutiny

Those statistics trotted out in the aftermath of defeat to Liverpool made the current slump feel exceptional. Chelsea had never previously lost successive home league matches since Roman Abramovich purchased the club. Indeed, André Villas-Boas’s team have already shed twice as many points as those surrendered in the first 12 games under Luiz Felipe Scolari, whose tenure set the benchmark for trauma, to contribute to their worst start in more than a decade. Yet the reality is that all this feels horribly familiar.

Chelsea have been here before, and it is what happens next that must buck the trend. There have been periods where form has drained and performances fizzled out in disappointment in each of the past three years. Scolari’s lull cost him his job with qualification for the Champions League apparently under serious threat. Carlo Ancelotti clambered out of a trough in the spring of 2010, resuscitating his team to secure a Double, though there was to be no surviving the “bad moment” of last term. That sequence of 10 points from 11 games, and the Italian’s apparent inability to hoist his team back afloat, undermined confidence in his entire regime. Villas-Boas, with three defeats in four league outings and matches against the third-placed Newcastle United and the leaders, Manchester City, looming, is already being asked the same questions.

The test, admittedly, has come early in the Portuguese’s stint but, in witnessing this team’s painful toils as winter sets in, it is Abramovich’s commitment to some rare long‑term thinking that is being placed under real scrutiny. This owner and his glut of advisers are supposed to have finally recognised that the manager is not always the problem. This team needed rebuilding – and the squad reinvigorating with younger blood – as it has done probably since José Mourinho’s Internazionale eliminated Ancelotti’s side from the Champions League in March last year. The league and FA