Joe Cole has come to the defence of Graham Potter as the manager goes through a tough time at Chelsea. With one win in 10 league games the former Brighton man would almost certainly have been fired at any other point in the club's recent history, things have changed though.
With Potter trying to balance a mid-season appointment, a plague of injuries, a massive squad and a host of new signings all settling in he has picked up the poison chalice. These are just some of the reasons that the new owners are yet to pull the plug on their biggest yet investment.
Their staunch defence of Potter comes at the expense of disgruntled matchgoing fans that made their views perfectly clear. It has not yet gotten to the point of banners against the manager but the atmosphere is far from pleasant. This is all a new situation for many a Stamford Bridge but Cole has urged supporters to be lenient on the new coach.
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Writing for the Telegraph, Cole has insisted that Potter is not solely to blame for the run of results and should be afforded time to turn things around. "He is building a team while trying to compete in the intensity of the season, integrate new signings, rehab the injured, and develop a playing style at the same time. That is not easy," he explained.
"When you factor in other aspects – like the players who can see their time coming to an end at the club, or those like N’Golo Kante, who just cannot seem to get fit – the problem just gets worse.
"Potter has been stoic about it – no blaming his players, or the referees, or anyone else. You have to suppose that Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the principals of the consortium in charge, will admire that. Potter came into a team that was not in a good place, with injuries, and it has proved as difficult as most people expected."
There is also a sense of the shifting with the times for Cole, who was part of the squad that got success, and instability, during the peak hire and fire years. Cole was managed by five managers in a three-year spell and looks back to those times as the opposite of what Chelsea are moving towards.
"As a player at Chelsea I lived through four managerial sackings – Claudio Ranieri, Jose Mourinho, Avram Grant and Luiz Felipe Scolari. As a player you know when a manager is under pressure – and most footballers are good people. They will all have a different view on it depending on whether they are in the team or not but the big picture is that they will train hard and do their best. There are times when the results just do not come.
"Scolari – Big Phil to us – came to Chelsea in 2008 six years after winning the World Cup. The first thing was that he changed our training completely. Avram had kept most of the structures Jose had left in place. Big Phil ripped it up. He had his methods and who was to say what was right and what was wrong?
"The periodisation model has become universal now, but Big Phil had his way and that was how it went. If he had been given 10 more games perhaps we would have clicked but that was not how Chelsea operated then.
"As a squad we talked about sharpening up our performances in training which we saw as our way of changing what happened on matchday. Didier [Drogba] was part of the senior player group – with John Terry, Frank Lampard and Petr Cech – who kept standards high. They managed the mood in the dressing room. The previous season we had reached the Champions League final with Avram letting us get on with what we did best.
"Potter is trying to build something completely different. Sometimes a manager comes in, throws it all together and it works fine. It can make you look like a genius but is it that, or is there a major slice of luck to it? He has not had the rub of the green with injuries, and yet all anyone will point to is the huge transfer spend and how that should guarantee an instantaneous change. Yet he was also left with players who really should have left and will not be happy still to be there."
The complexities of the situation really have been laid bare and many will still argue that Potter should be doing better on the field regardless, which is hard to argue. But Cole, who won nearly everything as a player with the brutal style of ownership, being open to a new, patient structure is perhaps evidence that there is more than one way to go about it, even if the start is rocky.
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