After ‘betrayal’, Chelsea team to face Sunderland will reveal who Mourinho views as loyalists

When Jose Mourinho submits his teamsheet for Saturday’s game with Sunderland, footballing factors will not be the sole consideration. This is the chance to see who he believes his loyalists are. These are the men he will trust to fight for his future.

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has seen his reigning English Premier League champions lose nine league games in 16 matches so far this season. Ben Stansall / AFP

After the great betrayal, the chance to see who Jose Mourinho believes was plunging a dagger into his back.

The Chelsea manager’s explosive, extraordinary comments at Leicester City on Monday when, in the most emotive language, he accused his players of letting him down, of ignoring his instructions and rendering his supposedly perfect preparation irrelevant, mean an added layer of scrutiny will be added to his decisions.

When he submits his teamsheet for Saturday’s game with Sunderland, footballing factors will not be the sole consideration. This is the chance to see who Mourinho believes his loyalists are. These are the men he will trust to fight for his future. Their identities will be instructive.

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It certainly seems unlikely that Eden Hazard will be among them.

Either the hip problem he sustained in seemingly innocuous fashion at Leicester will be sufficiently painful to rule him out or Mourinho, who sarcastically asserted then that “it must be serious”, will determine the Belgian lacks the appetite for the fray.

England’s reigning Footballer of the Year has gone 229 days without a club goal. Mourinho has tried him as a left winger, a No 10 and a striker. He may experiment without him. The breakdown in their relationship seems such that Hazard’s talent may not be enough to secure selection.

In times of strife, Chelsea managers have tended to want John Terry in their corner.

Mourinho substituted his captain at the King Power Stadium, citing Leicester’s counter-attacking pace as a reason for his removal. Sunderland possess similar speed, in Duncan Watmore, while Mourinho deemed his defenders culpable in Leicester’s goals, yet omitting Terry would send a signal about a broken bond between two Chelsea mainstays.

Certainly Diego Costa accused the Chelsea rearguard of sleeping at Leicester. Yet those who are beyond reproach themselves are better equipped to criticise and Costa has only scored three goals, each against limited opposition, since August.

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Mourinho said he had to bring Loic Remy on so he had a striker who would get into the penalty box. The Frenchman has not been a Mourinho favourite but he has only started seven league games for Chelsea and has scored eight league goals. Perhaps, as his attempts to engineer a revival against Claudio Ranieri’s team indicates, Remy is one Mourinho can rely upon, even if the manager showed few signs of realising it.

The other catalysts in the comeback were Cesc Fabregas and Pedro, who were also substitutes. Mourinho, nevertheless, had a dig at a “world champion” at Leicester.

Each was in the victorious Spain squad of 2010. If the presumption was that the remark was aimed at Fabregas, the midfielder struck a conciliatory tone this week when suggesting the players should take the blame for Chelsea’s decline. The reality, though, is that neither has lived up to his reputation in mediocre seasons.

Nor, indeed, has Oscar, who has gone four months without a league goal and was unceremoniously hauled off at Leicester.

That Willian is Chelsea’s only in-form attacker is borne out by the statistics that show him as their top scorer, followed by own goals.

The Brazilian has allied a deft touch from free kicks with incessant running and, if Mourinho deems some of his temperamental talents too unreliable, perhaps he could revert to the more solid citizens in the Chelsea camp.

If John Obi Mikel joins Ramires in the midfield, it would be a statement of limited intent, but it may at least give the Portuguese characters he trusts.

Certainly a pragmatist has not invested his faith in youth. Ruben Loftus-Cheek has been limited to 63 minutes of league football this season. Kenedy’s dynamism has only brought him 179. At pivotal points, Mourinho has turned back to those he knows best.

Now the implications are that he feels some of them have deserted his cause. So those he rounds up will be the stalwarts, the staunch supporters charged with winning a game and saving a job. His.