"I am concerned," Jose Mourinho acknowledged after his Chelsea side were held to a 2-2 draw at winless Newcastle United last Saturday.
“I don’t understand it and I don’t accept it,” he added. “The reason I didn’t make substitutions at half-time was because I didn’t know which decisions to make.
“I wanted to make six substitutions. That is how bad we were.”
Given his reaction to his team’s showing – Mourinho rated their first-half display as a “minus-1” out of 10 – it was no surprise to see him make several changes for Tuesday’s Uefa Champions League trip to Porto.
Nemanja Matic and Eden Hazard were dropped to the bench, with Oscar, Radamel Falcao and Loic Remy left out of the squad.
Despite the alterations, Chelsea were beaten 2-1 by Porto, leading to the not-unreasonable conclusion that Mourinho’s decision to remake his side had little effect.
Of course, it is impossible to tell whether the outcome would have been different had the aforementioned quintet been involved.
Hazard and Matic cannot have too many complaints about missing out given their below-par performances in recent weeks, and Oscar was beyond ineffectual against Newcastle last weekend.
Remy and Falcao, moreover, have not convinced Mourinho they can be effective deputies for Diego Costa.
More interesting was the lack of debate surrounding the continued absence of John Terry. Spirited discussions surrounded the omission of Matic, Hazard, Oscar, Falcao and Remy from the starting line-up, as well as the inclusion of the woefully out-of-sorts Branislav Ivanovic, but Terry’s place on the bench already seems accepted.
He has begun only one of Chelsea’s past five matches, the League Cup encounter with Walsall.
Since the opening day, he has completed 90 minutes twice.
Terry may now be 34, but there were few signs that he was on the wane last term. The one-club man was an ever-present at the back as Chelsea won their fourth title in 11 years, demonstrating a consistent quality that made him the division’s outstanding central defender.
It is true that Terry struggled in the first half of Chelsea’s 3-0 loss to Manchester City in August, with Mourinho taking the unprecedented step of withdrawing his captain at the interval.
In 177 previous league starts under Mourinho, Terry failed to complete a game only once, when he was sent off in the 2-1 defeat to Tottenham in November 2006.
Mourinho insisted that his decision to replace Terry with Kurt Zouma that afternoon was tactical, with most observers expecting the former England international to immediately return as a regular fixture in the side.
Instead, Terry looks to have been permanently relegated to the substitutes’ bench, with Gary Cahill and Zouma establishing themselves as Chelsea’s first-choice centre-half pairing.
Zouma is a player of huge potential, with his pace and physique extremely useful against certain opponents.
The Frenchman is still prone to positional errors, however. He was at fault for Ayoze Perez’s opening goal in the game with Newcastle, guilty of horribly misjudging the flight of Vurnon Anita’s diagonal pass.
It is the type of error that Terry, a fine reader of the game, rarely makes. He is also a natural leader and a fine distributor of the ball, attributes so integral to Chelsea over the years.
Regardless of his undoubted strengths, Terry is likely to remain outside of the first XI unless Cahill or Zouma is injured or suspended; defending is a collective art that relies upon established partnerships, so managers tend to be wary of excessive changing at the back.
Terry’s absence looks set to continue against Southampton on Saturday. It is a situation he has never before encountered, and it will be increasingly interesting to see how the 34-year-old captain reacts to it over the coming weeks.
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