CHELSEA WILL seek to continue reshaping their squad during January’s transfer window, with the club’s hierarchy hoping Andre Villas-Boas will oversee the changes having steered the team out of their slump.
Faith in the Portuguese manager, who was prised away from Porto at a cost of €15 million in the summer, is retained by Roman Abramovich and his board and the owner is apparently still intent on seeing Villas-Boas fulfil his potential at Stamford Bridge.
There is a recognition at the top that dismissing the 34-year-old and abandoning the experiment after a little over five months would amount to a huge loss of face and call into greater question whether there could ever be any long-term planning at the Premier League club.
Even so, Villas-Boas is well aware that results need to improve swiftly and dramatically after a run of three defeats in four league games was compounded by the Champions League loss at Bayer Leverkusen on Wednesday. Chelsea must win or secure a goalless draw at home to Valencia on December 6th if they are to avoid failing to make the knockout stage for the first time in the Abramovich era.
The Russian has been preoccupied of late with his court case against Boris Berezovsky and did not visit the club’s training ground at Cobham yesterday following the team’s return from Germany. The motivation behind his appointment of Villas-Boas as Carlo Ancelotti’s successor in June had been to supply some longevity to the role, having gone through five permanent managers in seven years.
The Portuguese was charged with overseeing the rebuilding of the squad; that process began towards the end of the summer and was always due to continue in the midwinter window. Reinforcements should arrive in January, even if the outlay may not match the €80 million committed to the purchases of Fernando Torres and David Luiz at the same stage last season.
There is a long-standing interest in the England centre-half Gary Cahill – he will be entering the final six months of his contract at Bolton Wanderers and would come relatively cheap at around €8 million – as well as the Atletico Madrid defender Diego Godin and the Porto wing-back Alvaro Pereira.
There will be attempts, too, to freshen up the attacking options, particularly as Nicolas Anelka and Salomon Kalou may leave. Both forwards are out of contract in the summer and have spent the first half of the campaign on the fringes of the first team. They could be the first of a number of senior fringe players nearing the end of their deals to leave, with a similar blood-letting to that experienced in 2010 – when Joe Cole, Juliano Belletti, Deco, Ricardo Carvalho and Michael Ballack departed – expected next summer.
Chelsea’s players trained as normal yesterday, with those involved at the BayArena undertaking a warm-down session, as attention switches to tomorrow’s visit of Wolves. There is an acceptance among the players that individual performances rather than that of the manager have contributed to the travails over recent weeks.
“There are no excuses,” said the goalkeeper Petr Cech. “We need to look first at ourselves. The manager is not on the pitch. He cannot do anything about individual mistakes while he is standing by the bench. So the players are to blame and we know it and we try to make things happen and change.”
Michael Ballack, a former team-mate now turned tormentor for Leverkusen, was rather more forthcoming on Chelsea’s shortcomings.
“We could feel it on the pitch every minute, especially at the beginning of the match,” Ballack said. “They were not as strong as they normally are. Even when they went 1-0 up we could sense it. They didn’t have the strength, mentally, that they usually do. We knew before the game they were in a difficult moment, but it’s only when you play against a team on the pitch that you see what is really happening. You get a clearer picture.”
Meanwhile, Chelsea have appointed a leading developer to explore the feasibility of building a new stadium at the site of Battersea power station on the south bank of the Thames.
The club have yet to buy back the land upon which their current home is built from Chelsea Pitch Owners plc (CPO) – a company founded in 1993 to safeguard the then financially vulnerable London club’s future at Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea would need to secure the freehold and sell that site before they would be in a financial position to switch to a new ground.
Yet the club have appointed Mike Hussey, chief executive of Almacantar, as their development partner to ensure they would not miss out should the area in Battersea emerge as the most viable option if they do indeed choose to relocate.
The architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox has been hired to draw up plans for the potential construction of an arena that would house between 55,000 and 60,000 spectators, to be situated to the south-east of the Grade II listed power station, with hotels and shops to be housed within the building.
There would also be complications involved in moving to Battersea, which has been empty for nearly two decades. The site is largely owned by Treasury Holding which reportedly owes Nama and Lloyds Banking Group around €350 million, a debt which can be called in any time. The site has been trying for a year to find an equity investor to fund a proposed €6.4 billion redevelopment.
Guardian Service
