Mourinho dogged by more squabbles

Soccer/ News: They are putting the finishing touches to new, beautiful, bronze headquarters at Chelsea's training ground but yesterday Jose Mourinho conducted his press relations inside a much older building a hundred yards away.

Amusingly for everyone bar Mourinho, on the outside of this drab office block, close to the blue door, is a sign saying: No Dogs. It has probably never seemed so prominent.

Mourinho has been accused this season of wasting too much time and energy on small-scale squabbles. Should Chelsea lose the FA Cup final on Saturday it will be said again: that the events of Tuesday night caused Mourinho to distract himself unnecessarily in a crucial week - and all over a dog.

Mourinho will counter that this was an important family matter and his annoyance yesterday about his children being photographed on the way to school was entirely understandable. "In football nothing hurts me, what happens to my family hurts me," he said.

That may be true, though only up to a point. It is difficult to believe that Mourinho's professional pride has not been wounded by this season's events at Stamford Bridge even if a strange calm has descended on the topic of his Chelsea future in the past three weeks.

It is a mere 27 days since Peter Kenyon, the club's chief executive, reacted to the revelation that he and other senior club figures flew to Los Angeles to meet Jurgen Klinsmann in order to offer the German Mourinho's job. Unconvincingly Kenyon then insisted that Mourinho was the man for Chelsea next season and beyond: "Jose has a contract to 2010 and he wants to stay. We are not going to sack him, he has the club's support."

A quadruple, unprecedented, was still on then. However, in the intervening three weeks Chelsea have ceded their Premiership crown to United and have been knocked out of the Champions League by Liverpool. The possible quadruple has been halved and by Saturday evening it could have been quartered. It will be then, surely, that Chelsea's season is dissected.

Speculation of Mourinho's future may have all but ceased, as if Kenyon's words were reliable or definitive, and he is expected to be at Stamford Bridge come July. But from Beijing yesterday came a reminder that it is a city state within the country of Chelsea that Mourinho runs, not the country. The Chelsea chairman, Bruce Buck, spoke in China of an economic plan to which Mourinho will adhere, rather than drive. Some of this was repetition as Buck talked of Chelsea's intention not to be ripped off in the transfer market and of 24 players amounting to an adequate squad.

Yet even the hierarchy can foresee next year's African Nations Cup delivering problems. "We could be pretty stretched in January," Buck said, before adding of the transfer market: "We've been going down every year and that's my expectation this year in terms of aggregate spend."

That may not faze Mourinho, though the tone will hardly delight him. Besides, he might have his own, separate, thoughts about his future. "From a selfish point of view," he said yesterday, "you like to win new things, instead of repeating things.

"The point is that it's an FA Cup final. It's the only title this group didn't win in the years we've worked together. And I can imagine it's a special final because it's the new Wembley. I can imagine that has a lot of meaning for everybody. I'm not English but for me it means a lot.

"I have had to analyse things from the club's perspective and, because of that, I had to say the Champions League was a big target and the Premiership too. But I told you a few months ago that the FA Cup was the one I'd never got before.

"From a selfish perspective, the FA Cup will have a lot of meaning for me."

If Chelsea win, that opinion may spread within Stamford Bridge. But should they lose, how will the pictures from Athens next Wednesday night be viewed? Things can change quickly at Chelsea.

• Guardian Service