A change in mentality
If Mourinho’s methods can ultimately be summed up as a desire to push players to their absolute breaking points and beyond in search of maximum intensity and focus, then the approach of Hiddink is more about boosting performance by pumping his team up with confidence rather than testing them to the extreme.
Chelsea have looked like a team physically and mentally exhausted of late after years of high pressure under the Portuguese and according to the club’s Technical Director Michael Emenalo, he was sacked because of a palpable discord with the players.
Hiddink’s first task will be to play peacemaker to unite the group once again as a team as he did after following the similarly disruptive Scolari in 2009, but that may come down to change of tact in the relationship between manager and squad rather than between the players themselves. In his book on the greatest managers of the modern age, The Football Men, Simon Kuper describes how Hiddink set about looking for inter-personal problems at Chelsea after taking over — his usual process of probing the issues at hand after arriving at a club. He found none.
Chelsea remain a club built around a self-conscious image of solidarity and finding strength as a unit rather than individuals. Over the past few years, Emenalo has acted as a buffer of sorts between Mourinho and the sharp-end of the Blues’ recruitment policy, and Hiddink’s squad cannot be assumed to be riven with other conflicts besides the disunity over the Portuguese’s methods and maligning comments. As the man who departed the dugout at Stamford Bridge more than six years ago, leaving many Chelsea fans distraught and pleading for more, praised by his players for his skill as a man manager and dressing room diplomat, Guus could be the ideal candidate to quell tensions once again.
Read the second part of the article here