Chelsea’s legendary title winning 2004-2005 season is now 20 years old, making a perfect moment for something like Matt Law’s piece for the Daily Telegraph which is comprised of three exclusive interviews with key figures from that memorable year – John Terry, Frank Lampard and Jose Mourinho.
It covers the whole season and adds a lot of fascinating detail, but perhaps the most interesting part is when Mourinho relates that team to this current side.
“One of these players of 2004-05, a few weeks ago, when Chelsea played Arsenal. One of the guys wrote me a message. I won’t tell you who it is, but the guy is now, I say, 45 years old, something like that,” the ex-Blues boss wrote.
“All of them are more or less 45. And one of them wrote to me, it was not John or Frank, and told me ‘boss, if you got together the 2004-05 team now and went on a training camp for two weeks, we would beat the current Chelsea team’. Of course, it was a joke. But this was a message of we were so good, we were so, so strong that 45 years old, we train for two weeks and we beat the current Chelsea team. Between us, we are still a team.”
Mourinho memories remind Blues fans of what they’re missing in current crop
As Mourinho says, it’s a joke, but there is some truth in there. The team that capitulated so meekly against a depleted Arsenal side a few weeks ago is so materially different to the war machine that Jose constructed in just one summer of genius preparation and team building.
This side still have a lot of potential, but after 3 years together for the most part, they’re still struggling to match the cohesion and fluency that Mourinho’s team managed in 3 months.
