The Special One

I’m not a sport kinda guy. Hey, I said that before.

But I like to watch some sports, and one of them is the English Premier League (EPL) football competition (this year it's called Barclays Premier League since they are the main sponsor). One of the club that I admire the most is Chelsea. Well, most of the time I can’t watch when they play. But I have been in love in this London-based club since the coach was Ruud Gullit. So at least I always try to follow the competition even it’s just through the news or some sport TV program that shows the highlighted goals.

During the past few years, Chelsea has become a very strong football team in English League and in International competition. They haven’t won any Champions League yet, considered as the most prestigious club trophy in European football, but get two EPL champions within three years plus few other local cups is their highest achievement in 50 years. And that’s because a guy name Jose Mourinho.

This is the guy who came to Chelsea in 2004 as one of the highest managers in football. This is the guy who turn Chelsea from ordinary club to a world-class and win two back-to-back EPL champions. This is a guy who said in his first press conference: "Please don't call me arrogant, but I'm European champion and I think I'm a special one". And I believe he is indeed the special one.

Jose is full of controversy from his comments, but he’s a genius when it comes to build a solid team and strategy. And Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich, used to support Jose by giving him a blank check to buy any players he wants. He used to. Because for some reason, the tension between this Russian owner with the genius coach has been raised lately. Many small incidents happened between them. The owner stated winning EPL is good but he wants the club to win European Championship league. The owner would like to see his team to not only win the game but win it with a beautiful football style. The owner got involved in choosing the player to be hired and obviously this wouldn’t make any coach to be happy. And the peak was few days ago when Chelsea announced a shocking news that Jose Mourinho is leaving the team 'by mutual consent'.

I don’t know whether Jose got sacked or decided to leave. Today I watched the first game without Mourinho and Chelsea goalkeeper must picked the ball from his net two times without any chance to score back to Manchester United. What to expect? Not anyone can just replace a legendary coach who at the same time gives the spirit to the team.

But one of my concern here is the fact that sometimes achieving something extra ordinary is not enough. Once you deliver a superb result, people want you to deliver even better. So no guarantee that after completing a job with satisfied result we won’t get sacked because we don’t deliver the same level of result in the next job. It happens not only as a football coach, but as well as an engineer, a consultant or a project manager. It doesn’t mean we don’t get appreciation, but the celebration party should only last for a day since the next day we must start preparing for the next game. Or perhaps it’s just a matter of attitude. We must deliver the trophy at the same time mind the attitude to the owner. So we always have to deliver superb result all the time, while showing a good attitude to the stake holders. And this may be a good thing to maintain a high quality and consistent result.

I guess we all have to be the special one consistently.