THINGS are unravelling quickly for Liam Rosenior and Chelsea.
The Blues boss is already fighting for his job as he adds failings of his own to all the old issues that dogged Enzo Maresca.
Stamford Bridge is now toxic, with some fans leaving at half-time on Tuesday of the latest defeat in a big game, the 3-0 home drubbing by Paris Saint-Germain that completed the club’s worst ever beating in European football.
No wonder Enzo Fernandez, one of the poster boys of the current Chelsea regime, was in no hurry afterwards to commit himself to the “project”. Not with Real Madrid sniffing around.
It is not all Rosenior’s fault, far from it.
A lot of the long-term problems with Chelsea are down to the owners, sporting directors and their strategy on and off the pitch. Blues fans are singing Roman Abramovich’s name, with pointless nostalgia.
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But club supremo Behdad Eghbali, his fellow investors and his football lieutenants are going nowhere.
So it will be Rosenior who pays the price if he and the team cannot retrieve this situation and Chelsea will be looking for their FIFTH permanent head coach in less than four years.
They almost certainly already are. To sack Rosenior now would be a huge climbdown from Blues bosses after all the initial criticism of his appointment and their confidence they knew best.
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But failing to qualify for next year’s Champions League would be too big a blow to the club’s finances and status to ignore.
Maresca was never the darling of the Shed End. His style of football and tactics were criticised. His defence of his team’s indefensible disciplinary record was ridiculed.
His substitutions, particularly of Cole Palmer, were booed and his teams were jeered off at half and full-time more than once.
But Maresca came into the season with credit in the bank from winning two trophies and taking Chelsea back into the Champions League.
And when the Italian started picking fights with his bosses, the fans finally started singing his name and supporting him in his war of words.
So Rosenior, with only a year and a half of experience in a top-tier league, came into the club on the back foot.
The resurfacing of old interviews in which he offered David Brent-style wisdom played into the caricature of someone out of his depth.
But the opening signs were promising. A tired, injury-hit team that had a wretched December under Maresca looked revitalised.
Chelsea won their first four Premier League games under Rosenior and beat Napoli, led by former Blues boss Antonio Conte, to qualify directly for the Champions League last 16.
But the only early setback was down to the first of a number of bad calls by Rosenior.
In the first leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final against Arsenal, the Blues head coach decided it was the right time to start playing out from the back – despite the Gunners’ being the masters of the aggressive high press.
Sure enough Robert Sanchez, who never looked comfortable with the ball at his feet under Maresca, was nervous from the start.
The Sanchez mistakes which actually led to two Arsenal goals in the 3-2 defeat were not as a result of losing the ball in build-up but were a symptom of his discomfort.
Then in the return game at the Emirates, Chelsea shut up shop for the first half. If they had gone on to force extra time and win, it would have looked like genius. But they didn’t and it didn’t.
Results and performances also began to turn in the league. Just as under Maresca, the Blues have been unable to hang on to leads, dropping points to late goals against Leeds and Burnley.
They also started to lose discipline again with back-to-back red cards in the home draw with Burnley and defeat at Arsenal.
The latter result made it three losses out of three against the Premier League champions elect for Rosenior.
No shame in that, necessarily, nor in being beaten twice by PSG.
But Rosenior has lost all five games against sides Chelsea want to battle for the biggest prizes.
And it was the way the head coach and his team shot themselves in the foot against PSG which was really worrying.
For the first leg in Paris, Rosenior made the big call to drop Sanchez and bring in Filip Jorgensen. The Dane duly gave away the ball when playing out from the back in order to gift PSG the goal which made it 3-2 and sparked a disastrous 15 minutes.
Ominously for Rosenior, the first rumours of his superiors questioning his decisions, including the substitutions which preceded the collapse, soon emerged.
Then on Tuesday the Chelsea head coach gave Mamadou Sarr, usually a centre back, his Champions League debut as a right back against in-form Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.
A Sarr error gifted the Georgian the opening goal which killed the tie once and for all, and the young Senegal international was substituted at half time.
After the game, Rosenior brought up the hangover from the exertions of winning the Club World Cup last July.
Just as Maresca said, it was unprecedented territory for a club to try to compete in the Premier League, the domestic cups and Europe under such circumstances.
Cole Palmer, Caicedo, Fernandez and Joao Pedro, have all been carrying injuries. Yet the latter three have kept on playing.
It is no surprise they are running on fumes at the business end of the season.
But PSG were also in that Club World Cup final last July and are finding another gear at exactly the right time.
And Luis Enrique’s team is very young, too. Tellingly, amazing youngsters like Bradley Barcola, Desire Doue and Joao Neves have older, more experienced stars like Marquinhos, Ousmane Dembele and Achraf Hakimi alongside them.
The Champions League has gone. To save his job, Rosenior will surely, as an absolute minimum, have to secure the top-five finish which should be enough to guarantee a return.
It is hard to find positives. Especially after Trevoh Chalobah, Chelsea’s most consistently fit and reliable defender of the season, was taken off on a stretcher late on Tuesday night.
With club captain Reece James yet again on the sidelines with a hamstring injury, things look bleak ahead of Saturday’s tough trip to face David Moyes’ physically strong Everton.
In the last Premier League game, Rosenior’s side failed to execute a new style of pressing properly and Newcastle scored the only goal as a result.
The infamous centre-circle huddle, featuring a guest appearance by referee Paul Tierney, made Chelsea a laughing stock. Even more so when Rosenior talked about his players just wanting to “respect the ball”.
The saving grace for him and the Blues may be the form of Liverpool and Aston Villa.
If Chelsea can rally and put together some results, it feels likely that one or both of their top-five rivals will end up below them.
But after a truly demoralising night, in which all Rosenior and the club’s chickens came home to roost, it is hard to be optimistic.