Expectancy turns to anxiety at Bridge

The defeat of Manchester United six weeks ago may haunt Claudio Ranieri more than it does Alex Ferguson. On November 30th, Chelsea were the epitome of rigorous expertise as they quelled Ruud van Nistelrooy, coolly made the most of a penalty kick to eke out a 1-0 win and went top of the Premiership.

After that, the Chelsea manager could no longer expect a sympathetic hearing when requesting patience for a team still to mature.

It might have been better if an infant side really had taken wobbly steps in the first half of the season, but Ranieri cannot persuade anyone to disregard the impact that culminated in the defeat of the Premiership champions. The Italian has some explaining ahead of him and he may have been doing a great deal of it after a Liverpool victory at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday that leaves Chelsea seven points behind United. His debrief with the club's owner, Roman Abramovich, was far longer than usual.

It was an hour and 20 minutes after the full-time whistle when Ranieri attended the press conference. The manager scoffed at the suspicion that he had been agreeing severance terms with the Russian billionaire, and Abramovich is indeed an uncommonly merry proprietor. That, however, will not stop him from making calculations about his next step at Chelsea.

The exoticism of his takeover distracts people from one of its mundane aspects. A new owner generally hankers after a new manager and, before long, he finds one. With three defeats in the past five Premiership matches, Ranieri has begun to give Abramovich grounds for the recasting of the club that has been predicted ever since Sven-Goran Eriksson met him.

Ranieri's gracious demeanour is refreshingly at odds with the widespread surliness of the Premiership, but he will hardly be retained for his manners. He was always bound to be on trial because he had no prior experience of the sort of circumstances that now pertain at Chelsea. Very few people have. It is not normal for a manager to be given £111 million to spend in a hurry. Despite the thrill of the spree, Ranieri should have felt disquiet at the pressure being placed on his judgment. Once the signings had arrived, other managers, including Ferguson, wondered aloud if they would have chosen the same targets. Chelsea supporters put the same question much more brutally on Wednesday.

Real Madrid's willingness to part with Geremi looked wholly explicable, Adrian Mutu's best form again eluded him and people sympathised with Bobby Robson's view that £6 million was an astounding price for Glen Johnson, the full back whom he had valued at £2 million.

Criticisms become exaggerated in defeat and all of these players may thrive later, but there has to be unease that Chelsea miss the injured Damien Duff so severely when the specific purpose of the expenditure was to create a broad-based group in which no person is indispensable.

Figures around Abramovich say that his faith in Ranieri is unshaken, but nothing would hurt a magnate more than to think his fortune was being badly invested. Even if Eriksson had never sipped tea with the Chelsea owner he would still be a possible recruit for the club because he has a track record that saw him deploy Sergio Cragnotti's wealth, as well as a dash of good fortune on the last afternoon of the season, to bring the Serie A title to Lazio in 2000.

Ranieri, on the other hand, earned his reputation by coping with slender means at turbulent clubs and the major honours gained have been domestic cup successes with Fiorentina and Valencia.

It is up to Abramovich to consider how much bearing those accomplishments have on the aspirations of a club such as Chelsea.

For the moment, nothing works properly for Ranieri. Having accepted Hernan Crespo's assurance that his troublesome calf strain had vanished, he saw the Argentinian striker hobble off after only 12 minutes against Liverpool. The injury has been aggravated and his absence will be longer than it need have been.

Ranieri's calculations may not have been much wiser than Crespo's in the defeat. He likes a diamond formation in midfield and has even been known to enslave Duff to it by using him through the middle, but the system played into Liverpool's hands by adding to the congestion as the flanks were neglected.

Busy as they were, Chelsea could not scrap their way through to a draw. The captain Marcel Desailly refers to the "personality" Chelsea have yet to bring to their performances and that term may be a euphemism for character.

Ranieri is a hard taskmaster on the training ground but, despite the splendid afternoon against United, he has still to show that he can bind together a string of rich and famous players into a rugged team.

The situation in the Premiership is now almost irretrievable. Ranieri's penchant for knockout competitions is well known but he could never have guessed that he might have to triumph in the Champions League to obliterate all doubts about his future with Chelsea.