Time will tell if it’s a different approach from a different Jose

Just as in 2004, Jose Mourinho walked into a packed room of expectant journalists at Stamford Bridge; and although this time there were twice as many to greet him and the atmosphere was more of excitement than suspicion, it didn’t look like an awful lot had changed — at least on the surface.

Roman Abramovich was still the unseen elephant in the room, chairman Bruce Buck watched cross-armed from the sidelines, just as he done nine years earlier, and Mourinho looked forward to working with Frank Lampard and John Terry, just as he had on arriving from Porto. But then he opened his mouth and it became clear that this was, in fact, a new era with different challenges ahead.

The old Jose, the self-assigned Special One, was brash, ultra-confident and hired to drag a club from obscurity into the winner’s enclosure — in that first press conference he even raised his hand high above his head to indicate how big his ego was, smiling knowingly as he did it.