As surprising as Leicester's Premier League title triumph turned out to be, Chelsea's total collapse from champions to midtable mediocrity was also stunning.
Journalist Matt Hughes followed the unfolding drama at Stamford Bridge throughout the season for The Times and shared some insights into what went wrong in the relationship with the playing staff and whether Antonio Conte is the man to truly move on from Jose Mourinho and caretaker Guus Hiddink.
"Everything you hear about Conte is about him being a disciplinarian, valuing fitness extremely highly, working his players very hard in training and it will be interesting to see how Chelsea's players respond," said Hughes on Off The Ball.
"I think it wasn't so much Mourinho's demands in terms of training that was the problem, it was the way he responded to bad results. He was very critical of his players publicly, the likes of Hazard he dug out, even Loftus-Cheek, a 19-year-old kid who was slaughtered after one indifferent performance and basically lost the players earlier in the season and couldn't get them back."
Wrote this for @br_uk about #Chelsea's season. Warning: it's quite long and contains that may distress celery lovershttps://t.co/mLOSHMTvXF
— Matt Hughes (@MattHughesTimes) May 17, 2016
From what Hughes has been able to surmise, Mourinho was also critical of the players behind-the-scenes, while a complacency appeared to set in ahead of the season and a poor summer 2015 transfer window.
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