Chelsea have confirmed that manager Andre Villas-Boas met with owner Roman Abramovich on Sunday after the club cancelled a day off.
Blues confirm owner has held talks with coach regarding wobble
Chelsea have confirmed that manager Andre Villas-Boas met with owner Roman Abramovich on Sunday after the club cancelled a day off.
The Blues were scheduled to take a break on Sunday, having been in Premier League action less than 24 hours earlier.
However, a 2-0 reversal away at Everton, which saw the club slip out of the top four, saw Villas-Boas haul his players in for extra training.
Billionaire owner Abramovich was among those to greet them on Sunday, with the disgruntled Stamford Bridge supremo determined to get to the bottom of recent failings.
He held talks with Villas-Boas in an effort to understand what has gone wrong, with the Portuguese coach struggling to get the best out of an underperforming squad.
Abramovich also spent much of last week inspecting the current coaching regime at close quarters, with his availability from a high-profile court case allowing him to stop by the club's Cobham training base on a regular basis.
The club insist that the Russian's interest in events is perfectly normal, as it is his club, but speculation continues to suggest that Villas-Boas, who only took the managerial reins last summer, is working on borrowed time.
Post-mortem
Abramovich has been able to turn the Chelsea ship around in the past, though, after holding summit talks, with the club having gone on to claim the Double in 2010 after a post-mortem was held into their UEFA Champions League defeat by Inter Milan.
There is little chance of that feat being repeated this season, as the Blues sit 17 points off the title pace, but they are still in a position of being able to salvage their season.
An improved collective effort is required if they are to turn their fortunes around, but admitting that there is a problem to address is half of the battle, and goalkeeper Petr Cech admits recent showings have not been good enough.
He told
Chelsea TV: "When you lose a game 2-0 and you are Chelsea Football Club playing for the Champions League and with big expectations, losing is not good enough and the performance was not good enough, that's why we lost.
"We took so many passes side to side and we never really opened them up.
"In the second half, we tried to play more direct but they were fighting well and kept organised, and 1-0 up so early became so much more difficult to break."
