Manager Luiz Felipe Scolari was invited to ESPN Brasil‘s show Bola da Vez this week. The program is a long interview directed by three journalists, asking questions about the person’s entire career.
Felipão talked about his time in China, at Palmeiras, Grêmio, Portugal, the World Cup title in 2002, and obviously the 7-1 defeat to Germany in 2014.
But Chelsea were also a part of it, despite the manager’s short spell at the club between 2008 and 2009.
Journalist Gian Oddi asked why his time at the London side was so short, and if there was any special player who made a boycott against him.
So Felipão spent more than three minutes telling the story about his time at Stamford Bridge and the reasons behind his early departure from the London Club.
He said: “It was like this: we went there, started working the way we normally work. Many things happened. So first the Chelsea doctor at the time told us: ‘Look, we have a wonderful recovery center’, which was true, ‘here at Chelsea, we don’t need to send players to recover here and there anymore’.
“Then Drogba had a bad knee injury. They pulsed pus from his knee. I don’t want a player like that, for the love of a god! Then, in a year or two, he’s in trouble. And I’ve been there, did not participate, and did not give him a chance? No, go have a surgery!
“Look, he has to make a recovery in Cannes’. Recovery in Cannes? End of summer? Summer? Okay. Cannes, Nice. Beach, right? I don’t remember right now.
“No, sir, you told me that, etcetera.’ Well, I got an enemy.”
“Some time later, I put Anelka playing up front. Nine. Top scorer in the league. The players return, I make a meeting, and in the meeting I say: ‘Look, now that the players have all returned, Drogba is back after two months, we will try to work a situation involving the two attackers playing one by the side, one in the centre, changing positions.”
“Then Anelka, the league’s top scorer, was a reserve all the time, turned out to be a starter, said: ‘I do not play on the wing’. Well, that’s when I said, ‘You don’t play on the wing, one’s going to be on the left, it’s over, I’m not going to stay here arguing with you guys, I’m trying to compose, I can’t compose, I’m not composing’. And there began a series of other things.
“I left there and our team was third in the league, three or four points behind top. Qualified for the semifinal of the main cup there. Qualified for the round-of-16 or quarterfinals of the Champions League. But there was this bad environment, that situation. And then they called and said, ‘look, it’s like this…’. Okay, what can I do. Then the thing was interrupted. I don’t know if I had continued, what would have happened. But it was interrupted. There, I got upset.
“They’ll say: ‘Oh, because you didn’t speak English perfectly’. Of course, I did not. I didn’t speak English perfectly. But I understood perfectly. We understood, with my English, and the English that was spoken there, we understood perfectly.”
Felipão signed for Chelsea in the summer of 2008, with the likes of José Bosingwa, Deco and Mineiro all joining him in that transfer window. Ricardo Quaresma was another Portuguese player brought by him in January.
The manager was sacked in February 2009, with a record of 20 wins, 10 draws and six defeats. He was replaced by Ray Wilkins, and then Guus Hiddink.
