- Manchester City's recent accounts showed that the club has spent more than £600million on incoming transfers since the Abu Dhabi takeover.
- Tonight at the Etihad Stadium is the reason City have invested so extravagantly,a Barclays Premier League game against Chelsea and Mourinho.
- City will be without Aguero. But their back-up is stellar quality. Negredo – The Beast – and Dzeko will threaten Chelsea's defence.
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| Mourinho returned to England to pick up where he left off. He came back to win things and over the coming years it will, more often than not, be Manchester City that stand in his way. |
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One of the most interesting figures in Manchester City's recent accounts showed that the club has spent more than £600million on incoming transfers since the Abu Dhabi takeover of 2008.
Robinho, Emmanuel Adebayor, Carlos Tevez, Craig Bellamy, Sergio Aguero, David Silva, Yaya Toure. It is an astonishing list of talent.
Tonight at the Etihad Stadium is the reason City have invested so extravagantly. A Barclays Premier League game against Chelsea and Jose Mourinho.
Second plays third and City have the chance to go top. Is it a shootout for the title? Not quite but it feels like it.
City will be without Aguero, who is injured. But their back-up is stellar quality. Alvaro Negredo – The Beast – and Edin Dzeko will threaten Chelsea's defence.
Silva – who could choose any top team in the world to play for – will scamper about in the pockets while Toure – that astonishing wrecking ball of a footballer – will bulldoze in to tiny gaps and make them bigger.
Against this remarkable line up of attacking talent – against a team that averages four and a half goals at home since the start of November – do Chelsea and their charismatic coach have any chance at all?
Of course they do but to take something from this game represents perhaps Mourinho's single biggest challenge since returning to English football at the start of the season.
In the run up to the contest, Mourinho has reverted to type. He has talked so much it's a surprise he hasn't worn himself out.
City – according to the Portuguese coach – have been lucky at times this season. The title, he says, is theirs to lose, even though Arsenal are actually top of the table.
Financial Fair Play, meanwhile, may not turn out to be so fair, or so he claims.
Up north in Manchester, City coach Manuel Pellegrini has said little. The two men clashed during their time working in Spain. There is no love lost.
The fact is, though, that the ball is in Mourinho's court at the Etihad. He must wriggle out of his usual conservative coat and make something happen.
His team couldn't score at home to West Ham last week but they surely must against City and they may have to do it more than once.
When Mourinho brought Chelsea to Manchester United back in August for their first away game of the Premier League season, he played without a centre forward. His team got out of town with a goalless draw.
Given what we know about United now, though, that seems less like an achievement and more like a chance missed with each passing week. Not long after, remember, City dismantled United 4-1 at the Etihad.
Chelsea can score goals, of course. They recently beat United 3-1 in London. They scored twice against City in winning 2-1 at Stamford Bridge in October.
Winning tonight, though, will take something rather more special. This is a different City team, one that hasn't lost in the league for almost three months and that hasn't dropped a point in almost two.
Mourinho, in short, is going to have to come up with something special. Perhaps it will have to be a plan as sophisticated and well-constructed as that which enabled his Inter Milan team to defend a 3-1 first-leg Champions League semi-final lead at Barcelona's Nou Camp with only 10 men four years ago.
That night in Spain stands out as one of Mourinho's finest. It is worth remembering though, that the end game that night was not to win but to avoid defeat.
At the Etihad he may wish to try and do the same and if he does he has players disciplined and experienced enough to try and do it.
It's hard to escape the feeling, however, that Chelsea may have to win in Manchester. Someone, somewhere, somehow, is going to have to try and derail the City train between now and the end of the season and Mourinho may feel that it is too risky to sit back and hope that someone does it for him further down the line.
On Friday, Mourinho suggested that second place would represent a successful season this time round.
Do we really believe that? If there was ever a man who bought in to the old maxim that 'first is first and second is nowhere' then surely it's the Chelsea coach.
Mourinho does not live and breathe to collect consolation prizes and to talk about steady progress. He measures success in silver and gold.
He returned to England to pick up where he left off. He came back to win things and over the coming years it will, more often than not, be Manchester City that stand in his way.
Mourinho now has an opportunity to puncture one of City's tyres and blow this title race wide open.
It would be some victory but who would honestly bet against him?
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