How a higher leaderboard position can psychologically benefit your side is well known to everyone, but how can it shake your moral is obviously not known to many. Chelsea is on the top of league table and they are here for some time now, had there been any other team on the top for so long time, it would have explored this opportunity by issuing exaggerated media statements just to demoralize their upcoming high profile opponents, but this is not with the former Everton manager who is serving his second team with the Blues. Significantly, he has been denying any advantage of being on the top and repeatedly saying that their rank is just misleading as there are others equally competitive teams who are still as likely to win the title as they are. Though, he never said they cannot win the title, in fact, he always said, they are in the better position to take away the silverware despite of their misleading leaderboard position. Who is the next favorite to win the crown? He believes City is the team who could hurdle their chances to triumph English top flight.
This is possibly be the first time when a manager, especially manager of top positioned team, is repeatedly refusing to accept any positive things out of their table position and why he is doing so is not known to anyone at the moment, however everyone predicts it to be a part of his well-defined strategies to coup the title. What he said ahead of their game at Aston Villa is, “I keep saying the same, the table is fake. If you have just the number of points, the table is fake. Before the number of points is the number of matches. We could have 30 points more than them and 10 matches more. It means nothing. When everybody has the same number of matches, I don’t know when this is going to happen, maybe in the last week of the competition. Only in that moment is when the table is real.”
Apart from this, he considers this season as completely different from what he saw during his first spell with Chelsea and added, “In 2004-05 and 2005-06, it was just Chelsea and Manchester United, two teams. In this moment four teams can win it so it is a completely different picture. How many points to win the title? I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. We have a very difficult match tomorrow. That is all I think about.”