Sport

Luiz Felipe Scolari's reign has so far been a charming purge. The Chelsea manager has broken with previous regimes and there are even times when he succeeds in wiping the name of Jose Mourinho from the minds of the Stamford Bridge crowd. Spectators have been too enthralled to spare any brain cells for recollection of how it used to be at the club.

The allure is measurable. On Tuesday, 39,365 people watched the Champions League campaign get under way with a 4-0 victory over Bordeaux. A year before, a crowd of just 24,973 showed up for the 1-1 draw with Rosenborg and by the end of that week Roman Abramovich had parted company with Mourinho.

It would take a shameless rewriting of history to present the Portuguese as any sort of failure. Mourinho is the most successful manager in Chelsea's history and may well remain so. It was his achievement to make the team see itself as the dominant force and such a frame of mind could not have been brought into existence via Abramovich's investment alone.

Mourinho kept the side on a war footing by encouraging a siege mentality and there was a craving for confrontation to sustain it. Ultimately that policy was debilitating for Chelsea themselves. The dashing football seen on those days when Arjen Robben was fit had been all but forgotten. A preference had virtually developed for grinding out wins over opponents who could have been overwhelmed if the team had expressed itself. When Mourinho left there was a season when the club paused, even if Avram Grant's side could easily have won the Champions League.

The Israeli turned out to be a human buffer zone and Scolari goes about his work without the distraction of being compared to Mourinho. The only protests heard at Stamford Bridge are those he shouts from the technical area. His was the one bad review of the trouncing of Bordeaux.

A man who had been regarded in advance as an intimidating despot has applied a light touch. Ahead of tomorrow's game with Manchester United, he was probably parodying Manchester City's bombast when he made reference to signing Cristiano Ronaldo. There would have been no peals of laughter from Sir Alex Ferguson, but this was not the sort of brooding provocation that Mourinho perfected.

It is unlikely that any manager in England will ever again reshape a club as radically as Arsène Wenger did Arsenal since there is not the same scope to break new ground in all areas. In his own way, though, Scolari has turned Chelsea upside down. Losing the opener, as the team did so sloppily at Manchester City a week ago, would have been a terrible blow to Mourinho in his latter phase, but Chelsea went on to run up a confident 3-1 victory.

The red card for John Terry, in the same fashion, might have had the Portuguese declaring war on the FA. Scolari took it stoically and when the review panel found in his player's favour he launched into a tribute to English football culture. Until something really unpleasant happens we will not know, of course, if this serenity is built to last. United are itching to carry out that experiment.

Although a shortage of strikers may ultimately bedevil him, Scolari's judgment appears acute. Jose Bosingwa, bought well before the manager's appointment was announced, is reunited with the person who favoured him for the Portugal team. Scolari's signing of Deco also showed him imposing his own approach.

As it happens, it was Mourinho, arriving at Porto in 2002, who galvanised Deco, but the midfielder was not taken by him to Chelsea. Tellingly, Mourinho plundered his old club for defenders, Paulo Ferreira and Ricardo Carvalho. Some would have argued that Deco is not cut out for the unwaveringly visceral Premier League. In fact, the 31-year-old, under Scolari's direction, now looks as if it were designed for him as he prompts with panache from a deep-lying role.

Chelsea, like so many teams, have five men in and around midfield but it is a tribute to the coaching that each of them has space to breathe. Mikel John Obi, taking the holding role in the absence of Michael Essien, is less prone to lapses than he was. While there is faith in him, a manager can give licence to his full-backs. On Tuesday, Bosingwa was tearing at the left of the Bordeaux defence from kick-off.

Ashley Cole, the subject of that unflagging pursuit by Mourinho, seemed, strangely, to have been asked to suppress the style with which he had made his name at Arsenal. With Chelsea, Cole has largely been applauded for his prowess as a defender, but now he is beginning to remember what it is to join in the attack.

United, indeed, will be out to sabotage Scolari's style by pinning back Cole and Bosingwa. Even then, however, Frank Lampard and, conceivably as a substitute, Michael Ballack could make headway in central areas.

As ever, no one will be confident of the outcome of a meeting between formidable squads. With the advent of Scolari, there is simply a feeling, in contrast to days gone by, that it will be fun to find out.