Chelsea initially courted me during two meetings in May 2008, in Geneva and Paris. The manager’s position was soon to become vacant, as José Mourinho’s replacement, Avram Grant, was due to be replaced himself. The need for the meetings to be clandestine affairs meant that this courtship took on a slightly comical turn, not least because the notion that any meetings between two people such as Roman Abramovich and me could be kept secret was immediately undermined within a couple of hours of the Paris meeting, when Adriano Galliani called me to ask how it had gone. I lost out on the job that time because the owner chose Luiz Felipe Scolari before me, supposedly because of my poor English.

Scolari proved to be not