With each day of a painful week André Villas-Boas has ramped up his support for John Terry. "What I'm saying is you guys should be proud of him," Chelsea's Portuguese manager told newspapers on the eve of Arsenal's visit. "I'm proud of [Cristiano] Ronaldo – he's the captain of my [national] team."

With that exhortation Villas-Boas went further than he had when saying he fully believed Terry's version of events at Loftus Road last Sunday. He went one step on from dedicating the midweek Carling Cup win to the leader in his dressing room, who is under Football Association and police investigation for alleged racial abuse directed at Anton Ferdinand of Queens Park Rangers.

By urging his adoptive country to be "proud" of Terry while the evidence is still being studied, Villas‑Boas tied himself inseparably to the most politically powerful player of the Roman Abramovich era. This week he has taken a moral and legal gamble on Terry's innocence while Chelsea were fined £20,000 for failing to control their players at QPR and Chelsea Pitch Owners celebrated their victory over Abramovich and his board on the future of Stamford Bridge.

Kneading his hands on the dais, but otherwise cool under pressure, Villas‑Boas tried to shift attention to Chelsea's lunchtime clash with Arsenal but knew the discussion would gravitate back to Terry and more generalised questions about racism in sport. Most managers would welcome a distraction from the kind of turmoil Chelsea endured in the west London derby, where QPR were victorious and Didier Dogba and José Bosingwa were sent off – but not one with such toxic possibilities, at such a multiethnic club where the accused is also the public face of the England team.

Despite distancing himself from José Mourinho, his fellow Portuguese, who is of a far more disputatious nature, Villas-Boas has become steadily more combative in fighting Chelsea's corner, especially in relation to Premier League refereeing, which he has routinely criticised. English football is becoming used to him as a politely argumentative type who constructs long answers to questions his aides would probably rather he answered more concisely.

His English veers between brilliantly precise and rambling, especially when the heat is on. On the Terry episode at one point he lectured the assembled press: "Speculation on a negative situation is something that disappoints us, in some ways, that you can try to sustain a couple of things under speculation. That is the only surprise: maybe the scale this has arrived at, due to a speculation situation."

Less verbosely he said: "No, there's no siege mentality, not at all. Not at all." Yet you can see him groping for the right balance between support for Terry and condemnation of a vile social curse: "Serious? Of course, it's tremendously serious but that doesn't mean that it's not speculation – or a big misunderstanding."

This latest inquisition came two days after Villas-Boas said of the Carling Cup win over Everton: "I think all the players would like to dedicate it to John Terry." At the start of the week he said: "John is a player who [represents] this country to the highest level internationally. He is a player of great responsibilities. I find it strange when people don't trust the words of a representative from your country."

Terry missed the trip to Merseyside, with Villas-Boas saying: "We decided not to take him to Everton based on the quality we have at centre-back. The selection was also made on the fact that he had four yellows. But he's been excellent in training. For me it's the end of the matter and it's under FA investigation. I have no concerns about his state of mind – never, ever."

Next in his crosshairs was the FA charge from the QPR game. "I think the charge of failing to control the players is very aggressive to what happened," he said. "It's an incident where Bosingwa is red-carded and we had suffered a penalty 10 minutes into the game. There was no surrounding of the referee in that case.

"Twenty minutes after, with a sending-off you know can go either way in terms of a yellow or a red, the players showed frustration. One player who is there is the captain and he should be allowed to ask the referee what is in his mind. Then eventually the players gather up. A couple of them have Premier League experience and know they shouldn't do it – a couple of them, like [Juan] Mata, don't have that experience and end up adding to that number.

"When you have four or more than four you are charged with failing to control the players. I found it strange but it is the reality. We never confronted the referee, we weren't aggressive, we never tried to influence the referee's decision. It's just the natural reaction of the team – nothing else."

Chelsea did not contest the charge but Villas-Boas clearly resents it, despite owning up to the fundamental offence of surrounding the match official: "We haven't lost control, we haven't lost discipline, we are a correct team. My team is not aggressive, it's not confrontational, it knows how to behave itself – and I don't agree with people taking that tack."

In the middle of all this Chelsea have failed to keep a clean sheet in eight league games for the first time since 2003 but are earning praise from Arsène Wenger and others for a more fluid style. Here Villas-Boas invents a word: "incentivate". He says: "It comes by the expression of talent. One of our choices in the way we train is to incentivate the players' freedom of choice. Sometimes the players feel more comfortable when they have more guidelines but we decided to free the players in their decision making. Because of the talent we have it's given us more fluency and this kind of new style.

"I agree more with the expression of talent and the freeing of talent. We don't dictate choices, We incentivate choice making, and this is our style of coaching."

While the team shifts off its old functional axis to provide more excitement, Villas-Boas is unmovable on the biggest test of his short time in London. Of the Terry problem he said again and again: "I would say it's a big misunderstanding."