For the first four months of this Premier League season I felt I was watching the best top-flight side in England since Manchester United in 2008. The real deal. Very few mistakes, great defending, wonderful attacking, fighting spirit, a mean centre-forward in Diego Costa and a top-class playmaker in Cesc Fabregas.
Now, we enter the new year with Chelsea and Manchester City locked together on 46 points from 20 games and an identical goal difference of 25. Chelsea’s lead has evaporated and Jose Mourinho knows he is heading into a highly pressurised five-month spell - which will not daunt him, because he knows the pressure game inside out.
It will involve Mourinho challenging the players internally after the recent run of points dropped on the road: "Do you have what it takes? Do you have the steel inside you to go and be ruthless and finish teams off?"
He will remind them that they can have all the possession (as at Southampton), or be unlucky (Newcastle), or fall apart defensively (Spurs), but still correct those recent setbacks if their attitude is right. Even Mourinho, though, will wonder whether the sequence of away results points to an underlying problem.
The pattern of struggle certainly raises a doubt. Returning to the Jose Mourinho interview I did in the Telegraph earlier in the season, he talked about his team acquiring the killer instinct they lacked in 2013-14. He seemed confident they would now see teams off. But the uncertainty has returned, and they must now show that the brilliant autumn form is the true face of a strengthened Chelsea side.
The results at Sunderland, Newcastle, Southampton and Spurs undermine their claim to be the thing they promised to be in the first 15 games. Is there still a little bit of a weak underbelly in that Chelsea unit?
In my business I hear people say Chelsea dropping points is good for the league. The opposite seems true to me. I always want a competitive league with changing leadership and I always want the bottom to be capable of beating the top.
But what I loved about Chelsea in the first two or three months of the season was that they looked a potential Premier League standout side to go alongside three or four others in the last 20 years. Looking at it with a neutral hat on it would have been good to see them go on a long unbeaten run playing outstanding football, with clean sheets and great goalkeeping.
So my hope was that an outstanding team had emerged. The benefit of that is that it pulls everyone else up. Rather than crushing the others it raises the standard and galvanises rivals. I would have preferred Manchester City to be forced into busting a gut to catch them. City are on a marvellous run, so I’m not dismissing their good form, but I still feel the title race has been opened up mainly by Chelsea coming back towards the pack.
Titans: Diego Costa battles Vincent Kompany in September's 1-1 draw (Reuters)
With the arrival of Arsène Wenger in 1996 and Jose Mourinho in 2004, we saw two bursts of improvement at Old Trafford in the Premier League. At Manchester United, in the late 1990s, we were made to push ourselves to the absolute limit to deal with Arsenal. We were neck and neck. Week in, week out, we went to work knowing every dropped point would be punished. Now, we need to get back to those titanic struggles, with one club setting the pace.
At United we were famous for getting stronger in the second half of the season and for hunting down our rivals. In the mid-2000s when we faced Mourinho’s first Chelsea team, or in the Nineties when Arsenal were giving us trouble, dressing-room conversations would often start with: ‘These are good teams, these. Proper teams.’
If I search my memory for top performances over the last two or three years, City’s victory over United at the Etihad last season is one but there haven't been many. Uppermost in mind however are games involving Atlético Madrid, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, or Borussia Dortmund a few seasons back. I get excited watching those boundary-pushing games with very few mistakes and great intensity.
When we were chasing teams – and the great Wenger team of 1998 was the best I played against – the bar was set at such a high standard that you had two options: join them at that level or wait for them to come down.
There is no doubt City are a good Premier League team. However, for them to be an outstanding team they will have to acquire the consistent intensity you see at the two Madrid clubs or Bayern Munich. To my eyes they are not as good as when they first won the Premier League. The big question remains: can they handle success the season following a title win.
The next two months will tell us whether Mourinho can get Chelsea back into the habit of killing teams off, and whether City can win year on year. I worry, too, about the purchase of Wilfried Bony, who is a very fine centre-forward but is not certain to add the kind of intricacy and ferocious intensity they found in the Sergio Agüero and Carlos Tevez partnership. The owners will want sustained success: back to back titles and a serious challenge for the Champions League. The quality to go again, go again and again.
We want standards to be raised. It is about time now, with all the money invested (far more than anywhere else), that we are able to confidently get back to saying we have the best product. Over the past three or four years in England the product has slipped, relative to Spain and Germany.
On a positive note, Chelsea, City and United can get there. There is no doubt that over the next 12 months Louis van Gaal will build a side who can challenge for the title.
In the shorter term I was hoping this Mourinho Chelsea side would shift our football up a level and create a titanic struggle domestically that can drive them and others to the highest European standards. They still have the chance.
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