Ian Ledman: Graham Potter’s sacking from Chelsea is short-term and short-sighted

So it turns out that the new Chelsea is like the old Chelsea. win or fail. Move forward or go to the next stage.

Graham Potter’s appointment was meant to signal the end of Roman Abramovich’s years of recruitment and fire, both literally and in terms of the club’s philosophical outlook. The new owner, Todd Boyley, assured Potter on his appointment last summer that it was time to build a different, more sustainable football club.

But that doesn’t mean anything in the end. It meant nothing once reverse travel season became inevitable. It meant nothing once a shiny new toy was available from Germany. How inevitable. How dreadfully short-lived and short-sighted.

Chelsea shouldn’t tolerate bad managers, of course, but Potter isn’t either even if he is disappointed in some ways. His results were worse than anyone could have ever expected.

But then Potter was never an influencer. This is not in his resume. His first season at Brighton was a bit slow, even he would admit. But his CV tells you that, over time, he is a coach who can have a profound impact on a group of players and on a football club.

There were very few signs of those gifts at Chelsea. Some of his choices were unusual. Similarly, Potter is asked to work with a bloated team full of new players and completely lacking in balance.

Chelsea, for example, doesn’t have a single reliable attacking position just because Abramovich spent the last years of his ownership being punished for buying really bad or really inappropriate products. Then Bohle arrived and bought a rogue one, too, in the form of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

Of all the strange things Chelsea have done in the past few months, buying a central striker like Aubameyang in August and then hiring a manager like Potter the following month is perhaps the strangest. We probably should have known then that joint long-term planning was something Bohle was able to say only to find it a little more difficult to implement.

With all this in mind, the stats behind what turned out to be Potter’s final game in charge of Chelsea were quite fitting. He had 70 percent possession and resulted in 13 corner kicks and 27 shots on goal with no goals exactly. The result was a 0-2 loss at home to Aston Villa.

There are those who say that Potter was not the outcast of a big club. He said the wrong things at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Strange how these things are thrown at managers when they lose but not when they win. It’s all rubbish, of course. What matters is what happens on the training ground and then on match day and the biggest shame now is that we will never know if a major change of direction – some real belief in a new way of being – would have worked for Chelsea over time.

Chelsea’s attempts to reach the top four in the Premier League ended weeks ago. They’re still in the Champions League at the quarter-final stage and this is a competition in which Potter’s Chelsea have done reasonably well.

So the interesting thing for Chelsea and Bohle is to give Potter his time over the rest of the season, through the summer and pre-season and into the following season. In other words, to do what they said they would be. That would have been the bravest thing to do.

But in the end, Bohle’s Chelsea proved to be just like the player who came before and feels a little sad albeit also inescapable. Potter will come again. He is a good coach and guy. It wouldn’t be at all surprising to see him at Leicester next season. It already seems to be suitable for both of them.

He will definitely choose his next club carefully. Speaking to this newspaper in his capacity as Brighton manager at the start of the season, he allowed himself to speak hypothetically about what a move might entail.

“Surviving is part of the consideration when you take a job,” he said.

You ask: What are the chances that I will be here? Do they understand how you got to this point?

“Because there is no point in going somewhere and expecting them to be something completely different than you always have been.”

With that in mind, Chelsea and Graham Potter have always seemed like an odd partnership. It hasn’t changed and neither of them has changed. It’s the same Chelsea, just in a different outfit.