Be careful what you wish for.
That might be the best advice for Jose Mourinho, Chelsea's fans and players as the “Special One” returns to Stamford Bridge facing unreasonably high expectations.
Mourinho may indeed be special, but times have changed for both Chelsea and the Premier League.
Mourinho is rightly credited for transforming Chelsea during his first term – but not everyone singing his praises remembers what that time was like. A decade ago, Chelsea was not among the English elite, and players like Frank Lampard and John Terry were not household names.
Mourinho arrived at the perfect moment: Roman Abramovich was ready to spend whatever it required to make Chelsea a European power, and he had a European manager who knew the landscape well. Hindsight reveals that it was also the time when Arsenal and Liverpool were about to pass their peaks, and years before Manchester City was to become a Premier League power.
Armed with Ambramovich's resources, a passionate will to win and an eye for talent, Mourinho drove Chelsea into the top ranks; displacing Arsenal as the top club in London; fighting it out with Manchester United for supremacy at home and in Europe. He won everything except a Champions League in his first spell at the Bridge, a term which unexpectedly ended when he and Abramovich mutually agreed to a separation.
This time, Mourinho comes back to a Chelsea which has won everything. For a week this spring, the Blues actually held both of Europe's top trophies, having added the Europa League to the Champions League they won in 2012. And he arrives after a well-publicized falling out at Real Madrid, where a team with arguably as much talent as any in the world failed to make a race of it with Barcelona in La Liga and then collapsed in the Champions League at Borussia Dortmund, losing a 4-1 match that eventually cost them a place in the final.
By the end of the Spanish season, with Iker Casillas nowhere near the playing field and Mourinho giving the Spanish media the silent treatment, some of the gloss surely had been rubbed off the Portuguese master's reputation.
Perhaps that is why Mourinho relishes the challenge that awaits.
He will know all about how Kevin Keegan returned to Newcastle in 2008 to save the Toon from relegation, only to fail to last a month into the next season. He'll know how Luiz Felipe Scolari went back to Palmeiras, the Brazilian club that he led to a Copa Libertadores title in 2000, only to be sacked in 2012 with that famous team headed for relegation. Others, notably Bora Milutinovic, in a second spell with Mexico, have found it very hard to work miracles twice.
Adding to the intrigue, Mourinho faces some big and difficult decisions. What role, if any, will Terry, a talisman in the club's best days, have in the new season. And what place is there for for Lampard, a Chelsea legend, whose second half of 2012-13 was brilliant and earned him a contract extension against the odds? No matter which way Mourinho jumps, there will be critics aplenty. There is also the matter of deciding what to do with Fernando Torres and Demba Ba, an equally high-profile debate where Mourinho must tread smartly.
And where do precious talents like Eden Hazard and Oscar fit into a Mourinho team? After all, the Mourinho's best sides have accented defense more than midfield creativity. Oddly, that was sometimes a shortcoming at Real Madrid, where the available personnel argued otherwise.
Perhaps just as important, how does Mourinho prevent himself from becoming the focus of all of the attention all of the time? The scrutiny of the English media is legendary, especially when it comes to the game's biggest names. Add in Chelsea's penchant for creating its own crises, and you wonder how the team will bear the suffocating pressure.
Then there are those unreasonable expectations.
Mourinho's biggest rivals for the league title, Manchester United and Manchester City, will both be under new management. That, some will suggest, should work in Chelsea's favor as those clubs settle under their new directors.
Arsenal is no longer Arsenal, or so its critics say, and Liverpool continues to face a challenging road back. As Gareth Bale goes, so goes Tottenham.
So Chelsea will start the season, perhaps unfairly, as no worse than co-title favorite with the Manchester giants. Failure to get the Blues off to a fast start is likely bring the kind of instant analysis that ultimately doomed Roberto Di Matteo despite having won a Champions League trophy.
For Mourinho, ultimately, the hardest thing to accomplish at Chelsea will be matching what is -- arguably – impossible to match.
He made Chelsea what it is today, a team both respected and feared by everyone in England and Europe, a team that became the measuring stick for any opponent. He transformed Chelsea, the club, into Chelsea the Great.
Unfortunately, a manager can only do that sort of thing once.
