KEY POINTS:
The gap between the Premiership leaders Manchester United and defending champions Chelsea has reached six points and Jose Mourinho has not been slow to point the finger of blame.
The Chelsea manager has sent a warning to the Stamford Bridge dressing room by naming and shaming three of
the five players he believes have been "performing nothing for the team".
In a remarkable and wide-ranging attack on his own team after Saturday's 2-2 draw with Fulham, Mourinho identified Andrei Shevchenko, Salomon Kalou and Shaun Wright-Phillips as three who "cannot perform at a high level".
The remaining two are understood to be the £16m ($45m) Nigerian midfielder John Obi Mikel and the Dutch international defender Khalid Boulahrouz, bought for £7m last summer.
"For me, six points is not a drama, the drama is consecutively you cannot defend," Mourinho said.
"And not just defend. Some of the players in other areas cannot perform at a high level.
"So in this moment you have one hand and in one hand you can find four or five players performing high since the beginning of the season.
"And in another hand you can find four or five players performing nothing for the team and that's the situation we live at this time."
The shaky confidence of Shevchenko, Kalou and Wright-Phillips has been plain to see, but Mourinho's exasperation with Boulahrouz and Mikel has been more private.
The 19-year-old Mikel has already been criticised for turning up late for training.
Mourinho is close to losing complete faith in Boulahrouz and dropped him against Reading on Boxing Day to play the full-back Paulo Ferreira at centre-half instead.
It was the most scathing attack on his own players since he took the Chelsea job in the summer of 2004 and was witnessed by the club's chairman Bruce Buck.
Mourinho did not spare Joe Cole who, he suggested, had needlessly delayed having an operation on a stress fracture in his foot and will now miss the rest of the season.
By the time Chelsea face Aston Villa tomorrow, Mourinho could find his side nine points adrift of Manchester United if they win at Newcastle today.
Perhaps most bizarrely of all, Mourinho also criticised his squad players for complaining that they were not given a chance to play and then failing to produce quality performances when they were in the team.
He warned his players that they would have to "close their mouths" if they could not come up with the goods.
"I hope the players have enough character against the situation because it looks like sometimes it is easy for players when they are not playing to complain," he said.
"They speak and get some friends and agents and parents to give some words to the press about their boys not playing. But it's more difficult to play and to play well.
"Some of them [should] close their mouths and not speak too much."
- INDEPENDENT