HE will always be the ‘Special One’, but over the course of the next few months, we will discover whether Jose Mourinho deserves to be regarded as one of English football’s all-time greats, comparable with the likes of Bill Shankly, Brian Clough and Sir Alex Ferguson.

His record throughout his career so far enables him to stake a claim for a place amongst such company, with league titles in Portugal, England, Italy and Spain accompanied by two Champions League titles and countless Manager of the Year awards.

Yet for all his successes, there remains one glaring omission from his CV. Mourinho is yet to prove that he is capable of reversing the fortunes of a team that has plunged from its former heights into what appears to be terminal decline.

He has never established a dynasty, or reconstructed one of his winning sides in order to create an even better one. Unless he starts doing so soon, he will be leaving Stamford Bridge saddled with the tag of being a star that burns itself out very quickly.

Mourinho’s lack of longevity at any one place is well known by now, and for all that he bridled when the issue was raised earlier this season, it is surely still telling that he has not managed any one club for more than three full seasons in succession.

This, of course, is the third season of his current spell at Chelsea, and for all that the extent of the ongoing decline was almost impossible to foresee in the wake of last season’s procession to the title, perhaps the signs were there in Mourinho’s past record rather than from any forensic analysis of the players in the reigning champions’ squad.

Put simply, this is what Mourinho’s teams do. Not generally this dramatically, admittedly, and in the past, the Portuguese has managed to hold things together more effectively in order avoid the kind of dramatic meltdown that has engulfed Chelsea in the last month or so.

But Mourinho has always been a manager who has made a massive initial impact, only to struggle to sustain it beyond an initial couple of seasons.

Why? A myriad of reasons, but chief among them has to be his abrasive, domineering managerial style. Mourinho likes to set himself apart from other managers, but in reality, there are elements of his approach that have been mirrored elsewhere.

He is a ‘shock-and-awe’ type of manager, bursting into a club and immediately shaking it from top to bottom. His authoritarian streak means there is no doubt who is in control, and he has never been afraid to offend his players if he thinks it will provoke a reaction. He is wedded to a very specific tactical style, and quickly loses faith in players who struggle or refuse to buy into it. And he is a master of using the media to construct a powerful ‘them-and-us’ mentality, raging against anyone he considers to be a potential barrier to his team’s progress.

The level at which they were operating might have been very different, but there are clear parallels between that approach and the way in which Roy Keane conducted himself when he took over at Sunderland.

It was ‘My way or the highway’ then too, but just as Keane quickly found that his players lost faith in him once the initial explosive impact of his appointment died down, so Mourinho appears to be discovering that the methods that worked in the early days of his reign have quickly become tired.

Put simply, if all you’ve got in your arsenal is a charismatic personality and a desire to challenge players head on, you’re eventually going to turn people against you.

Clearly, that’s a gross simplification – you don’t win the medals Mourinho has without an extremely high level of coaching ability and tactical nous – but the general principal appears to be ringing true.

Watching Mourinho petulantly refuse to speak to his television interviewer in the wake of Chelsea’s 3-1 defeat to Liverpool last weekend, it felt as though you were watching a manager who had completely run out of ideas.

He didn’t have a clue why the methods that had been so successful with the same group of players in the past were suddenly not working, and it looked as though he didn’t have much of an idea what to do about it either. Exactly the same thought patterns were apparent in the latter stages of the Keane era at the Stadium of Light.

Other managers will have been through a similar mental process in the past, but they found a way through. Generally, they were more adaptable and less constrained by a rigid managerial style.

Ferguson was the master at reinventing himself, whether tactically in terms of the way he asked his teams to play, or mentally in terms of the way in which he repaired his relationship with players who might have rubbed him up the wrong way.

Admittedly, his supreme influence at Old Trafford enabled him to quickly dispense of people when a relationship broke down irreparably. Jaap Stam and David Beckham are just two players who were immediately out of the door once Ferguson concluded he could no longer trust them. You would imagine Mourinho would gladly sell two or three of his ‘bad apples’ tomorrow if he had that kind of power at Stamford Bridge.

Yet Ferguson’s greatest strength was still his ability to sense the potential for decline a year or two before it happened. Mourinho doesn’t seem to be able to do that, perhaps because his entire persona is based on the premise that he is capable of fighting his way through anything, so it doesn’t matter if a potential difficulty is looming on the horizon.

That persona is in danger of crumbling around him, so surely his only way out is to change the way he is doing things. Less of the combativeness and victim mentality; more in the way of bridge-building and tactical flexibility. Instead of constantly making himself the centre of the story, why not afford his players some time in the limelight and challenge them to find a way out of the current mess?

The alternative is that at some point in the not-too-distant future, Mourinho either walks away or is dismissed from Chelsea for the second time in his career. He would still be ‘special’ if such a scenario unfolded, but he wouldn’t be ‘great’.