It's all gone pear-shaped for Liam Rosenior of late. He had made an impressive start to life as Chelsea head coach with a string of fine wins, but those victories are increasingly looking like the result of a new-manager bounce.
Since throwing away a two-goal lead to draw 2-2 at home to Leeds United on February 10, the Blues have only won and performed well simultaneously in two of their subsequent eight games, swatting aside Championship outfit Hull City 4-0 in the FA Cup and punishing a naive Aston Villa 4-1 in the Premier League. It's the other results in that time that paint a clearer picture of where this team is truly at.
Rosenior's men 'set on fire' two points at home to relegation-battling Burnley, drawing 1-1 at home. They then lost 2-1 at rivals Arsenal, their third defeat to the Gunners in a month, before recovering at Villa. An extremely unconvincing 4-2 triumph at second-tier Wrexham in round five of the FA Cup followed, with three straight losses coming as some sort of karma, falling to PSG twice either side of one to Newcastle.
It has to be Rosenior who takes responsibility for Chelsea's worst-ever Champions League knockout elimination. He dropped goalkeeper Robert Sanchez, one of the team's better performers this season, and his replacement of Filip Jorgensen was broadly at fault for a late collapse in the first leg, with the Blues seeing a 2-2 draw quickly turn into a 5-2 hammering.
Back at Stamford Bridge, Rosenior named Chelsea's youngest side on record for a Champions League knockout game, and that included playing 20-year-old centre-back Mamadou Sarr at right-back. Within six minutes, PSG took advantage of this call as Khvicha Kvaratskhelia pinched the ball of the defender and scored the first goal of the evening.
Between declining performances, poor results and strange rhetoric in his press conferences, Rosenior is undoing the hard work of his first few weeks in the job. The club need to reach next season's Champions League to reap the financial rewards, but at this rate they will be returning to the Conference League instead.