From Chelsea's great hope to another Abramovich cast-off - where did it all go wrong for Andre Villas-Boas?

Andre Villas-Boas arrived at Chelsea last June billed as the brightest young managerial talent on the European circuit.

He had the medals three in his first full season in management and the CV, swagger and stubble to match another famed graduate of the Porto finishing school.

After initially trying to distance himself from the Jose Mourinho ‘mini-me’ caricature, Villas-Boas crucially failed to match the specialness of his former boss at Chelsea and Inter where it mattered on the pitch.

So where did it all go wrong for Luis André de Pina Cabral e Villas-Boas, whose name was so easily abbreviated for English audiences? Why did AVB go in eight months from fresh-faced hope to a dead man walking?

In Chelsea’s carefully-worded statement, the club said: Unfortunately the results and performances of the team have not been good enough and were showing no signs of improving at a key time in the season. It added: With that in mind we felt our only option was to make a change at this time.

Villas-Boas' final record, given the resources at his disposal, was poor. Of the 40 competitive matches he oversaw, 18 were won, 12 were drawn and another 10 were lost. His win percentage was the worst for a Chelsea manager since Ruud Gullit 15 years previously and comfortably lagged behind his six predecessors - Claudio Ranieri, Mourinho, Avram Grant, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Guus Hiddink, Carlo Ancelotti of the Roman Abramovich era.

The final nail in Villas-Boas’ coffin was the 1-0 defeat to West Brom on Saturday, in which Chelsea struggled painfully to even compete with Roy Hodgson’s far better organized team.

But the writing was on the wall for the 34-year-old long before the Midlands massacre. In football parlance, he had lost the dressing room. Many of the senior players had lost faith in his methods. Egos, agendas and leaked stories were rife.

Yet the early signs had been good. Chelsea won four of its first five games under Villas-Boas back in late summer after kicking off the new era with a creditable goal-less draw at Stoke City.

He had demonstrated that Mourinho’s understanding of the dynamics of a game had rubbed off on him, while his tactics and management of charge were generally sharp.

The first cracks began to appear at Old Trafford in mid-September when Frank Lampard, untouchable for the best part of a decade, was withdrawn at halftime as a gung-ho Chelsea lost 3-1. The talk was not just of a brilliant goal followed by an embarrassing miss by Fernando Torres but of naive tactics.

The challenge for Villas-Boas when he took on a ‘project’ that he had been assured was for the long haul was to build an entertaining and successful team while overhauling a squad ageing before his eyes.

In some ways Villas-Boas went too far. The high defensive line that yielded such catastrophic results in the 5-3 drubbing by Arsenal and twice against Liverpool, all at Stamford Bridge, was described by one Premier League coach to Goal.com as schoolboy stuff.

At 34 and only five months older than Didier Drogba and nine months senior to Lampard, he attempted to stamp his authority on the squad by weakening the power base of the cabal of senior players. There was distance and hostility between the manager and the ‘untouchables’, as Mourinho had once described them. He barely spoke one-on-one with his players, other than to offer tactical instructions.

An intense and headstrong man, Villas-Boas also demonstrated a remarkably thin skin for such an intelligent individual. He should have laughed off criticisms from Gary Neville and Alan Hansen but instead allowed himself to be caught up in unnecessary verbal spats. Furthermore, he ordered that former Chelsea player Tommy Langley be removed as a pundit from the club’s in-house TV station for describing him as vindictive.

In other ways Villas-Boas did not go far enough. Nicolas Anelka and Alex were ostracized from the main group and ordered to train with the youth team. In hindsight, Villas-Boas should have forced out more of the old heads at the start of the season or kept them on board as he gradually tweaked the team.

Instead, he arrived at an unhappy halfway house. Too many noses were put out of joint, culminating in the farce in Naples, when Jose Bosingwa was preferred at left back to a fit-again Ashley Cole and Raul Meireles and Ramires formed a highly penetrable two-man defensive shield while Michael Essien and Lampard sat on the bench barely concealing their anger.

It was perverse, self-defeating and the 3-1 defeat in the intimidating Stadio San Paolo all but sealed Villas-Boas’ fate.

The big question mark when he took the Chelsea job was his exposure to big-name players and this turned out to be his greatest weakness at Stamford Bridge.

Yet if Lampard, whose relationship with Villas-Boas had reached the point of no return, was such a divisive figure, why was he not sold to Manchester United in January, when two enquiries from David Gill were rebuffed before Paul Scholes was summoned out of retirement?

All the while, Michael Emenalo, the technical director who is regarded as Abramovich’s eyes and ears at the club’s Cobham headquarters, was monitoring the young manager and reporting back to the owner.

It was an unhealthy situation. There was no players’ advocate to smooth relations between players and management, a role filled in the past notably by Carlo Ancelotti’s former No. 2 Ray Wilkins and Paul Clement, the long-serving coach who worked under all of Abramovich’s managerial appointments until being dismissed shortly before Villas-Boas took the reins.

Villas-Boas’ position was weakened. Although he felt he had a mandate from Abramovich to flex his muscles and dismantle player power, results were not in his favor.

The convincing 3-0 home win over relegation-threatened Bolton bought him time but this was immediately wiped out by the West Brom defeat. Rock bottom had been reached with a thud.

Given his marching orders after training on Sunday, Villas-Boas leaves Chelsea a wiser, richer but less brazen figure than the one who arrived.