An inability to adapt and turning on his players: Is Maurizio Sarri the new Jose Mourinho?

Those performances against Liverpool and City, the league’s top two, serve as a counter to Sarri’s belief that his players are difficult to motivate. To produce as limp a display as they did against Arsenal this weekend is inexplicable.

Perhaps he should be looking elsewhere for an explanation for the defeats against Tottenham and Arsenal. Like in the mirror.

There’s a basic tactical explanation for both losses. Chelsea’s rigid devotion to a possession-based, short-passing game came unstuck against a team that pressed high and hard and broke quickly. Much like how Pep Guardiola has often been undone by hard-working, high-pressing, counter-attacking teams, Sarri’s preferred style is vulnerable to a fairly obvious strategy.

Then there’s the Italian’s inability to adapt. His adherence to a 4-3-3 forces Marcos Alonso out of his preferred wing-back role and into that of a more traditional full-back. David Luiz is so clearly uncomfortable without the ball in a back two, and looks like a world-beater in a back three. Cesar Azpilicueta at right-back is not the same as Azpilicueta as the right-sided centre-back in a back three, where the Spaniard thrived for two seasons under Antonio Conte prior to Sarri’s arrival.

The attempted reinvention of N’Golo Kante as a box-to-box midfielder should also go down as a failure. As a holding midfielder, Kante led Leicester City to the Premier League title in 2015/16, repeated the feat with Chelsea the following season, and then completed a glorious three-season run by winning the World Cup last summer.

Yet Sarri’s devotion to Jorginho as a lone deep-lying midfielder has forced Kante to play further forward, neutralising what makes him one of the best midfielders in Europe, and Chelsea are suffering as a result.

Not to mention, Jorginho is easily countered. Ever since Everton came to Stamford Bridge in November and earned a point by having at least one man paying close attention to the Brazil-born Italian midfielder, teams have repeated the strategy to varying degrees of success. He’s often man-marked, or teams do their best to cut off his passing lanes, and he is reduced to playing non-threatening, often sideways passes that do nothing other than keep possession for possession’s sake.

Too much is being made of Jorginho’s lack of assists, directly setting up goals is not his role, but starting attacks is and he’s not being allowed to do that. And Sarri hasn’t figured out how to counter the tactic, a failure that is entirely on him.

Further up the pitch, he insists on playing Eden Hazard as a false nine, perhaps hoping that the Belgian responds much as compatriot Dries Mertens did at Napoli, by morphing into a prolific goalscorer. Though it’s not entirely the manager’s fault that he’s been able to do little to turn around the form of Alvaro Morata, whose confidence is shot, and who needs to move both for his own good and Chelsea’s, Sarri’s lack of faith in Giroud is baffling.

The Frenchman may not be a prolific scorer but team-mates enjoy playing off him – like Antoine Griezmann and Kylian Mbappe at the World Cup, and Hazard earlier this season, when he went as far as to say that Giroud was the best striker he’d played with.

Yet this is what Sarri has brought to the table so far. A refusal to adapt his philosophy. Playing players out of position.

Add in the willingness to throw his players under the bus without reflecting on his own shortcomings, and Sarri begins to seem less like Guardiola or Louis van Gaal and more like another celebrated manager who has recently struggled in England.

Welcome, Chelsea, to the third coming of Jose Mourinho.