Impressive as Jose Mourinho's first seven months in Premiership management have been, his most nimble feat has been to restore something approaching a sense of dignity to Chelsea football club.

Chelsea's transformation from the fashion conscious dilettantes of yesteryear to the steeled, ambitious and aggressively model professional sports club has jolted the old order. Mourinho's suave, wintry calm and the steadfast resoluteness with which his team are negotiating a traditionally treacherous part of the English league season has already been hailed as a master class in management.

Former football men now working the punditry circuit have been breezily conceding the championship to him for weeks and can but compare his glacial demeanour against Arsene Wenger's truculence and Alex Ferguson's irascibility. Mourinho's abrupt and simple refusal to even acknowledge the pressure of leading the Premiership by a stand-out margin with three months left to play must be disconcerting to the Scot and the Frenchman, both of whom have delighted in the debilitating effect of the innocuous remark.

When you trawl back through the Premiership's relatively unexciting history, the moment that continues to stand out is Kevin Keegan's fatal and all-too-public breakdown under the strain of Ferguson's caustic sniping. But Keegan was a different animal to Jose Mourinho and it must be a source of considerable annoyance to the ever-warring Ferguson and Wenger that they cannot even guess at what might get under the skin of the new man.

Instead, it was Mourinho who brazenly insinuated that a referee would effectively cheat on behalf of the traditional giants Manchester United. He said his piece and it seems unlikely that the FA's decision to charge him will upset him greatly. The protracted game of bitchy and highly amusing bickering that has characterised the relationship between Ferguson and Wenger must delight Mourinho. His erstwhile rivals have been huffing and puffing like Joan Crawford and Betty Davis, leaving him to the job of winning games with little fuss.

It could be that their inability to outwit Mourinho, either on or off the field, is the chief reason why the two managers who have given the Premiership its personality are in such a highly emotional state. Right now, all they can do is pray that Chelsea gets upset by some sort of speed wobble - as Arsenal did at Old Trafford - and are forced to doubt themselves. That does not look like happening, with Chelsea happily playing as if oblivious to the resurgent form of Manchester United.

Chelsea's remorseless advance on the League Cup competition this week only underlines the message that for Mourinho, greed is good. Ultimately, a cup is a cup and even though the league is his main desire, the seriousness with which Chelsea have scrapped through this lesser light of a competition has been forbidding. Their involvement in a final against Liverpool gives what is often a hindrance of an occasion a real poignancy. It seems like a clear battle between light and dark.

Liverpool are in danger of becoming the aristocratic eccentric of modern day English football, fumbling around in candlelight in a mansion full of ghosts and yesterday's baubles. The new man at Anfield, Rafa Benitez, is a Spaniard of Mourinho's generation and has - perhaps unwisely - declared his growing obsession with learning everything about Liverpool's incomparable past. Mourinho, in contrast, behaves as if he is unaware that English football has a past. Not for him late nights swotting up on Dixie Dean.

Mourinho is in the business of preparing for the next game and against Liverpool he will field a team cleansed of the fear of failure and with a clear and obedient grasp on what he expects of them. The League Cup final pairs a team that is still trying to cling on to the old values of English football against a team whose values are locked into the enigmatic dealings of a Russian wide boy made good.

For what Mourinho has done best has been to make everyone forget about Roman Abramovich. It was not so long ago since the game was up in arms about the sudden appearance of Chelsea's distant and unsettling sugar daddy. Abramovich's endless wealth forced English football to admit that the quickest way to football success was simply to buy it. For traditionalists, it was a tough truth to absorb, a modern rebuke to all the resourcefulness and patience of men like Matt Busby and Bill Shankly.

That Abramovich is himself a product of the mines, like many of the figureheads of the old English game, is an irony that has been left unspoken.

It is not all that long ago since Claudio Ranieri was portrayed as the first victim of Chelsea's new money and the ruthless policy of win at all costs drawn up by Abramovich and implemented by Peter Kenyon. Ranieri was widely held as a man doing his job with exceptional grace under appalling circumstances and the drawn out manner of his firing left a bad taste. But Mourinho has banished almost all memory and reference to the likable if flighty Italian. In Chelsea's world, the past does not matter and so the Ranieri business has been forgotten.

And this season, the new Tsar of Chelsea has been able to quietly observe his new empire from the shadows of the luxury seats, remaining aloof and silent as the rest of England observes his phenomenal impact upon the game. And although his vision of immediate major success at Stamford Bridge looks like coming to fruition, it is not being carried out in the manner many predicted. Unlike Real Madrid, this Chelsea team is not going to dazzle their way to silver by parading the flashiest players in the world.

Mourinho has managed to appease many critics of Chelsea's new wealth by fielding a team that resonates with many of the traditional values of English football, playing with discipline and tough ambition week in, week out. Marvellous as Arjen Robben has been to watch at times, the abiding sense of Chelsea is that they are a hard, calculating team, like so many teams in the past that dominated league seasons.

Of course, the new man has won nothing yet. But it is a strange thing when the idea of a Manchester United burst for the league or another Liverpool League Cup victory seems almost romantic. In just over half a season, Chelsea and Mourinho have made the heavyweight northern strongholds of the English game seem a touch soft and outdated.

It is too early to say where it is all going. If Chelsea sweep all before them for the next few seasons, the FA and the rest of soccer would do well to introduce a maximum salary allowance for every team to avoid their sport becoming little more than an exotic board game for billionaires.

It could be that Chelsea will take the game to a place so hard and unsentimental that the era of Ferguson and Wenger will seem quaint. But it is only January and if there is one immutable truth in sport it is that sooner or later, all teams fall apart. The time will come when it will be Mourinho's turn to be eclipsed as Ferguson and Wenger appear to be right now. The difference is that unlike those two gentlemen, Mourinho operates in a club unlikely to allow him the privilege of calling time on himself.

No team can keep on winning forever and Chelsea's hard edge and winning way seem like an attempt to escape the club's history rather than build on it. Perhaps Mourinho understands that in the world of Roman Abramovich, time is the most precious commodity and that is why he is intent on getting the trophies in sooner rather than later.

As the great fighter Joe Louis said years ago, "Every man's got to figure to get beat some time."