Mourinho-Abramovich friendship pivotal in Essien loan

If you're interested in Jose Mourinho, CNN has released a long interview with the former Chelsea manager on their site. It's in depth and fascinating, but from a Chelsea perspective what really jumped out was a tidbit about the Michael Essien loan right at the bottom:

[Roman Abramovich and I] are in touch a lot, and the last example is Michael Essien was going to another club and when I did (gestures to telephone call) 'please leave it to your friend' he left to his friend. We have a great relationship in fact.

The 'good relationship' between Mourinho and Abramovich is going to attract some attention, but what I find really interesting is that the Essien loan wasn't simply a matter of Real Madrid wanting the midfielder and pulling some strings -- they had to actively hijack another deal in order to acquire him. You can infer from that that Chelsea were trying to get rid of the Bison, at least for this season. Which is... interesting.