The phrase “losing the dressing room” is often bandied about. It essentially means that players have given up on their manager - that they no longer believe in his methods or tactics. Jose Mourinho isn’t there yet, but the signs are starting to creep in after Saturday’s dismal home defeat by Southampton.

And as far as I can see, it's all Mourinho’s own fault.

Dragging off one of his rocks, Nemanja Matic 27 minutes after bringing him off the bench doesn’t help anything or anyone. From a player's perspective, it indicates that Mourinho doesn't know what to do. That he’s run out of ideas. As far as losing the dressing room goes, this is where it starts. The message to Matic was simply, “Get off, I’ve had enough of watching you.”

There is nothing more demoralising and embarrassing for a player, and it won’t sit well with his team-mates.

What concerns me most about Mourinho is his lack of consistency. First he wanted to mollycoddle his players by being the guy who praised everything they do. I was at Stamford Bridge for the Champions League game against Maccabi Tel Aviv and I've never seen him so animated in the technical area, but in a supportive way. Even when Eden Hazard missed a penalty, the manager was on his feet clapping and staying positive.

But a couple of weeks later, Mourinho was the bad guy: threatening to play the kids if his players didn't sort themselves out. Now the latest thing after the Southampton defeat is a rant about his team being mentally gone and him not being able to do anything about it.

The players will be watching these interviews and seeing the decisions being made, such as subbing Matic and dropping John Terry, and eventually it makes you start to lose belief in your leader.

Even though Mourinho says he’s the best man for the job, and his record backs that up, it doesn’t mean he can’t lose a group of players. It doesn’t make him a bad manager, but it might just mean his players at this stage don’t believe in him anymore.

It’s clear to me that something happened at Chelsea over the summer. I doubt we’ll ever find out what it is, but there is a problem internally. As early as the first game of the season, his reaction to the Eva Caneiro situation indicated a level of stress.

Ever since, everything Mourinho has done to fix things has only succeeded in knocking his team’s confidence, from back to front. He’s shot his defence by taking out Terry, then he did the same with Matic in midfield. It’s even extended to his backroom staff and Caneiro. Mourinho seems to be laying down some kind of gauntlet to his players, but not by setting them a challenge; it’s by undermining them.

If I was a player watching my manager describe his team as “weak”, I’d be more than annoyed. Mourinho might be right – I’ve never seen a Chelsea side with such little confidence – but it’s him who has to take responsibility for shattering it.

Jose might think everyone should respect his decisions, but it doesn't work like that. Certain sections of the changing room will be starting to get unhappy. This is when cliques can also be damaging. The English lads will gather together and start talking, while the Spanish lads will be having a conversations in their own language.

People might start thinking, “Is he talking about me?” and players start blaming each other. Team spirit, and the manager’s control, easily starts to slip away.

All eyes will be on Mourinho’s next move at the training ground, and this is where he needs his senior pros to support him. When I’ve been at teams in a situation like this, such as when we were going through a rocky patch at Tottenham, it was the players that got together to thrash things out.

The experienced pros like Ledley King, Robbie Keane and Edgar Davids called a meeting and everyone got a chance to moan about whatever they wanted. It’s a chance to air your grievances about staff, management, training regimes, pitches, the kit, the showers… anything. Good things normally come out of those meetings because it clears the air and afterwards you can move on. This is something the players can do without Mourinho.

When the manager calls a meeting, the quieter players in the team don’t talk. And who could blame them, given the mood Mourinho is probably in? But everyone’s voice in that changing room is important, now more than ever.

What Mourinho needs is for his senior players to be a conduit to that discussion, and John Terry has to be that man. JT is a hugely powerful figure at Chelsea - he’s close to everyone, from the players to the board. Terry and Mourinho may have had their ups and downs – and there’s no doubt JT will be angry about being dropped - but I’d like to think there is enough history between them for the manager to still trust his captain.

Without that link to his players, any team meeting without Mourinho will just undermine him further. But if everyone pulls in the same direction, it can save Chelsea’s season.

In terms of keeping his job, Mourinho is clearly under more pressure than ever, but things will have to get a lot worse for Chelsea to fire him. Who would they replace him with?

They’ve already sacked Carlo Ancelotti once so it’s unlikely he’ll fancy coming back. Jurgen Klopp looks like he is going elsewhere. Everybody wants Pep Guardiola, but why would he swap Bayern Munich for Chelsea at the moment?

When Mourinho came back to Chelsea, it seemed as if he could become the next Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger in English football. That he was here to stay for as long as he wanted, and I hope he is because he’s one of the best managers in the world. But the current situation at Chelsea is a new experience for Mourinho, and so far he isn’t handling it well.