Chelsea's head coach Claudio Ranieri has often been compared to the former Spurs manager Christian Gross. And though Ranieri is Italian, not Swiss, he clearly has a second home in cloud cuckoo land.
As he surveyed the wreckage of another Premiership defeat, Chelsea's hopes of a Champions League place and possibly, his long-term prospects in south-west London, he cheerfully announced: "I've always said that the best time to judge me will be in three years' time."
If Ranieri has been led to believe that he will get that long to assemble a winning team, then the improvement in his English skills has been grossly, or even Grossly, exaggerated.
Managers at Chelsea last about as long as paint on the Forth Bridge. Ranieri is the 14th manager in the past 27 years and only one of those, John Neal, has lasted beyond three years.
The only person guaranteed to be at Stamford Bridge in three years is the chairman Ken Bates, assuming he is in more robust health than Mark Bosnich. The Australian is still trying to achieve fitness after recovering from injury, which will apparently include shedding more weight than Vanessa Feltz.
Ranieri says he will be "interested" to see Bosnich in action in the Premiership. Chelsea fans will be delighted, after a lamentable performance from Carlo Cudicini.
As an Italian, Cudicini was perhaps only demonstrating his fondness for comic opera when he failed to clear a back-pass from the substitute John Terry for the final goal by Kevin Phillips and instead tried to trap it. Or perhaps he was pretending to be Fabien Barthez.
Not that he should be the only can-carrier in the Chelsea defence. Marcel Desailly and Frank Leboeuf, often such an immaculate partnership, were run ragged by Don Hutchison and Gavin McCann. And by way of a change, it was Desailly and Graeme le Saux who starred in the comedy duet which allowed McCann to sidestep their entwined legs to roll the third goal past a static Cudicini.
Chelsea, who led twice and were ahead 2-1 at the interval, must have thought they were on course for another routine home win, having lost only one game at the Bridge all season and that to Leicester back in September.
Eidur Gudjohnsen brilliantly set up Desailly's header for the first and then gave another demonstration of his beautiful left foot by clipping one in off the underside of the bar. Hutchison scored in between those efforts but Sunderland were leaving so many gaps in defence that they seemed certain to be punished again on the break.
Sunderland had not won at Stamford Bridge since 1957. But their players clearly agree with Henry Ford's statement that history is bunk, since they delivered the half-time talk to their manager Peter Reid.
Hutchison, who scored the second equaliser as well and was man of the match by a country mile, said: "The gaffer didn't have to say anything because we were insisting to him that we could win it. We've had a poor run of results recently but now we're back on track and hope this is the start of a run that will take us into the Champions League. That is the logical next step for us."
Chelsea thought that was almost a God-given right for them but now they may have to take the logical step backwards by playing in the InterToto Cup.
At least Stamford Bridge now looks more like a football ground than a building site, with all the cranes having been removed since the previous home game five weeks ago. Pity, really, since they might have been used to lift the players' spirits.
