Well, can they? The odds now are that Chelsea will progress to a Champions League semi-final against Milan or Barcelona. Not bad for a side outside the qualifying places at home and stuck in familiar flux. All at Stamford Bridge await Roman Abramovich’s next big whim. In the meantime, they are keeping busy in a competition they have come to understand intimately through many continental adventures. Success in the return leg would bring a sixth semi-final appearance in nine attempts.
This 1-0 win over one of the most evocative names in Europe was an organisational victory over a mediocre side who borrowed their shooting boots from Mr Magoo. No grand extrapolations can be made, except that Chelsea still possess the necessary resilience to pull off results like this. On his old turf, David Luiz was Chelsea’s outstanding player. He may not relish the uglier aspects of Premier League defending but on nights like this his elegance prevails.
The beauty of sport is that it offers rolling shots at redemption.
But that possibility was closed to Lampard when Roberto Di Matteo started with him on the bench, along with Didier Drogba and Michael Essien, fellow warhorses from Chelsea’s brightest era.
Lampard gave his diagnosis at the weekend on Chelsea TV. The most influential midfielder in Chelsea’s Premier League history was simply setting out the facts – yet the words must have arrived with a clunk for Abramovich, whose message to the elite coaches of Europe is: “Could anyone I’ve not yet hired and fired please take one step forward.” The omission of Lampard, Essien and Drogba probably owed more to fatigue and the need for speed against Benfica than oligarchichal revenge. Yet again, though, we were reminded that no Chelsea team-sheet can drop without accompanying intrigue. Selection is often more interesting than their play. Which is part of the problem.
Lampard’s observation was not about politics but quality. With Salomon Kalou’s 75th-minute counter-strike they maintained their reputation for defiance on Europe’s grandest stage. Nobody disputes, though, that Chelsea have regressed. They are way off the peaks of the Jose Mourinho years and the 2008 Champions League final appearance in Moscow. Streisand, again: “Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line?”
The best XI of the Abramovich years would contain several from last night’s squad: Lampard, John Terry, Petr Cech, Drogba and arguably Paulo Ferreira at right-back, for his sterling work in Mourinho’s title-winning sides. But Ferreira, who is way past his prime, is still out there: the go-to right-sided defender for a huge match in which the consistently mediocre John Obi Mikel, and Raul Meireles were the two central midfielders.
It is in this vital area that Chelsea’s generally realistic fans would have most to grumble about. With Kalou pulling the play left, and Ramires hugging the right, a central pairing of Mikel and Meireles bears no comparison to the great Chelsea engine rooms of Lampard, Essien (in his pomp) and Claude Makelele.
A pre-match game of pick the best Abramovich-era XI brought votes for Ricardo Carvalho, William Gallas, Arjen Robben, Joe Cole, Michael Ballack and Eidur Gudjohnsen: all no longer present. In other words – it generated nostalgia for better players than Chelsea now possess.
This was Lampard’s point. And the proof is in the Premier League table. The one signing Chelsea could parade before their major rivals as a top acquisition is Juan Mata, who runs the subtlety department all alone and worked in vast tracts of space here behind Fernando Torres.
Still, a virtue of extreme wealth is that it allows the richest owners to rip it up and start again. Less well-endowed teams are lumbered with their errors, as Liverpool are finding.
Waiting down Europe’s track, probably, are Milan or Lionel Messi’s Barcelona, who would not need the hallucinogenic refereeing of Tom Henning Ovrebo to beat this Chelsea side. The sense is of a club waiting for the next big thing to happen and trying to look busy while Abramovich decides what it should be.
In the imposing Stadium of Light, with its resident eagles and half-time ritual of paper-aeroplane launching, Torres was sharp and eager without locating the target and Ramires was consistently effective. At the back, Luiz excelled in the ground where his suave defending persuaded Chelsea to pay £23 million for him, and Terry, who is ignoring his injuries, slugged it out with the combative Oscar Cardozo.
This game looked every inch a sideshow to the main Champions League action. It remains hard to believe that the eventual winner was on show in this eagle’s lair. On 67 minutes, after Jardel had drawn a fine save from Cech, Lampard finally joined the drama, replacing Meireles, who is miscast in defensive-midfield positions.
Lampard’s presence reassured the wedge of Chelsea supporters whose hopes had seldom risen above a respectable scoreline here and a repeat of the Napoli heroics at Stamford Bridge.
With all this uncertainty, and silence from above, the world’s best club competition still offers a shot at salvation for the least impressive Chelsea side of the Abramovich era. The impetus will evidently have to come from Terry, Lampard, Drogba, Ashley Cole, Luiz, Essien and Ramires, who remain the club’s biggest assets, along with Mata, who could do with a few kindred spirits around him.
Torres can still join this core. It remains impossible to give up on him. His breakaway on the right and cross to Kalou broke the deadlock and punished Benfica for their inaccuracies. If anyone knows the words to The Way We Were, it must be Torres.
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