Madrid: There was an undeniable romance to Chelsea’s 2012 Champions League adventure. Not this time. Jose Mourinho is so untrusting of this team as an attacking force that England’s last representatives are not trying to stay in the competition so much as refusing to leave.
Two years ago, Roberto “Robbie” Di Matteo was at the head of a defiant bunch who seized their opportunities and were swept along by each improbable victory. The passage past Napoli, Benfica and Barcelona to meet Bayern Munich in the final was a hoot.
Chelsea were a spirited lot, with Didier Drogba up front, and each win produced a growing sense that fate was reaching down to give the Drogba/Frank Lampard generation the crowning moment they craved.
Chelsea were not the most entertaining side in that tournament but they were the most implacable, as they showed by taking the final in Munich to a penalty shoot-out, with Drogba the executioner.
These memories came flooding back in Madrid as Mourinho’s great defensive block stood in the way of an Atletico Madrid team who went from side to side and up and down without really explaining how they came to be top of La Liga. Pragmatism has seldom been pushed so far by a Champions League semi-finalist.
We saw much the same impulse in the away leg of the quarter-final against Paris St-Germain. Chelsea’s manager has almost no faith in his strikers. All season he has run this team down as if Roman Abramovich had emptied a skip at his feet when he summoned him back to Stamford Bridge.
Mourinho’s demeanour has been strange for most of this campaign. His low opinion of the side has been too consistent to be a mere motivational ploy. Losing his amazing 77-game unbeaten home league record to Sunderland at the weekend may have been a karmic response to all that criticism. If you show so little confidence in your team, how can you complain when they lose to the league’s bottom team?
Mourinho could. He complained by sulking at the pre-match conference here in Spain, where he is not fondly remembered. Atletico’s fans let him know it, too, rolling out the insults. But if he sees this Chelsea side as a nuisance he must tolerate before he can rip it up and start again, his method of isolating Fernando Torres in attack and packing the defensive midfield area with David Luiz, John Obi Mikel and Lampard said he had no intention of trying to win the game by anything other than the odd counter-strike.
Mourinho’s best counter-attacking sides have been good to watch. But this one broke from defensive positions with scant conviction. The first half was only about building barricades. Chelsea knew John Terry and Gary Cahill would not shirk from the barrage of crosses swung in by Atletico’s wide players. Chelsea’s central midfield three was set up to smother and frustrate.
The semi-final draw was especially kind because they must have felt they were facing a pseudo-English side whose directness inflicts more damage in Spain than it would most weeks in the Premier League.
Mourinho, of course, is entitled to beat a path to a Champions League final whichever way he chooses. With the home defeat by Sunderland the Premier League title challenge seemed to evaporate. So Europe offered the best hope of embellishing his return to London with a first-season trophy. But there is no getting away from the timidity of his methods here. Only Willian, and Torres, in the odd burst, attempted to play expansive football. Mostly, though, it was an exercise in retreating, blocking, suffocating.
Chelsea came to the Vicente Calderon purely to take the game back to Stamford Bridge: again, a familiar policy, especially in semi-finals, but a lot less fun than the 2012 campaign, which looks better by the day.
— The Daily Telegraph