After shaking hands with Frank Rijkaard and commiserating with his own weary players, Jose Mourinho blew kisses to the crowd as he disappeared down the tunnel, saying farewell to Europe until the next campaign. Above him in the VIP box, Roman Abramovich made a show of clapping along with Barcelona’s victory hymn.
The Russian did not spend a fortune on a football team in order to endure elimination at this stage of the Champions League, and there will be no shortage of people watching to see if it strains relations with his volatile manager.
Nor might the manner in which Chelsea made their exit have been to Abramovich’s taste. Once again their players were no match for Barcelona’s assembly of thinkers and ball-players.
The sight of the hulking defender Robert Huth doing an impersonation of a centre-forward in the closing minutes spoke poorly for Mourinho’s powers of invention. He has tried it before, and it has yet to work; in the context of this tournament’s glittering history, it was an embarrassment.
The need to score two goals while holding Barcelona’s brilliant attackers at bay would have tested the combined ingenuity of Alexander the Great, Carl von Clausewitz and Vo Nguyen Giap, and the Portuguese controversialist proved that he was not quite up to the challenge.
His re-jigged line-up almost brought dividends in the opening 20 minutes when Didier Drogba spurned two clear chances, both from headers. Significantly, on neither occasion was he hampered by the proximity of an opponent.
Barcelona’s habit of attacking far more effectively than they defend was certainly in evidence. Mourinho must have been chewing lumps out of his clipboard when those two opportunities went begging.
Having spent the past few days demonstrating that he would not recognise the moral high ground if you gave him a lift there in a helicopter, he was trying to take the opportunity to re-emphasise his elevated standing among the present generation of coaches. Had Drogba capitalised, the match would have been set ablaze.
The coach had made his first appearance of the evening 40 minutes before kick-off, standing in lonely majesty while watching his goalkeepers warm up.
As he had promised, he was presenting himself as a human sponge for the cat-calls of the Catalans in the vertiginous five-decked grandstands. When Chelsea’s players made their appearance, however, the home fans demonstrated that Mourinho had by no means succeeded in exhausting their derision.
And as he retired to the dugout, with the stadium now full and seething with emotion, he would have attracted fewer photographers had he been a movie starlet removing her top on the beach at Cannes.
Yes, Mourinho is certainly a star. But the weakness of his squad may yet turn out to be the absence of performers whose light shines as brightly as his own. The application of rigorous organisation to modest resources can be enough to win trophies, as he proved with Porto, but the approach has a limited shelf life.
At this level there could hardly be a greater contrast of approaches than the one between his side and Rijkaard’s, which is why their meetings have proved so compelling. The presence of four Brazilian-born players in Barcelona’s starting line-up meant that every time a Chelsea pass went astray, that was the last Mourinho’s players would see of the ball for a couple of minutes.
Ronaldinho was clearly in the mood to turn the match into a more explicit display of his intuitive spontaneity. He seemed to want to turn the game into an exposition of the art of the back-heel, as if out of some deeply felt desire to demolish the suggestion that coaches might be the ones who really decide matches.
With an hour gone, the Chelsea manager made one of his double substitutions. A year ago we would have expected it to produce a miracle. Now we know that Mourinho’s gambles sometimes work and sometimes fall flat.
Hernán Crespo’s inability to force home Joe Cole’s brilliant ball to the near post was another example of a strategist failed by those entrusted with the execution of his plans.
A stroke of individual genius was what Chelsea needed then, but there is room for only one genius at Chelsea and he sits on the bench, in an expensive overcoat. — Â