Giles Smith: Lighting up

A great performance and a life-enhancing result at Anfield. And what a reaction. That Saturday night, people round my way were letting off fireworks long into the night, and from what I can gather it was the same in many other parts of the country.

In some places, apparently, they even built huge bonfires, like beacons, and set fire to them. And, on the Thames, in the early part of the evening, newspapers and television reported that a glorious display of fireworks was launched from a barge moored mid-stream just east of Waterloo Bridge while a delighted crowd looked on from the pavement.

Extraordinary scenes, and it showed you how much that result meant to everyone – a testament to the way that football can really bring people together from time to time, and certainly when Chelsea win away at Liverpool.

Actually, now I come to think of it, people were still letting off fireworks more than 24 hours later, on the Sunday evening – largely, I guess, because, by then, a defeat for Arsenal at Swansea had been added into the celebratory mix, along with that pitifully scraped draw for Manchester City away at QPR. And also because it seems people just can’t stop letting off fireworks once they start.

Anyway, festive times. Those combined results left us:
1. Four points clear at the top of the table.
2. Eight points clear of Manchester City.
3. Twelve points clear of Arsenal, whose manager went on to state that the title was now officially beyond his team’s reach.
4. Thirteen points clear of Manchester United, whose manager has yet to express an opinion about the title but who surely wouldn’t want to quibble with an analyst of the game as shrewd and experienced as Arsene Wenger.
5. Fifteen points and 10 places clear of Liverpool.
6. Fifteen points and 11 places clear of Tottenham.
7. Only 10 points and 37 places clear of Fulham – but don’t forget that we have six games in hand on them.
8. Unbeaten in 17 games in all competitions since the season started, which is a new club best.

Really, you would have to say, that outcome was worth a Catherine wheel and a family pack of sparklers in anyone’s back garden. And that’s before you consider the remarkable fact that we would be four points even better off than we are, had the Manchester United game ended 10 seconds earlier than it did and had Frank Lampard not scored that own goal in the dying moments at the Etihad.

Not wishing to be greedy, or anything.

It’s been a truly outstanding opening phase, though, leaving us all with a sense of quiet, understated and becomingly modest confidence to take into the latest of this season’s seemingly fortnightly international breaks, and with some warm and fond memories to look back on as England take on the Faroe Isles or Iceland or Caragua or whoever it is they’re playing this time. Let’s not get carried away, though.

Despite the fact that we’re under a third of the way through the season, we’re already hearing people talk about whether a complete campaign without defeat in the league might be possible for this Chelsea side, emulating the achievement of Arsenal’s 'Invincibles' of 2003/04.

And obviously it’s nice when your team inspires that kind of conversation, because there are far worse kinds of conversation that a team can inspire. But, even so, don’t you kind of wish, deep down, that people wouldn’t? After all, it’s no longer 2003/04. The league in which Arsenal racked up 90 points, drew 12 times and suffered no defeats, included Charlton Athletic, Wolves, Bolton, Portsmouth, Fulham, Leicester, who were on their way down, and even Leeds, who were also on their way down. (Arsenal’s aggregate score against Leeds that season: 9-1.) Hard to spot the equivalent of today’s Swansea or Southampton or Stoke in there – tough, so called ‘over-achievers’, perfectly capable of ripping three points out of the hands of anybody who grows complacent. It was also a league in which Manchester City, Tottenham and Everton all contrived to finish well inside the bottom half. (Everton weren’t far off being relegated.)

The point is, in the intervening decade, the league got harder – more random, more variable and better, you could argue. It got so much harder and more random that it’s currently a place where, after 11 games, Arsenal are sixth, Manchester United are seventh and Liverpool are 11th. No disrespect to Arsenal, of course, but one hardly expects to see invincibility in such circumstances – not this season, of all seasons.

Or perhaps one should put it another way: if it happens, it will be a far greater achievement than anything the Premier League has known. One should also remember that you don’t have to win or draw all of your games in order to win the title. Though, of course, it helps. Brendan Rodgers got a lot of stick at the end of what turned out to be a triple-defeat week for Liverpool, but much of that stick was enormously unfair and even gleefully opportunistic in my opinion.

Management is about getting the best out of what you’re got, after all. Rodgers was noisily criticised for standing down seven first-teamers for a Champions League match against Real Madrid, in order to keep them pristine for a league match against Chelsea. Yet the plan worked pretty much perfectly.

His team selection for the Bernabeu effectively removed the competitive sting from the game and turned it into a televised training match. As a consequence, Liverpool came away with a narrow defeat, and nothing like the humiliation expected at the hands of a side that had already comfortably beaten them 3-0 at Anfield.

Moreover the first team was then fresh and motivated enough to restrict us to just the two goals – and, again, a predicted humiliation with genuinely lasting consequences for Liverpool's morale was averted. (They’ll be over this one by Christmas, no question about it. Or soon after.) Excellent maximising of resources, then, by Rodgers.

Last year’s ‘Make Us Dream’ slogan up at Anfield seems to have modified, metaphorically speaking, to this year’s ‘Spare Us Our Worst Nightmares’, and Rodgers more than met the fans’ requirements in that area, so they should give him credit for that.

We all should.

Giles Smith is a columnist for the official Chelsea FC website and his weekly piece is published every Thursday throughout the season.