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.

Giles Smith: In contrast

What a total and utter Champions League disaster. What a complete shake-your-head-in-disbelief shambles.

For Manchester City, I mean – defeated at home by CSKA Moscow, reduced to nine men, wedged dismally at the bottom of their group with merely two points from four games and obliged to beat both Roma and Bayern Munich in the next month or so in order to have even the faintest chance of appearing in the competition on the other side of Christmas.

Whereas our team, by contrast, secures a handy point away from home, increases its points tally to eight (the most of any English representative in the competition and more than Manchester City and Liverpool combined), maintains its position at the top of its group table and remains set fair for the knock-out stages, with the ample possibility of
qualifying as group winners, which is always nice if you can manage it. (Ask Arsenal.)

Plus we dominated the game in all the important areas, had a penalty to win it and would have had the luxury of two penalties if the referee hadn’t missed a high-definition, wide-screen trip on Oscar mid-way through the second half, and if that extra official behind the goal with a blunt stick (who was only four feet away from this particular incident and was almost close enough to feel the pain in his own ankle) had anything other than a purely decorative function, like the marzipan on a cake, if the marzipan on a cake wasn’t edible.

The player who missed the penalty that the referee did manage to award was Eden Hazard , which was a shame because, for long portions of this match, he appeared to be surging about the pitch on a mission to win it on his own, and this was a particularly neat opportunity for him to do just that. Even so, in my opinion, he could have missed this one, the penalty that wasn’t given and a third penalty for good measure and it wouldn’t have detracted from his pre-eminent qualification as Man of the Match. He was blistering to watch.

Obviously, a win would have been even nicer – and would hardly have been considered undeserved in the circumstances. But instead we’ll simply have to settle for extending our unbeaten run since the beginning of the season to 16 games in all competitions, now officially the equal best in the history of the club, and then swiftly turn our minds back to the pressing matter of our league title campaign.

Which, specifically, means Liverpool away on Saturday. Yes, I know: Saturday. Didn’t there used to be an understanding that teams who played in Europe in midweek would be given the honour of a Sunday kick-off in order to allow them time to finish getting their bags out of the plane’s overhead locker? I’m fairly sure there did – but clearly not any longer.

What can you do, though? Well, one thing,
obviously, is leave all your best players on the bench for your Champions League games. That certainly seems to be the Liverpool way, at any rate.

I don’t know about you, but at the beginning of the week when I saw the headline ‘LIVERPOOL RESTING GERRARD FOR REAL MATCH’, I couldn’t help but feel the writers had gone slightly over the top. Okay, so it’s difficult to know where the Champions League could realistically be said to lie among Liverpool’s priorities this season. But even so, to imply that, by comparison with taking on Chelsea at Anfield, travelling to the Bernabeu to meet the reigning champions of Europe doesn’t even rank as a real game.

Then, of course, I worked out that I had misread it.

Still, Liverpool do seem to have looked at the fixture list and decided that a showpiece match against Real Madrid in Europe’s elite competition is less important to them than the weekend’s upcoming fixture, and I suppose we can only feel flattered by that – not least because it’s just the next game as far as we’re concerned.

It must be somewhat dispiriting for Liverpool’s fans, though, some 4000 of whom apparently travelled to Madrid this week. This, one imagines, is not exactly what they longed for, throughout all those long years in the European wildnerness: the chance to let Raheem Sterling rest up and to give Lazar Markovic a run-out against the best team in Spain.

Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong and the current generation of Liverpool fans will grow old reflecting nostalgically on ‘those big Capital One Cup-style nights in the Bernabeu.’

Anyway, the mind went back to that little storm that kicked up last season when poor old David Moyes was in charge of Manchester United and, ahead of a match against Liverpool, made the mistake of saying, ‘They possibly do come here as favourites.’ Whatever you want to say, Moyes did have a point at the time. And, looked at with the benefit of hindsight, it was two bald men fighting over a comb in any case. Nevertheless, it prompted a response from Brendan Rodgers: ‘I would never say that at Liverpool, even if I was bottom of the league.’

Surrender, or even the mere prior concession of an advantage, Rodgers seemed to be implying, was not in Liverpool’s DNA. So it was all the more surprising to see him send out a team-sheet for Tuesday night which effectively doubled as a huge white flag, made out of hurriedly tacked-together bedsheets, and with 'We certainly don't come here as favourites' written on it in big black letters.

He would be most welcome to do the same against us on Saturday, but I don’t suppose many of us think he’s likely to do so. There seemed to be something of the smokescreen about Rodgers’ suggestion that the rested players were by no means guaranteed a return to the side at the weekend. How many of the seven players deselected Tuesday do you suppose will be on the pitch at the beginning on Saturday lunchtime? Here’s your handy ‘cut out ‘n’ keep’ checklist, so you can tick them off on the day: Raheem Sterling, Philippe Coutinho, Mario Balotelli, Glen Johnson, Jordan Henderson and Steven Gerrard.

My guess: all seven. But we’ll see.

It’s not often, as a fan, that you get a personal dressing down from the manager after a game. But on Saturday evening, I was one of the 40,000 or so who were hauled up in front of the gaffer and told to pull our socks up a bit in terms of what we bring to the table, noise-wise.

Personally, I wasn’t in any real position to argue. I’m big enough to admit that, when it comes to being noisy in the ground, I could do a lot more, and I’m going to be looking at it hard on the training ground.

Mind you, I’m not using this as an excuse, but I do think the fact that it was QPR had a lot to do with it. There’s no question in my mind that, had it been, for instance, a London derby (but, you know, a proper one), the atmosphere would have been altogether hotter and the dressing-down wouldn’t have been necessary. Point taken, though.

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