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

Giles Smith - Six Shooters

Some 36 hours after it happened, scientists are still at a loss to explain the appearance of John Terry in Maribor’s six-yard box on Tuesday night.

The bare facts are these: that in the 31st minute of our Champions League group game, our captain was seen defending a corner; and yet that, within seconds, after a run somehow entirely unnoticed by many of the more than 40,000 people in the ground to witness it, he was also spotted in the penalty area at the other end of the pitch, sliding onto a Cesc Fabregas cross and scoring the third of
our cluster of six goals on the night.

‘Was that… Terry?’ said my puzzled companion at the Matthew Harding End.

It was, though I don’t remember feeling quite so bamboozled since a Michael Jackson show at Wembley in the early 1990s when the late King of Pop (a massive Fulham fan, of course)
disappeared in a puff of smoke on one side of the stage – only to reappear almost instantaneously in another puff of smoke on the other side of the stage.

I believe this was an illusion on which Jackson had worked closely with David Copperfield, the great American magician and lavishly well-kempt showman who spent a significant portion of the Eighties and Nineties downwind of a hair-dryer. The stunt was said to involve cunning use of body-doubles and also an elaborate system of pulleys under the stage.

Has Terry been collaborating with Copperfield (who still has a show in Vegas and, I can report, a very brilliant one)? Are there pulleys under the Stamford Bridge turf? Again, we simply don’t know.
What we do know is that the distance of the run, as measured from its starting point just outside his own six-yard area, was 97.8 yards and that Terry was clocked (by police speed cameras, presumably) completing the distance in 13.2 seconds, which is none too shabby given that, so far as we are aware, he wasn’t using blocks, and given that he definitely wasn’t wearing Lycra. (UEFA frown on it, and quite rightly, in my opinion.)

Whisper it, but there may even have been a hint of offside. Which only makes us marvel at this moment still more. When your central defender is possibly a hair’s breadth in front of the opposition’s defensive line a split second after defending a set-piece in his own area, that player is showing a commitment to getting forward on the counter-attack which simply cannot be questioned.
It just seemed perfect that this goal should come directly after Terry’s 500th game as captain, which was marked in the victory over Crystal Palace last weekend. It was also amusing to note that Terry was older than Tuesday night’s referee, Danny Makkelie from Rotterdam, aged 31. (It’s always
good to see the young refs coming through, I’m sure you’ll agree.)

The cliché about Terry at this particular stage in his career, of course, and the one you will hear blithely trotted out in every pitch-side television studio across the land, is that pace is a diminishing
resource but that he compensates for its diminishment with positioning. Tuesday night’s pitch-length explosion rather dynamited that handy punditry nugget. It may actually be the case that, as he gets older, far from lagging, Terry is turning into that all too rare asset: a box-to-box central defender.
Here’s the other thing about that John Terry strike. It wasn’t even the most impressive goal on the night. That was Eden Hazard’s in the 90th minute- the first touch, the double twist, the curled
shot... brilliant. Given its timing. I’m guessing that a number of people missed it, having decided to do the 9.25 Tuesday-night excuse-me and head for the exits to beat the rush. 

This is something which we bash on about in this column a lot, and I know that some people genuinely do have last trains to catch, and so on. But nevertheless, it cannot be overstressed: you can never leave early. Even at 5-0, you can’t leave. Or, at least, you can, obviously. But only at the risk of missing something that you would have remembered forever.

This column is in danger of turning into a slightly breathless goal catalogue – but nevertheless, a big cheer, too, for the Didier Drogba penalty on Tuesday, another moment of take-home magic
from an evening bountifully blessed with them.

Obviously there are distinctions to be drawn between the pressure of taking the potentially trophy-clinching kick in a shoot-out in a Champions League final in Munich, and taking one in the 23rd minute of a home group stage game in which your team is already a goal ahead and fairly conclusively on top.

Nevertheless there was still pressure because expectations were inevitably high that the Drog would oblige us by producing some sort of replica 2012 moment, to the point where, had he punted it wide of the left-hand post, the atmosphere would have pancaked and the traditional descending cartoon trumpet signature (‘wap-wap-wap-waaah’) would have been virtually audible in the ground.

I don’t really know how players summon the nerve to take penalties at the best of times. But to do it while history is squatting on your shoulders and the gods of slapstick are, metaphorically speaking, gathering behind the net into which you are shooting and pulling faces at you, must require a particular kind of steel, and in especially baffling quantities. Credit to the Drog, then. There was fibre in that pen and, accordingly, an awful lot of happy memories were stirred.

Of course, you don’t necessarily turn to the Champions League expecting to see six- and seven- goal spankings and the unusual coincidence of a small cluster of such spectacles on Tuesday night
seems to have led to a bit of grumbling about the competition in general.

Too padded out, the complainers were saying, in the usual outlets. Too inflated with weaker sides, leading to ‘meaningless contests’ in the group stage. Better when it was truly a proper knock-out competition for champions only. Well, it’s a point of view, I suppose. But due respect and humility obliges us to point out that there was only one reigning champion on the pitch at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday night, and it wasn’t Chelsea.

Incidentally, was there a ban on spectators at Anfield this week? I tuned in briefly, about 35 minutes into Liverpool’s game against Real Madrid, and it was like CSKA Moscow v Manchester City all over again – so quiet in the ground that you could hear the players shouting to one another.
And this on what television had promised us would be another of ‘those famous European nights at Anfield’. So what happened there? I’ll look into it and try to get back to you at some point.

Meanwhile we head to Old Trafford for a match which, despite United’s best efforts, still just about retains the status of a ‘big clash’ and can still make it onto the television in one of the live slots.
United, of course, don’t play in Europe these days so they will be well rested. And by the look of their performance at West Brom on Monday, a rest was exactly what they needed. Still, I suspect that all of us, deep in our hearts, know that United’s status as mid-table stragglers is just a delicious phase which is bound to end at some point. They have a number of extremely capable players and a
manager who may one day be able to form those players into a team. Let’s just hope it’s not before Sunday.

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