‘The Real General Election’ trumpeted a cynically astute headline in the Daily Mirror last week over a large blue campaign rosette bearing the picture of Frank Lampard alongside a red one framing Steven Gerrard, respective midfield dynamos of Chelsea and Liverpool football clubs which relishingly meet on Wednesday in the first semi-final leg of Europe’s Champions’ League competition. The winner will play either AC Milan or PSV Eindhoven in the final at the Ataturk stadium, Istanbul, on 25 May. Chelsea fancy themselves to settle the tie at this first strike on their home paddock. They have led the domestic Premiership by an ever lengthening street all through the winter (beating Liverpool three times for good measure). With fair reason, I suppose, is the London team collectively almost as self-regarding as its shamelessly immodest, one-off Portuguese manager Mourinho. It’s only a game after all, so his conceit is allowable. Zillions of Russian roubles are one thing, quite another is the way Mourinho has used them to shatter in six months the hitherto accepted divine law of English football that only Arsenal or Manchester United should win every prize on offer. Liverpool’s enterprising and skilful run in Europe, plotted by the more sober Spaniard Benitez, has further slapped the old dual monarchy across the chops. To think that only last autumn Arsenal folk were swaggering about the land in the cloying swank that their team was the finest ever — ever! — to play in these islands.
Week by week, Chelsea dismantled that strut. Steadily, they built up team spirit; then just as pointedly turned up the revs. In their first 10 matches they scored 14 goals; in 10 up to last week’s quarter-final in Munich they scored 26.
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