• ‘It’s probably the worst we’ve played on all year’
• ‘It was not good enough for a Wembley pitch’

John Terry was delighted to complete Chelsea’s first Double but he was scathing about the much-maligned Wembley surface. “The pitch ruined the final,” he said after his side’s 1-0 win against Portsmouth. “It’s probably the worst we’ve played on all year. It was not good enough for a Wembley pitch. The FA have to decide if this is a football pitch or an events stadium.”

Terry’s complaints come after Harry Redknapp, the Tottenham manager, called the Wembley surface “a disgrace” following his side’s semi-final defeat by Portsmouth last month. “For any professional team to have to play football on that is farcical,” he said.

The Chelsea manager, though, was milder in his assessment. Carlo Ancelotti said: “In the semi-final it was a different problem, with the players sliding. Now it was different. [It was still] not so good but the players didn’t slide.”

Ancelotti said Chelsea would celebrate the first League and FA Cup Double of the club’s history, sealed by Didier Drogba’s second-half free-kick, with “champagne and wine” and then claimed the side needed no additions to win next season’s Champions League.

The Italian, who saw his team hit the woodwork five times during the opening half, said: “Chelsea have never won the Champions League. It is one of our aims next season. This team has the quality to win the Champions League.”

By winning the Double in his first season the former Milan head coach managed a feat José Mourinho was unable to achieve during his three years in west London. Asked if this made him “Special” Ancelotti smiled. “I am normal,” he said. “But this was a fantastic victory. I was happy to work in a fantastic club with a fantastic atmosphere.

“We [will do] nothing special [in celebration],” he added. “I will follow my players and friends. Drink some wine and champagne. It is right to have a celebration, the team did a fantastic season.”

Despite being unfavoured, Portsmouth gave Chelsea an uncomfortable afternoon at times, and Ancelotti might have thought his luck had ceased after a series of squandered opportunities. He said: “It’s strange to hit the post five times in one half. It never happened in my career that you hit five posts in one half. It was also strange to concede a penalty. That was a key moment,” he said of Juliano Belletti’s foul on Aruna Dindane. “If Portsmouth went 1-0 up it would have been more difficult for us. [But] I was not worried. The team had control and a lot of chances to score.”

Ancelotti had praise for Drogba, who has scored six goals in competitive Wembley appearances. The manager said: “He finished the season how he started. He has scored a lot of goals and played with continuity all the year.”

Chelsea’s Michael Ballack limped off before half-time and Ancelotti said: “We don’t think it is a bad injury. He took a kick on his ankle. We hope he will make the World Cup.”

Avram Grant, his opposite number, said he was disappointed about the result, but proud of his team’s effort in what has been a trying year. He said: “This was a very difficult season. One I will not forget.”

John TerryChelseaPortsmouthFA CupJamie Jacksonguardian.co.uk

The Chelsea captain has shown balls in leading his side to the brink of winning the Double

It seems likely now that Chelsea will win the Premier League, but the season still has a slight air of murkiness about it. There has been a generally muted and fudged response to the prospect of Chelsea as champions, a lack of the accustomed simplistic and broad-brush moralising. At this distance it’s hard to know exactly what the story will be here. Something is missing. What could it be?

Of course, Chelsea winning the league doesn’t have to mean anything. Perhaps they’re just slightly better than every other team. This could simply be an example of how determined, talented men often triumph. But we do like a bit more of a story than this, and all sport works best when there is a sense of systems ranged against one another, or of character being put to proof.

Chelsea’s first Premier League titles had an air of punkish billionaire’s iconoclasm and a sense of high spec player-collectivism at work. What is the model this year? Endure. Luck out finally with the right manager. And have enough good players about the place who still aren’t quite past it when the money dries up. In a certain light Chelsea are the Premier League equivalent of zombie movie survivors, the grizzled cartel who laid in slightly more tins of rhubarb and shotgun cartridges than everyone else for when the bad times came.

There have already been attempts to tack on a deeper narrative, perhaps a story of egos pricked and all-star mucking in. Much has been made of the “bollocking” handed out by Roman Abramovich a few weeks ago, but I don’t really believe in this bollocking, which will surely have had all the impact of being beaten about the head with a cashmere-sheathed Toblerone bar full of money. Abramovich has given his players so much already. What can he really frighten them with now?

Perhaps we can fall back on tales of individual heroism. Didier Drogba has been brilliantly prolific and Chelsea have scored heaps of goals, proof if they do win the league that it will be deserved. At the same time, Michael Ballack has shown the vibrant mobility of a diseased tree stump. Mikel John Obi remains a tiny, plaintive child’s face grafted on to the rippling neck of a frighteningly muscular human being and condemned to run unstintingly sideways. Even Joe Cole has become slightly embarrassing and overheated, like an un-neutered tom cat perpetually inflammed by chair legs and corner flags.

None of this is really it, though. If the real story of Chelsea’s decisive surge has been insufficiently trumpeted, it is because its main protagonist is still cloaked beneath a media burqa. No one really wants to talk about John Terry. It all feels a bit too raw. But Chelsea have relied on resilience and vim and spirit, and while other players have performed better, and also shown leadership, this is really the captain’s territory. When Tiger Woods played at the Masters people kept saying what a great comeback it would be if he went on and won it. Perhaps we should now be saying the same thing about Terry, the one person for whom Chelsea’s title win does actually represent a compelling personal tale of defiance. And who will, in time, turn out to provide the defining image of the title race: specifically those recurrent shirt-less photos of him celebrating victory, always cropped at the waist and thus giving an impression of Terry playing out the late stages of the season entirely in the nude, still defiantly tumescent and horribly unembarrassable.

This is what has so far been glossed from the Chelsea story. Terry stumbled for a while and could have fallen. But he didn’t. Instead he may well soon be lifting a trophy or two. We don’t have to like him. But, in a peculiar and strangely apposite twist, I believe history will force us to admire his balls.

John TerryChelseaBarney Ronayguardian.co.uk