A stunning free-kick was all that separated the Cup finalists but their prospects could not be further apart
In surely the most inequitable FA Cup final in history a club who have fed off more than £700m in gifts from a Russian oligarch defeated another who are at least £130m in debt and owe the South Central Ambulance Service £19,535.39 and the Scout Association of Guernsey £697.
Chelsea collected £1.8m for completing their first League and FA Cup Double but the real measure of that small gain is that they paid £9.5m to agents in the year from October 2008. The real prize was the restoration of domestic supremacy. Carlo Ancelotti’s men secured the Premier League title with an 8-0 thumping of Wigan Athletic and added the FA Cup with yet another Didier Drogba Wembley goal, his third in the endgame of the world’s oldest knockout competition and his sixth in Cup matches at this £756m stadium.
To Chelsea: a victory parade at 1pm tomorrow through affluent west London streets. For Portsmouth, a trudge back south that will have felt like a drive to a cliff’s edge. All season neutrals have admired their stoicism in the face of a debt crisis that has been written up by some as mismanagement but is far more serious and sinister than that. The community schools and sports centres and the St John Ambulance will not care to be told that simple incompetence caused them to be stiffed by a succession of so-called owners.
The fans pick up the tab for this scandal and it was a pity for them that such a powerful and resolute Chelsea team opposed them on their last day in football’s sun. The way some told it after the José Mourinho/Internazionale ambush in the Champions League, Ancelotti’s side were the Chelsea Pensioners hobbling into sepia. But Chelsea are not a decrepit team if 26-28 is the optimum point on maturity’s graph. Only Salomon Kalou of the starting XI was under 25, but only four were over 30.
Ancelotti, who managed the imperishable aristocrats of Milan, could give lectures on the folly of dismissing 29-year-olds as doddery.
Drogba, the season’s leading scorer with 29 in the Premier League and 37 overall, is now 32, but what sense could there be in disparaging his best season in Chelsea blue on the basis that the goals may dry up in some indeterminate future? Persistent rumours say Abramovich is willing to bid high for Liverpool’s Fernando Torres as Manchester City and perhaps Barcelona join the race to sign arguably the world’s best centre-forward.
Any spending the Chelsea owner sanctions now will stem not from panic but deep strength. “It is not an old team, we have players with experience, with ability, with skills; it is not necessary to spend only for spending,” Ancelotti says, with classic Milanese respect for fully ripened talent.”
Yet last year Chelsea are believed to have had a £12m bid for Everton’s Jack Rodwell rejected and Abramovich is sufficiently emboldened by Ancelotti’s success to build another bonfire of his windfall wealth. All he wanted, probably, with his lecture to the troops after the Champions League setback, was a demonstration of the team’s resolve not to be Manchester United’s punchbag for another year.
Only Jimmy Greaves, in 1960-61, has scored more times in a season for them than Drogba, who has spoken of his “special relationship” with Wembley.
Only last week he was throwing hissy fits in the 8-0 win against Wigan after Frank Lampard grabbed the ball off him as he was about to take a penalty. This is the Big D package: histrionics, cascades of uncontrollable emotion, and a kind of barn-burning grandeur when he really craves the prize.
Five times Chelsea struck woodwork before the Premier League’s Golden Boot winner drove a free-kick in off David James’s far post in a match of two missed penalties (Kevin-Prince Boateng for Pompey, then Lampard for Chelsea). Ancelotti takes his garland for controlling Drogba’s moods, liberating Chelsea’s stifled creativity and guiding them to 103 Premier League goals: a record for the competition.
It was another FA Cup victory, though, that may speak most eloquently of Chelsea’s future. For the first time since 1961 the club raised the FA Youth Cup, after many years of frantic teenage-talent chasing, and Ancelotti has promised to promote to first-team action next season Jeffrey Bruma, Fabio Borini, Gaël Kakuta, Patrick van Aanholt and Nemanja Matic. Abramovich’s dream of a self-supporting empire is bolstered by new Premier League rules obliging clubs to have eight homegrown players in their first-team squads.
This time last year Lampard and John Terry urged the club to make “fantasy” signings to peg United back.” There is no such imperative now, merely an urge to go on improving. The catalyst, plainly, has been Ancelotti’s management. Yuri Zhirkov was the only major signing last summer (at £18m) and he has hardly played. Talent has been reorganised and re-energised. That way, Abramovich could take his hits in the world business markets and fall back on the apolitical talents of his fifth manager in five years.
“Success is the key driver in the popularity stakes,” said the club’s chief executive, Ron Gourlay, recently, meaning that Asian and African minds can be invaded only by a Chelsea side lording it over Manchester United and Arsenal. Since Mourinho left there have been many dire predictions: Abramovich would get bored and wander off, his private army would fail to protect him against some enemy or the global financial crash would shift him from a 370-foot yacht to a dinghy.
They are still waiting. The old guard of this Chelsea side are back on top for the first time since 2006, youth is poking through and there is apparently money to buy another household name. Most of all, Ancelotti is one cool cat who has conquered English football without fuss. As for Portsmouth and their devoted fans, the only dance they’re doing is with oblivion.
FA CupChelseaPortsmouthPaul Haywardguardian.co.uk
