• Chelsea have scored 21 goals in last three home games
• ‘We must learn quickly,’ says West Brom’s Roberto di Matteo
So much for a summer of anguished underachievement at the World Cup finals and a spluttered pre-season littered with defeats disrupting Chelsea’s rhythm. The champions continue to scorch all-comers to south-west London. This latest battering could have been hoisted straight from the run-in to their Premier League and FA Cup Double back in May, so little did it stray from a cliched script.
Everything about this club oozes bravado these days, whether it be the chairman Bruce Buck’s rather provocative dismissal of Liverpool as “a smallish club somewhere north of the M25″ or John Terry’s bold assertion that “retaining our trophies is the minimum aim for us this time around”, both views expressed in Saturday’s programme. The sense of unshakeable confidence will merely have been pepped up further by this rampant dismissal of West Bromwich Albion. Carlo Ancelotti’s side have scored 21 goals in their last three home games, and 47 in 10 top-flight matches here since the turn of the year. They are, at present, irrepressible.
That avalanche will eventually peter out although Chelsea, so rusty as they lost four successive games in pre-season, would still expect to have maximum points by the time they travel to Manchester City in the last week of September for what appears their most immediate daunting fixture. Ancelotti believes the six successive victories at the start of last season were ultimately “key to winning the title”, and the pack could be playing catch-up again this time round. Wigan and Stoke, their next two opponents, were dispatched 8-0 and 7-0 at the end of last season. They will shudder at the collisions to come.
The Baggies must have feared this trouncing. If Chelsea have been disjointed and blunt in their warm-up games, they merely clicked into elite mode here. Defensive mistakes, from Scott Carson for the first goal, his defensive wall for the second and in marking up at a corner for the third, opened the floodgates. Chelsea have tended to score in second-half flurries under Ancelotti and there was a relentlessness to their approach here that swept Roberto Di Matteo’s wide-eyed team away. The hosts had too much guile, too much menace, and too little need to graft for an opening. West Brom merely stepped aside and waved them through.
The most brutal presence, inevitably, was that of Didier Drogba. The Ivorian mustered 37 goals last season and, having finally rid himself of a hernia that had been troubling him, he said, for six years, eased his way into the new campaign with a hat-trick. He barely had to break into a sweat in swelling his personal tally to seven goals in three Premier League games. Attempts fly in off defenders or skim unerringly beyond sprawling goalkeepers for the forward these days. His second was slammed in from within the six-yard box. He, like Frank Lampard, is still well short of match sharpness. Both were rested long before the end as the home side dozed in their superiority before capping the afternoon with a sixth in stoppage time.
“It’s good to start the season like this knowing that we’re not even ready yet,” Drogba said with a touch of understatement. “The message we sent out was to ourselves, not the league, because we know we’re not fit but that we can still play good football. There’ll be difficult moments, but we have the quality. We can cope with difficult times. Personally, I’m a better player now at 32 than I was six years ago when I came here. I’m calmer, more relaxed on the pitch, and I’m scoring more goals. I still feel young.”
No wonder Ancelotti appears content not to add further to his squad. The manager, with no real hint of sarcasm, pointed out that Drogba is still prone to surrender possession at times – “He can use his body [better] to protect the ball and lose it less” – although few club teams in world football have such a rampaging and prolific presence. “But I’d rather score 20 goals and, let’s say, win the Champions League and the Premier League this season,” the forward added. Ambition still smoulders, even with this team’s virtual monopoly on major domestic trophies.
Drogba departed with the match ball and a box of biscuits baked for him by a 14-year-old fan. Di Matteo, a former Chelsea stalwart and serenaded throughout by the home support, merely sought an escape route. Life will not always be this traumatic as a top-flight manager, but his newly promoted team must play Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United in their next three away league games. “We have to learn quickly and improve quicker,” he said. The Baggies, like Chelsea, have been here before.
Man of the match Ashley Cole (Chelsea)
Premier LeagueChelseaWest BromDominic Fifieldguardian.co.uk
