Inter Do To Chelsea, What The Blues Do To Us!

I was in splits while watching this game. In so many ways it mirrored out recent losses against the big teams that I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony.

Chelsea got caught out early on. How many times have we seen that happen to us?! There wasn’t anything really wrong with Chelsea in the first few minutes but Inter were just a bit quicker off the blocks and boom, they scored from nowhere! Chelsea defense and the keeper might have made minor mistakes and that was enough for the home team.

After that Chelsea responded like we do so often by throwing men forward. Inter responded by going into a shell and sitting really deep. There is a slight variation here as Inter never created any counter attacks but that was because they were sitting too deep to create anything of note. Some might even say they never cared for the second goal until they conceded, so they never made an attempt to counter.

Chelsea tried everything, a lot of it looked like pretty football, but there was no end result. The Blues had bulk of the possession, got to the final third easily and still failed to create any clear cut chances. Julio Caesar wasn’t being tested.

Suddenly, Drogba didn’t look menacing did he? Big strikers, physical players, crosses, shots from distance, well nothing seems to matter when a well organized and highly trained defensive unit decides to park the bus.

As Chelsea were huffing and puffing without going anywhere I was thinking, is this what is called “Men against Boys”? It’s a phrase I’ve never understood in a footballing context. But if it’s applicable to games we dominate against the big teams and end up losing, surely it’s applicable to this game as well.

My joy was spoilt to some extent by a bad mistake by the Inter keeper but the mood was lit up within minutes by another freak goal from the Real Madrid reject Cambiasso. Once again the cycle resumed.

At the end of the game I was wondering if some of the moaner Arsenal fans had been Chelsea supporters, they would be saying Cech was a joker and a hopeless keeper. He let one in at the near post and didn’t recover in time for the second. They would also be having a go at Ancelotti for not buying and on Abramovich for sitting on his millions! After all, they brought a youngster like Daniel Sturridge on as a substitute and not some superstar. How could a big club’s supporters accept that!?

To me it just shows that when a team decides to sit back and when luck goes their way there isn’t much you can do no matter how much money you’ve spent and what tactics you use. This is not an attempt to defend some of our play which has been amateurish, but it does put a lot of the results and consequently the criticism into perspective.

As I’ve said often before, defending is the easier part in football and teams that focus on defense will always be hard to beat. Throw in a manager like Mourinho who knows how to suck the life out of any football game and we see a bunch of La Liga discards turned into a defensive unit that can win trophies.

I’m not trying to judge anything based on one game, nor am I mocking Chelsea or Inter. This isn’t an attempt to defend Wenger, his policies or the Arsenal players either. The point is very simple, results are important but true understanding can only be developed by taking distance from the results.

Chelsea won’t become a bad team overnight or even if they crash out of the Champions League and Inter Milan won’t become the greatest team in the world if they get through. The media will project it that way and some fans will fall for it but the facts don’t change based on a couple of results.

Hopefully, some Arsenal fans will have seen this game and will get a better perspective on the complexities involved in our problems. Or am I just flogging a dead horse!?