Nights like these go one of two ways, memorable, or erasable from the minds of those who love their football club. Wednesday evening’s drama on the pitch was a deterrent from what should have been a terrific night of European football.
Thiago Silva’s headed extra-time equaliser was enough to send the side from Paris through to the Quarter Finals of the Champions League on away goals, in a game that could have been mistaken for a soap opera.
West London is fantastic on European nights; Chelsea fans fuelled by prospects of progression in the World’s biggest club competition but the naïvety of both the set up and performance justified a forgetful crash out of our search for a second holy grail.
It’s difficult to pinpoint a particular fault because the performance was riddled with them.
There comes a point at which Costa’s off-the-ball antics start to act as compensation for poor on-the-ball performances. I love the guy. He gets defenders where he wants them and that showed in the reaction of David Luiz at times in the game. Arguably he deserved a penalty in the first half, but he struggled to get the best of a resilient Thiago Silva, who put in one of the best defensive performances I have ever witnessed at Stamford Bridge – capped by the winning goal.
We struggled to inject any pace or fluidity into the game; the kind of football we have thrived on this season was absent and it cost us.
The game plan was ambiguous. The decision to play Ramires on the wing while Willian and Cuadrado watched on from the sidelines baffles me. Ramires’ work rate is phenomenal but the fouling and the loose balls become tedious and the lack of football becomes frustrating. Verratti ran a crowded out midfield where creativity was minimised. We struggled to cope with the 10-men of PSG and at times we looked like the team who were a man short – and that’s a generous statement.
Here lies my biggest fault with the team: we don’t shoot. Pass, pass, pass. we work the ball so well to the edge of the box but then we slow the whole game down. We knock the ball out wide into a crossing position and hold it there; we allow the defence to readjust, before knocking the ball back and forth, around the box, making no real progression. Eden Hazard is one of the most incredible players I have ever seen, but he will never be in ‘that’ bracket if he doesn’t learn to shoot when given the opportunity. It was remarkable we even managed one goal on the night.
Drogba was the wrong player to bring on and at the wrong time. We needed an injection of pace. Remy. Willian. The players we have in our squad to make the impact we so painfully lacked. It was clear from Costa’s performance that the away side’s very strong back four could handle our physical presence. We needed to throw something else at the them.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the whole performance, though, was the decision to play two strikers when pushing for a goal, but to move one of them out wide when, again, we have players on the bench capable of playing in these roles.
I won’t hide my disappointment, because I know we’ll bounce back. In my opinion the Ibrahimovic red card affected us more than PSG. We fell into the trap of playing their game; responding to their antics with our own. We struggled to deal with a subsequently fired up away side and our performance dropped as a result of it.
On a night – perhaps our biggest of the season – when the level of football should have been at new heights, it faltered. At times it was poor. The melodrama on the pitch replaced what was a perfectly poised game. As a football fan, I feel aggrieved that the anticipation, the build-up and the excitement sort of, filtered out, and the prospect of another great European night at the Bridge collapsed in the theatrical performances of both teams.
Take nothing away from PSG; they were devastating on the night.
