Why Di Matteo is perfect fit
Every time Frank Lampard went to take a corner he was love-bombed from the stands by fans. Six months ago a lot of them might have agreed with Andre Villas-Boas that Lampard could no longer cut it for Chelsea, but everybody can forget about that if it means a club hero gets one last crack at the Champions League.
As everyone knows, John Terry will not be among the Chelsea players who take the field in Munich next month, and the Chelsea captain addressed this embarrassing situation in his programme notes yesterday.
“I am big enough to come out and man up when I have made a mistake,” said Terry, managing thereby to crowbar some (inadvertent?) self-praise into his own grovelling apology.
How big a man do you really have to be to admit it is stupid to get yourself sent off for a mindless act of aggression in your team’s biggest game of the season?
Terry made confessing to a crime everybody knew he had committed sound like an act of impossible bravery. Those with memories longer than a few days knew that he hadn’t, in fact, been big enough to “man up” in the immediate aftermath of the sending-off, when he told Geoff Shreeves that Alexis Sanchez had manufactured the collision by “checking his run” thus forcing Terry to knee him.
Terry has made himself irrelevant to the Champions League final, barring the help he might be able to offer Roberto Di Matteo in picking the team and choosing the tactics on the night.
That could be valuable for the Italian since his policy since getting the Chelsea job has been to do what the senior players want him to do.
Thus Chelsea, who started the season trying to play high-tempo attacking football in the opponents’ half, have abandoned those plans in favour of a defensive, counter-attacking style that suits the senior players. Few clubs can ever have undergone such a complete transformation in the course of a single season — but of course for Chelsea this is not really a transformation, but rather a reversion to type, the reassertion of the old Chelsea identity that has remained essentially unchanged since the sacking of Jose Mourinho five years ago.
Should Di Matteo get the job full-time? Of course he should, because as long as Chelsea retain the services of Terry, Lampard and Drogba, those players will continue to call the shots. You might as well give them a coach they like, since any other type of coach won’t last long.
Of course, it’s hard to see Chelsea winning another Premier League title playing a defensive style of football designed to maximise the strengths and disguise the shortcomings of these veterans. That style is only effective in cup matches against powerful opponents, and not suited for a long league season.
Villas-Boas may have been naive and lacking in tact, but he was right about that much. Sooner or later, Chelsea will have to move on from Terry-Lampard-Drogba. But the only person at Chelsea with the power to make those changes is the owner.
Abramovich keeps chasing the latest flavour of the month coach, but by sacking so many he has created a club where everyone knows the coach doesn’t really matter.
In Di Matteo he has found a coach who already understands this and is happy to work with it. Chelsea should call off their search now, they’ve already found the perfect man.
