In a game that almost lived up to its hype, Chelsea beat Manchester United to leapfrog the Red Devils to go top of the table in the English Premier League yesterday.
The Blues were clearly the better team in the first half, organized and composed at the back and a half-step quicker to most of the 50/50 balls. The patiently probed Man U's defense for openings and were rewarded with a beautiful goal created by Florent Malouda who made some nifty moves to get to the byline and feed Joe Coal standing with his back to goal for a redirection that goalie Edwin Van der Saar could do nothing but watch trickle into the back of the net.
Manchester United came out in the second half with more energy, but had nothing to show for it, with Chelsea content to play solid defense and look for opportunities on the counter-attack.
The second Chelsea goal was a gift from the linesman. Salomon Kalou sent Didier Drogba, who had just come on as a substitute, behind the defense and his powerful, clinical shot had Van der Saar well and clearly beaten. Replays show he was so clearly offsides that a novice linesman should have been able to get it right, but the goal stood.
Oft-criticized Mike Dean, who has handed out more penalty kicks by far than any referee in the EPL, called a good game, playing the advantage and not blowing his whistle on niggling challenges. He should have called a penalty when Anelka was, as the announcer so aptly ... "shoulder barged" by Gary Neville in the box, so perhaps it was justice that Drogba was allowed to shoot from an offsides position for the goal Chelsea needed to go 2-0 up and put the game effectively out of United's reach (although not without a few anxious moments for Blues fans after the Red Devils scored).
Once again, Florent Malouda was the best player on the pitch. He has just been a completely different player than when he first came to Chelsea two seasons ago. His ability to get to the byline and send dangerous crosses into the box in recent weeks, if not the whole season, has been a joy to watch and it was another of his forays that set up Joe Cole beautifully for Chelsea's opening goal.
Another Chelsea player deserving of praise has been Yuri Zhikov. Thrown into the breach when Ashley Cole went down with a broken ankle, the Russian has answered the challenge and has definitely shown quality as his replacement on the left side. While not as dangerous as he was against Villa (drawing two penalties with his rampages into the 18 yard box), he was still very effective working with Malouda down the left wing and has the pace to track back on defense.
United did a very effective job of shutting down Frank Lampard, but, except for the goal, Chelsea was very well organized and kept it shape at the back, with John Terry and Alex ready to take on anyone trying to run through the middle of the defense and both Ferreira and Zhirkov preventing Valencia and Evra from sending dangerous crosses in from the wings. The inability to get players into spaces in the box from which to take quality shots was United's undoing in the absence of Wayne Rooney, who watched helplessly from a skybox
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So how is that an American who grew up watching football (which we should call American-rules football like the Aussies call theirs Austrialian-Rules Football), and baseball knows so much about soccer?
Because I have been watching soccer for 45 years. At college I had the privilege of covering the Harvard soccer team in my junior and senior year for the Crimson. Harvard had quite the team back then, reaching the national semi-finals in 1971 (losing to Howard, with a roster of players from Trinidad-and-Tobago, 1-0, in the Orange Bowl) , and the quarters in 1972 (losing to Cornell at Ithaca 2-0 with Bruce Arena, later D.C. United and U.S. Men's National team coach, in goal for Big Red).
It played an international game with which most home-grown teams were, at that early stage in the development of soccer in this country, unfamiliar (American football in those days was more about hard tackling than finesse). No wonder: the Harvard team counted among its players a Nigerian who played in the Olympics at age 16, an English fullback, a Yugoslavian midfielder, a Norwegian forward, two Greek-Americans, an Iranian (a member of the Shah of Iran's family, as I recall), and an American goalie, Shep Messing, who later starred for the Pele/Franz Beckenbauer/Giorgio Chinaglia era New York Cosmos (and, like the new junior senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, in a Cosmo centerfold). The assistant Harvard coach at the time was Seamus Malin, who later made a very good living as a soccer analyst for ESPN and ABC. One of my earliest soccer memories was going to a movie theater to see a film about England's World Cup triumph in '66 (Bobby Charlton et. al.), so my love for the beautiful game goes pretty far back.
Will Chelsea win the EPL and FA Cup for the domestic double? It remains to be seen. It still has to travel to Anfield to play Liverpool, where wins for opposing teams are always tough to come by, as well as Spurs at White Hart Lane (Tottenham's surprise 3-1 loss to Steve Bruce's Sunderland saw them overtaken big-spending Man City in the race for the 4th and final Champions League spot), so dropped points between now and the end of the season is a definite worry. Next up is Aston Villa in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley. Martin O'Neil's team will surely put up a better fight than the last time it met Chelsea, a 7-1 shellacking at Stamford Bridge highlighted by a four-goal outburst from Frank Lampard. And, with Florent Malouda and Didier Drogba both in a rich vein of form, and with a team that has shown resiliency in the face of injuries to a long list of first-team players (Michael Essien, Jose Boswingwa, Ashley Cole, Richardo Carvalho), Carlos Ancelotti's Blues are the team to beat.
