Well, it's nice to see you've answered my question. Do you think Chelsea this season was capable of beating Man Utd as easily as Barcelona did?
It wasn't really a successful gameplan, although it was minutes away from working. It was quite cynical really. And it would have been worthless if Barcelona had gotten the penalty they deserved in the first leg, because Chelsea would have been forced to play football (although we would at least know for sure now if they could match Barcelona in pure footballing terms).
The thing is Chelsea's goal came from what was a pretty innocuous forage forward. Taking nothing away from Essien's flawless execution, a deflected ball came to him and he hit and hoped. Chelsea scored in the only way they were going to with the strategy they had adopted, a fluke. It was a gameplan that was only designed to give victory in two ways, a lucky goal or a penalty shoot-out. The match pretty much told us nothing about the true qualities of the two sides.
On the other hand, pitted against a much weaker opponent, Chelsea were able to show their real football face in the FA Cup final, and what we saw was not the standard expected of a European Champion.
