Last weekend Beauty played the Beast and lost. At least that is the way some saw it when Chelsea roundly defeated Arsenal 3-0 at the Emirates. Art and imagination had been beaten by dull-eyed functionalism. Pragmatism ruled, romance was dead.
This, of course, is nonsense. Chelsea won because on the day they were the better team in most aspects. When Arsenal are on form and fully fit there is no more pleasing spectacle but at present Arsène Wenger's side are falling well short of their own superlatives. Chelsea, on the other hand, are proving themselves the best in the country.
Frank Lampard made a cogent case for Carlo Ancelotti's side after Sunday's win when he argued that there was rather more to Chelsea's style than mere muscle. "We're well-organised because we work very hard on the training ground," he said. "We've got intelligent players, the manager works on tactics and we know that's the base from where we play. Teams do us a disservice by saying we're just a strong well-organised side." True enough. Look at Chelsea's record this season. Organisation alone would not have enabled them to win 18 matches out of 22 in all competitions, with 53 goals scored and 13 conceded.
The first of Didier Drogba's two goals at the Emirates was an excellent example of how to score on the break, from the measured pass with which John Terry found Ashley Cole in space on the left to the timing of Drogba's run to meet the full-back's dipping centre and find the net.
A football match is not an art exhibition. Aesthetics will come into the argument from time to time, such as the moments when Cesc Fábregas floats the ball into the goalmouth like a paper dart or Dimitar Berbatov appears to be in two places at once, yet this is essentially a physical contest to be decided by skill, certainly, but equally by strength and athleticism.
Whoever coined the phrase about football being the beautiful game never had to get a useful point at Stoke in January. The English season is less of a slog than it used to be. Pitches no longer become mudheaps and undersoil heating saves the players from having to skate around on frozen surfaces when the temperature drops. But it is still an exhausting nine months and teams who do not equip themselves properly to cope with the physical demands of the contest will usually lag behind.
The trick is to achieve the right balance between the requirements of physique and technique and on Sunday, in this respect, Chelsea seemed to be doing better than Arsenal. Wenger's previous Arsenal sides had more of a physical presence. Take the team that won the Premier League and the FA Cup in 2002 that had Tony Adams and Sol Campbell at centre-back, Patrick Vieira a massive influence in midfield and world-class forwards in Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp. At what point precisely did Wenger decide that the future lay in Munchkinland?
Arsenal are in danger of becoming what football used to call a "powder puff" side. That is to say a team able to pass the ball prettily but lacking a knockout punch while being exposed defensively by a bit of pace and power. The Nottingham Forest of the 50s were this way inclined. Managed by Billy Walker, one of the game's classicists, Forest were often a joy to watch but an equal delight to play against. They won the FA Cup in 1959 with attacking football of a high quality but that same season were beaten 7-1 at home by Birmingham City.
Ancelotti's Chelsea are more power mowers than powder puffs but they are still an advance on José Mourinho's pragmatists, even though important parts of the team have remained the same. Mourinho was what Chelsea needed at the time to get more consistency into their performances just as Ancelotti appears to be the right man now for a side that is capable of managing itself with the occasional adjustment from the bench.
Chelsea will probably win the Premier League this season while Manchester United and Sir Alex Ferguson chafe in their wake. And they should be good enough to win the Champions League; with Drogba anything is possible. Just so long as nobody dubs any renewal of hostilities between Barcelona and Chelsea as Beauty and the Beef.
