Another step back: another step forward. With the Champions League safely packed away for the winter recess Chelsea’s oddly fraught, in-out season continues to bring to mind John Updike’s observation that no matter how many times the world keeps ending, people still keep on showing up asking where the party is.
Chelsea may be just about skating above the bottom three in the Premier League but they are through to the last 16 of the Champions League after a clinical 2-0 defeat of Porto, last season’s quarter-finalists, that seemed to exist in a parallel world to the listless, shoe-gazing humiliations of the domestic season.
Best of all it was a distinctly Diego kind of night at Stamford Bridge, an evening of shared niggling energy, cheap fouls and no little attacking thrust that saw Chelsea’s own border-town bad guy centre-forward produce his most energetic performance for some time.
Goals from Willian and a Costa-assisted own goal were enough for a 2-0 victory against a muscular Porto team who spent much of the game in a state of Diego themselves, committing 14 fouls and earning three bookings in the first half alone.
The result means the Premier League champions top Group G. More importantly they looked compact, energetic, nasty in just the right way – and just at the right time too. At the final whistle on Saturday one commentator had described Chelsea’s defeat by Bournemouth as “the cherry on top of the problem cake”. Elimination would have been something more indigestible, a new tier plonked on the problem cake’s already crumbling sponge. And a custard pie too far, perhaps, for Chelsea’s own champion manager.
Cometh the hour cometh – kind of – the man. Costa’s goal drought has been chronicled but he has a bespoke set of failings in this competition with one Champions League goal for Chelsea in 12 appearances and 10 shots on target over two seasons.
How to get that malevolent energy flowing in the right direction has been a theme of successive pre-Christmas traumas. In the build up to this match it emerged José Mourinho had been cloistering himself away with his star striker for a series of crammers in the theory and practice of centre-forward play. No doubt quite a lot of which will have involved variations on the theme of get in the bleeding box, Diego old son, and stop acting like a drunken uncle at a wedding.
Costa didn’t score. In fact he fell over twice as he sprinted through on goal in the second half, both times seeming to lack the confidence to sprint away from a retreating defence. But he was a constant menace and a willing, warrior-like presence on a wet, boisterous night at the Bridge against calculatedly bruising opponents.
Before the kick-off Mourinho had explained the absence of Cesc Fàbregas in his starting XI by remarking that he did not want “lightweights” in his midfield. Ouch. Heavyweights only then, albeit Chelsea were roughed up a little at first by Yacine Brahimi and Giannelli Imbula, a gangling, thrusting midfielder, who twice ran straight over Oscar to win the ball. At which point: enter Diego. Chelsea’s opening goal was a product of luck and ragged defending, but above all persistence. Ramires won the ball and fed Eden Hazard. His pass released Costa who tiptoed awkwardly over Iván Marcano like a barefoot man stumbling his way through a pile of Lego on the living-room carpet. Costa’s shot bounced back off Iker Casillas and was deflected in off the hapless Marcano. “Diego! Diego!” the home fans sang, supportive as ever of their grizzling star striker.
After the good: the ugly as Costa produced what we can only call, for want of any real point of comparison, a moment of utter Diego. Trotting past Casillas, Costa stepped in and very deliberately trod on his ankle. In front of … well, everybody. He was booked. He waved his arms around. It has been said Costa plays near the edge. Often these days he is beyond the edge, post-edge, unaware the edge exists in the first place.
Still Porto continued to niggle. The towering Maicon was booked for dropping his shoulder into Oscar. Maxi Pereira, a scuttling little cube of muscle at right-back, chopped down Willian. And as the second half kicked off again, so too did Porto, resuming their mission to turn the shins of Chelsea’s midfield a shade of royal blue.
Chelsea kept coming, with Costa a key component in Willian’s goal to make it 2-0. Taking the ball down on his thigh 40 yards from goal he played a nice little pass into the path of Hazard, who shifted the ball to Willian, who buried it, as he tends to these days.
No goal for Costa then but he walked off to a standing ovation. Chelsea will look to bottle the spirit and energy of a midfield who were hugely bolstered by the presence of the galloping Ramires. Not to mention a step in the right direction for Costa, who worked and ran and looked, at the very least, like a man playing the right kind of game.
