Chelsea trudged on in the Champions League with a handy, if at times slightly painful 1-1 draw at the Parc des Princes against a Paris Saint-Germain team that showed enough quality to push the visitors back but too little explosive edge to win the match. Chelsea played with some control here at times in the first half. They will most likely progress to the next round from here. They may even get to compete in the final stages having all but wrapped up the domestic league. And yet for all that, the performance, if not the result, raises some difficult questions. The fact is that at some point Chelsea really are going to have to start winning this kind of match.
If one is to judge by José Mourinho’s own champion standards, it is a lingering cloud over this evolving team that, for all the talent in that midfield, the occasionally delightful football, Chelsea have still not beaten a genuinely high-class opponent this season.
The likes of Everton, Swansea and NK Maribor have seen the best of a pedigree attack. Arsenal were beaten 2-0 in October during their own poor run. Beyond that, four matches against Manchester City, Manchester United and now PSG have ended in taut, suffocating 1-1 draws. For Mourinho to get close to another chance at the competition he covets, for the champions-elect of England to have any real presence in the final stages, another gear will be required, a step into fresh territory that perhaps has as much to do with approach as personnel.
Certainly a tendency to draw against the very best is a nice weakness to have and Mourinho was rightly generous in his praise of Paris Saint-Germain at the final whistle. Blaise Matuidi was superbly energetic in a left-sided role, Zlatan Ibrahimovic played with a charged sense of cutting edge and Paris might have won this match as Chelsea’s assorted, stretched, sick and semi-fit players tired towards the end.
But there was also a vagueness to Chelsea’s attacking play that has been a familiar base note to these matches against stronger opponents and indicates that this is still a pedigree team in progress.
The last time Chelsea played Paris Saint-Germain, 10 months ago in the quarter-finals of this competition, Mourinho spent much of the tie and its surrounding soapbox moments fuming over his dearth of quality strikers. All four members of Chelsea’s attack then – Samuel Eto’o, Demba Ba, Fernando Torres and André Schürrle, the False Nein – have since moved on.
Ten months on Chelsea duly returned tooled up with the competition’s leading striker last season and with a team that has fizzed with the kind of free-flowing football that was absent in the Demba Ba-inspired mugging of PSG last April. And yet for all that, this was another admirable backs-to-the-wall performance, with a crucial first-half away goal made and scored not by the £30m centre-forward but by three defenders upfield after a set piece. John Terry curled in a low cross, the ball was flicked on by Gary Cahill, Marco van Basten-style with the outside of his foot, and Branislav Ivanovic headed home the bouncing ball.
It looked a potentially decisive lead, a little against the run of play. And yet from that point Chelsea began to edge backwards. The surge never came. Possession was ceded, then territory, then an equalising goal, expertly headed in by Edinson Cavani, evading Cahill.
There are extenuating circumstances. Before this match Mourinho had voiced his concerns that Costa might have “lost his edge” during his three-week domestic ban, a slightly odd notion in itself for a player who is made up almost entirely of jagged edge, the footballing equivalent of a buzz-saw blade in a blue shirt. Plus it is for matches such as this that Costa was recruited, an antidote to lack of big-match razor edge so evident last season when Chelsea came to a knife fight armed with a baguette at the sharp end of this competition.
And yet on a chilly, boisterous night inside this steeply banked jagged concrete bowl Chelsea’s rusty No9 played like a man trying desperately to remember what he was supposed to be doing out there. Undoubtedly the ban has dulled his match-fitness and Costa will return. But behind him the slight slackness in central midfield is a familiar problem against better teams, the sense that Nemanja Matic has too much to do, not least with Cesc Fàbregas looking peely-wally since the turn of the year.
It seems likely that the integrating of Juan Cuadrado will help Eden Hazard, offering speed and power on the other wing. But it is tempting to wonder if there is a slight imbalance in the dynamic of this team that for all the fine styling of its bodywork seems at heart to have a defensive engine. The leaders in this team are all in defence. Mourinho’s basic energy is defensive, organisational, defiant. Costa provides a selfless presence in attack and is effectively Mourinho made flesh on the pitch, his manager’s robot arm, the striker Mourinho would be if Mourinho could play. But Chelsea still seem to lack a real boldness, a sense of trust in the attacking half of the team against the very best. The next three months will be a test not simply of talent, or backbone, or Mourinho’s own sense of destiny, but of their ability to take that final step.
