The pursuit of perfection can feel like a hopeless dream in football. Last week a hush descended upon the Etihad Stadium as Bayern Munich produced one of the most staggeringly beautiful halves of football in recent memory to lead 2-1 against Manchester City despite playing with 10 men after Mehdi Benatia’s early red card.
With Pep Guardiola tinkering and tweaking and thinking on the touchline, Bayern looked like they were playing football from another world, which is what made the late mistakes from Xabi Alonso and Jérôme Boateng that allowed Sergio Agüero to steal victory for City so implausible. How does that happen? How can a team be that good and then throw the match away with a couple of errors that would have shamed a pub team?
Quite simply, football happened. It is an unpredictable sport, full of what ifs and nearly moments, a misplaced pass here or a missed clearance there always liable to ruin even a Guardiola masterplan. He glimpsed footballing perfection when Barcelona thrashed Real Madrid 5-0 in 2010, yet even his teams have been vulnerable to the bounce of the ball at times. Sometimes the game is about luck, especially when the margins are tight.
Maybe you can only make sense of football if you accept that it often makes none. The best team does not always win and perhaps that is why José Mourinho has been reluctant to talk about Chelsea going through the season unbeaten. The question was put to him before they played Tottenham Hotspur and it will continue to be put to him until they lose. Well, if they lose.
Chelsea have not done that since Atlético Madrid knocked them out of the Champions League in April and with Wednesday night’s 3-0 win over Tottenham extending their unbeaten run to 23 matches, it is natural to wonder whether they can pull it off. It is not so fanciful. They have rarely come close to losing yet and their response when they fell behind at Liverpool last month was resounding, yet Mourinho does not sound interested about the prospect of emulating Arsène Wenger’s Invincibles.
This is not Mourinho being negative. He may be a pragmatist at heart but the aim for him is not to avoid defeat but to win. Arsenal drew 12 games when they went unbeaten in 2003-04 and Mourinho is wary of giving Manchester City any encouragement. Chelsea’s dismissal of Tottenham kept City at arm’s length, six points away.
Arsenal were a joy to watch. Supporters watched them with their jaws rooted to the floor when Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Robert Pirès and Patrick Vieira were in full flow and they finished the season with 90 points, which has only been bettered three times in a 38-game season: by Manchester United in 1999-00 and Chelsea in 2004-05 and 2005-06.
But they did leave you wanting more. The argument against that Arsenal side is that defeats in their FA Cup semi-final to a weakened United and their Champions League quarter-final to Claudio Ranieri’s Chelsea were avoidable. There was a sense of an opportunity lost and perhaps the Invincibles would have preferred to have been Vincible if it had meant winning the treble.
United’s treble winners lost three times in the league in 1998-99 and were knocked out of the League Cup early, but when they beat Bayern in the Champions League final, it meant that they had gone 33 matches undefeated in all competitions, an acute demonstration of the intensity required to last the distance. Barcelona lost games when they won the treble in 2009 and although Bayern recently went more than a year without a defeat, that could not last forever.
Chelsea’s endurance will be tested if they challenge for the Champions League and Mourinho’s caution is informed by the 2004-05 season. They finished it with 95 points, 12 in front of Arsenal, but they lost once, an unfortunate 1-0 defeat at City in October. There were 27 games left and Chelsea did not lose again in the league. But it did not matter. Arsenal’s unbeaten season was beyond them.
Yet Sir Alex Ferguson summed it up well in his book when he recalled United’s difficulties trying to reel in that Mourinho side. “Chelsea skated to a six-point lead and we could never make it up,” Ferguson wrote. “Once they hit the front, José made sure they won plenty of games narrowly. They would take the lead in games and then consolidate.”
There is a similar feel to this side but it is too early to make grand statements. There is luck involved in any successful season. Arsenal’s run would have been over after six matches if Ruud van Nistelrooy had not crashed a last-minute penalty against the bar and United sailed dangerously close to the wind on several occasions in 1999. It would only have taken one slip from Chelsea for last Saturday’s 0-0 draw at Sunderland to turn into a 1-0 defeat and on Saturday they travel to Newcastle United, who have beaten them on their past two visits to St James’s Park. As long as Chelsea are untouchable in May, Mourinho will not mind if they are not invincible.
