Perhaps this is Chelsea’s lucky year, although to be frank most seasons feel as if they are special ones for them. The more they spend, the luckier they get. The more they rotate who is in the dugout and who is on the pitch, the more likely it is that silverware appears on the horizon.
Still, that Thomas Tuchel’s team overcame the threat of Atletico Madrid at the round-of-16 stage was not entirely down to their own efficiency and prowess. The Spanish side were less energetic than usual and created little to ruffle the team who won this competition so thrillingly in 2012. It felt just a little lucky.
Porto were without Mehdi Taremi and Sérgio Oliveira last week in the first leg of this quarter-final and generally lacked the oomph and passion that helped them to dispatch Juventus to set up this tie. Last night they were more boisterous, if still lacking imagination, and in any case were the team all the others wanted to face at this stage. It felt just a little lucky.
There is something moderately magically symmetrical about this season and that of nine years ago. Chelsea defeated Portuguese opposition in the quarter-final having sacked a young manager. Then it was Benfica and André Villas-Boas, this time around it was Porto and Frank Lampard. For the pattern to pan out, they need Real Madrid to knock out Liverpool this evening so that they once again face Spanish opposition in the semi-final. After defeating Barcelona in 2012 they faced Bayern Munich in the final and there is, still, the possibility they could face a German club in Istanbul.
What is clear is that the next stage of the competition will be much tougher than this encounter. If Liverpool manage to overturn their 3-1 defeat by Real they will be in sparkling, destiny-laden form. If Real progress, they will be feeling mightily imperious as they lay their 13 triumphs in this competition next to Chelsea’s one.
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The TV coverage last night was accompanied by constant birdsong, as if BT Sport were trying out a football remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds. At first the chirping was sweet then merely annoying but as Porto proved themselves in feisty mood, it became more ominous. Would all the pre-match optimism in the studio be shown to be hopelessly naive? Would a parakeet swoop down and start pecking at the eyes of Thiago Silva?
Actually, switching to a psychological thriller — or to the other quarter-final between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich — was rather tempting for this tie was devoid of entertainment. Porto were keen to impose themselves physically so that meant Tuchel’s side responded with lots of fouls. It was so tit-for-tat in terms of tackles and niggles and squeals that the occasional decent pass felt incongruous.
Was this all a stroke of genius by Tuchel, to introduce a note of menace where they might have been expected to be floatingly superior given their lead from the first leg? The German said he ignored the implications of their first meeting, but this smacked of deep consideration of how Porto might scrap for a lifeline. It was like tripping up the school bully well before he reaches the playground gates.
You could imagine Sérgio Conceição, the Porto manager, fuming at the interval at how little Chelsea cared about his robust approach. If he had hoped to inject a note of panic, then he failed. It only got worse for him as Chelsea started to ignore his team’s desperation. This was less of an enthralling European Cup tie and more of a trip to a paintball centre designed to build Chelsea camaraderie under a relatively new boss.
You cannot fault Tuchel’s adaptability. He set up his team to absorb all that a lesser club could summon. Come the semi-final stage, he will have the resources to change approach completely. He made his own luck last night and whoever he faces will wonder if Chelsea will choose to dictate or to react. Tuchel will not care, it seems, whether we are distracted by the local wildlife — or a late bicycle kick goal — or not.
