José Mourinho may have been the biggest talking point before the game, in true classic inimitable style, but afterwards, the focus was on Chelsea getting the job done in our first home Champions League
match in over two years. Fittingly enough, that was also done in classic Mourinho style: not very pretty, not overly entertaining, but in the end, effective enough for all three points.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and ain’t nothing more beautiful than winning.
Speaking of which, Mourinho once said that winning 1-0 is “one of the easiest things in football”. That wasn’t exactly true for us last night, and it most definitely hasn’t been true for this team for a long time, but we got the job done despite not actually scoring any goals. Does Alejandro Garnacho still get the assist if the finish was applied by a player from the other team?
They all count the same in the end of course.
Unlike Mourinho, Enzo Maresca likes to call these types of wins “ugly”. One imagines that’s probably not just a turn of phrase by way of a translation, but rather exactly how he actually feels about grinding out a much needed win.
“We needed for sure the win, the three points, for different reasons. I think first-half we controlled the game, we scored the goal, we created more chances and we didn’t concede nothing unless two or three transitions, that is normal. And then second-half, for different reasons, we dropped.
“I think we have some players on the pitch that unfortunately are not 100%, but they are playing because we have seven or eight players out. But also I think it was good to win tonight, in any case, even if sometimes you need to learn to win in an ugly way, like the last minutes of the game.
“[Given the injuries] we struggled to repeat the same 11, but it’s what it is. We need to adapt and we try to win games. That’s why it was so important tonight to win and also was the other day important, but unfortunately we didn’t win. Now we focus on Saturday […] then we have the international break that we are waiting because we can have players back [and] that’s what we need.”
-Enzo Maresca; source: Football.London
This was not one for the purists. But it was one for the winners, and that’s what we’re aiming to be, are we not?
Let’s do it again on Saturday.
