Porto went on general sale. This is atrocious considering
how big a game it was. Fair enough Christmas games against Sunderland and West
Brom don’t inspire a delirium of excitement, but a must win game against the
best side in the group? Our season hanging on it? As if to highlight the
severity I feel, Rich jokes in the pub beforehand that it could be the last
Champions League game at this incarnation of Stamford Bridge. I take a deep
glug of my pint and think about this. It’s not a very funny joke. Lose this and
we’ll see plenty more games on general sale, along with those burgundy Europa
League hoardings slapped up round our ground, and that doesn’t bear thinking
about.
I’ve always loved European games though. They’re some of the
earliest I can remember, an envelope full of tickets for the group stages in
1999. I can just remember flashes: Lazio’s yellow away kit, the Galatasaray
keeper sent off for handling outside his area, Vialli with the keys to the
Ferrari. That year, Arsenal were playing their ties at Wembley, already too big
for their boots. They’d crash out in the group stage. Supposed minnows Chelsea
would go on to take Barcelona to extra time in the Quarter Finals.
The buzz against Porto is partly from the crowd of people
that are packed in. I’d half expected to be sat next to some Portuguese, having
made friends with Ukrainians for the visit of Dynamo. But no, from the gate I
spy Barbour jackets and shaven heads on our row. These are proper Chels. Not
worn down by the drudgery of watching the team struggle every other Saturday
this season either, they watch and cheer and sing with a fresh enthusiasm. So
what if they get the words to the Willian song ever so slightly wrong? Bodies
tumble forward over the seats as Willian smashes the ball in at the near post,
voices cracking as they scream in celebration.
Chelsea won of course. Matic was impervious in midfield,
Hazard showed flashes of magic and it was suddenly apparent that the defence
was comprised of the same players as last year, rather than imposters from the
local pub team. So that’s it. Once again, we’re all going on a European tour. Who’s
to say how many more we’ll have though? How many great stories do we have left
in us?
My dad brought me back a clearly bootleg programme from a
2004 game played in Porto, where it doesn’t seem that match day programmes are
as much of a tradition. Bizarrely, near enough the exact same programme
appeared a few months later in Munich, the opposition’s name changed. The
content seemed to have been hastily bludgeoned together by entrepreneurial set
of Portuguese/ German brothers with an eye for a quick Euro, but alas, an
imperfect command of English. We still laugh about the Chelsea number 19 being
named as Sott Parker. However, the undisputed highlight was the club profiles,
which declared that Chelsea had “always been a team of rootless cosmopolitans”.
I believe they were trying to capture the glamour, the international flavour of
Abramovic’s first few years as Chelsea owner, but something was lost in
translation.
It’s not a million miles away though. Chelsea, or at least my Chelsea, epitomises that European glamour.
Sexy football, geezers with silly haircuts and great goals in the San Siro. I
remember queuing for the tube at Fulham Broadway after one of those 1999
European games when I was young, when the stranger next to me pointed out a low
flying plane. “There you go, Frank Leboeuf, flying back to France!” I almost believed
him as well. Leboeuf is a film star now, which sort of sums up what I’m trying
to say.
Where’s the fun of being an Arsenal anyway? Trudging your
way to fourth every year to play Dortmund every year and go out in the last 16
every year. In order to make the revenue necessary to just about do it the year
after. Wouldn’t you rather have a club in turmoil, finish bottom half in the
league, and trade it all in for one last heady, glorious day in Milan in May? Anyone
who’s remotely sensible has already written off our hopes for the top four this
season. So perhaps this is our European swansong, just as 2012 was supposed to
be. We are rootless cosmopolitans, and we’re going to Milan.
@JJReid13
@JJReid13
